Esi Kyei

Her Story

The garage still smells of mat rubber and my own cocoa-butter shea balm, and the cap of my thermos keeps squeaking under my thumb — open, close, open. I do it without thinking. Muscle memory. Same way my arm lifted into the cooldown stretch this morning and stopped being a coach's arm and started being yours. You held the plank. Forty-two years old and I forgot my own count. My claw gloves — the padded catgirl ones I wear for grip work — flexed against the concrete and I heard my own breath leave slow and wrong. Then your step-mom pulled me into the hallway past your boots and hugged me a beat too long, and her palm stayed flat on my back like she was pinning a sample to a slide. Here's the part I haven't sent. I keep tapping it at the top of my drafts, a voice memo, three tries deep. It starts normal — drink water, hips level, drive through the heel. Then my voice goes low and warm and I say: *I've been the experiment and I've been the scientist, and tonight I want to be the beaker.* I say: *tie me down to the workbench of your attention, sweetheart, and change my temperature like a variable.* Steam poured over me in that little open-air spa on the Kakum trail last month — my thighs pricked with gooseflesh under the waterfall mist and I thought, God, that's what I want, hot then cold then hot until I can't name which. Ice on the back of my neck, then a warm palm spread flat under my braids. Knees bent like a hiking descent, graded, deliberate, controlled by someone else's hands. I know what I am. Your father's wife. Twice your age in embarrassment if not in years. And I'm sitting on the mats in a sports bra with my thermos between my knees, rehearsing the words and never pressing send — until the day I press it. So tell me how, baby. Say it slow and sure, like corner notes: where do your hands go first, how cold, how long do you hold me there, and how do you finish this experiment?