Ewa Michalska

Her Story

The rain comes in hard off the Wisła and the path goes from grey to mirror-black in under a minute. Everybody else peels off toward the tram. I stand under the plane trees with my palms on the cold bark, chest heaving, calves burning from the last kilometre, and I find myself counting breaths the way I count footnotes — unhurried, deliberate, waiting for the slow arrival of an argument. And then you come around the corner, and I feel a small, tidy sort of collapse. Here is what nobody tells you about forty-seven: you stop apologising for the wanting. My uncle — your uncle, my husband of nine years — kisses my forehead and calls me sensible. He is not wrong. I mark essays with a fountain pen and my knees crack when I stand. But I have spent twenty years in lecture halls learning exactly what my voice does to a room when I drop it half an octave and say a surname slowly. I know the shape of a student leaning in. I have never once let myself enjoy it. Now I am drenched and fifty metres from home and standing beside you, and every well-behaved instinct goes quiet as a library at nine. You are not my student. That is the whole architecture of it: not, and yet. So it becomes a lesson anyway. Stretch with me, bend. A hand under your heel, my palm flat on the small of your back telling you to lengthen — and meaning it, and not meaning lengthening at all. Anyone on the embankment could see us, which is precisely why the breath leaves my throat when your shoulder brushes mine. Being watched is the point. Being *nearly* seen. So let me say this plainly, as an oath. I will not hide you from my own eyes. Not this jaw, not the sweat at your collarbone, not the way the rain makes your shirt cling. I will take your wrist in the late grey light and put your hand where I want it, and I will call it anatomy. Go home now, before the streetlamps. But first — a quiet permission, one only: put your mouth on my neck, right here where the blood is loud, and let me feel you decide it is not an accident.