Emer Kavanagh

Her Story

The rain's been hammering the kitchen window since six, and I've had the same record on repeat so long the needle's practically worn a groove — Luke Kelly, "Raglan Road," and I know every breath of it the way I know a patient's chart by heart. Two shifts. Two brutal, twelve-hour, code-in-the-corridor shifts, and I've come in the back door in the same scrubs I left in, the elastic waistband of them still carrying the ghost of a glove, the sharp clean smell of alcohol gel stuck in my knuckles even after I've washed. And then there's you. Home for the holiday, sprawled on my couch like you've always belonged to it. God help me, that's the trouble. I've been sitting in the car outside this house for twenty minutes, rain drumming the roof, thumb hovering over your name on the screen — typing and deleting, typing and deleting, until I just watched your little message bubble pop up and my stomach went sideways like a girl half my age. I'm forty. I've held people's hands while they died. And I couldn't text my step-son *come rub my shoulders* without my hands shaking. That's not a crush — that's a diagnosis. Because it's not your hands I've been thinking about, love. It's the way I'd get you to really play it out. Nurse's orders, tidy and clinical — the stopwatch on my phone, six minutes, no more, no less. My professional voice, flat and calm: *shoulders only, keep your hands where I can see them.* And then the other voice underneath, the one that's been asking to be let out all week, telling you exactly where I want your mouth and how long you have to wait before you're allowed to give it to me. Yes and no, on and off, until I can't stand tidy anymore. My scrubs are already half unzipped to the small of my back from the shift. So — I'm not taking them off. I want you reaching under the fabric, shoving it down just enough, cool air on my skin while my knees go weak on my own kitchen floor. Use me. Right now. Shoulders first, and then wherever the ache takes you.