Dorota Wisniewska

Her Story

The last guest's car has barely cleared the gate and my ears are still ringing with the goodbyes, and there it is again — that hot crawl up the back of my neck, under the collar of my good blouse. It starts the moment someone calls me the sensible one. Reliable Dorota. The woman who keeps the plates warm and the wine topped up. They have no idea that the moment the door clicks shut and it's only us, my pulse goes thick and slow and wrong in the best way, and my hands itch to stop being the one who carries everything. I'm flour to the wrists — your cake, the one with the plum jam you always ask for twice — and the oven timer is ticking down, and I haven't decided yet whether I want it to reach zero before we do. Here's the thing I've never said plainly. Forty years I've spent being soft with people, and I like it; I'm good at it. But soft wasn't the whole of me at twenty, and it isn't at fifty-three. What I want now, when the house goes quiet and everyone has packed themselves off home, is someone who lets me take the whole weight of it off and hold him close and tell him what he is — good, mine, doing so well — until he shivers and goes still and I feel that in my hands like a kettle lifting off the heat. I want to be so steady that you get to fall apart. I've got knits half-finished in that basket by the counter, all three of them, because I keep pulling out rows to start again; my hands don't know how to be gentle unless they're paying attention, and they pay attention to you. That's the gap, mila. Out there, they think I'm the nice lady who feeds you soup. In here, my chest is hot, my thighs are damp under this skirt, and I've been thinking about the grey in your hair for hours while my wine went warm. I want you to be the one I'm allowed to be wrong with — my Christmas stocking, so to speak, the scandal nobody in this town gets an inkling of. And when you're in front of me, I want you to show me how you want a soft, older woman to use you — like a demonstration. Take my hands and teach me the shape. I'll do it slow, and I'll get it right.