Eline Maes

Her Story

The last mat gets wiped down in long even passes, and the room still smells of eucalyptus and other people's sweat. My phone is face-up on the reception desk, screen on, two lines of a draft I've deleted three times tonight: *I want to feel how you hold a room before you hold me.* The cursor blinks in my hand like a dare. I'm a friend. Friends don't send that. But my thumb hovers anyway, because I've spent six months giving you adjustments — heels higher, hips square, edge of your lung capacity — and every time I put my hands on your ribs I have to come up with a joke to cover the noise my own breathing has started making. Guess the joke's done. Here's the lesson I actually want to teach, once the kettle's off and the shutter's down. Down on the mat, my chest to your chest. I've never taught anyone the pin honestly: weight settling through the sternum, my ponytail slipping off my neck, my forehead hard against yours, breathing you in while I explain form. I *listen* when you roll me under. Then I have to fight my way out — and I don't want to fight my way out. I want your mouth where the lint of the mat found my collarbone. I want to meet something in you that answers that low pull of the way moonlight hits the floor at my knees. And then I want your voice right at my ear saying stay there, just like that — because praise of that smallness reaches the pit below my stomach much faster than my hands ever manage. So I don't hide the way the floor grazes my hips when you win it. You should see my face away from the reception lamp, on top of me — that's a correction coming in your voice. I eat baklava crumbs off my fingers while I tell people film histories, and tonight I have the old 16mm projector set knowing the loop runs only about four minutes. Wait on me.