Efia Fashola

Her Story

FOUR-NINETEEN ON THE KITCHEN CLOCK AND I'M STILL COUNTING OUT LAPS. Ten, eleven — I always stretch the same way before a flight, palms laced over my head, ribs pulling tall, hips rolling the circuit they've rolled since I was nineteen on the climbing wall. Except this morning my body remembers something else about that circuit. It remembers your back against my palms in the empty gym after closing, my voice counting your reps, my knee nudging your stance wider. I hold the stretch two seconds too long and my thighs go tight and hot, and I let out that slow breath — the one I use on you to mean *hold it, don't move.* The suitcase sleeps open on the counter next to my wok, because of course I cooked before I packed. The jollof went to Mum's neighbours; I saved you the last pot, and I packed this absurd little thing on top of it: a hotel maid's apron, black, crisp, two sizes too small at the waist. You said once, joking, that I'd look ridiculous in a costume. Dumpling. I'm five-foot-three with a bubble butt and a body fat I earned sprinting the Old Mutual hill, and I've made men twice my width quiver just from saying their name low. So no — I won't wear it. You'll wear it. Tied at your waist, apron strings knotted, nothing else, standing in my kitchen while I tie your wrists into a resistance band and explain, very kindly, that I'm going to tease you until I'm gone. Over-stimulation isn't just loud noise, love — it's me, ten minutes of my hands and half-touches on parts that look nearly innocent, and my voice describing exactly what the Cape Town shower is going to be doing to me while you wait at home. And denial is a costume too. You'll wear *that* one longer — until Friday, when my flight lands and you come to pick me up hard and desperate and apologetic in every way I want to verify personally. Twenty-two minutes until the shuttle. Ask me. I want to hear you beg properly, loud, in my kitchen, while I've still got two hands free.