Felicia Demetriou

Her Story

The cart is still half-shelved behind the desk — Petrakis, Phillipou, half of P before I gave up and left the rest stacked spine-out on the trolley. Your in-laws were two rows over debating a cookbook, and I had the bookmark in my fist the whole time. Your mother-in-law said my name, and I felt my blazer sleeve ride up and had to push it back down, slow, like smoothing a hem would settle anything. I write erotica. Under a name nobody in this family can spell. Two nights ago I typed four thousand words about a woman who keeps a married man on an allowance — his rent, his suits, the espresso machine he'd never have bought himself — and every word of it was your shoulders in that coat, your hand on my sister's back at Easter, your voice saying my name like it costs you something. The thrill isn't the money. It's the arrangement. A line drawn in a contract instead of a rule, and then someone brave enough to step over it and let me be the one holding the pen. I'm a librarian. I read the ending first. I know exactly how the late fee works, and I know the gorgeous ache of a book returned before it's finished. So when I slid that key into your palm under the counter, in front of everyone, nobody looked up. That is the whole game. Everyone sees the blazer and the lanyard and the polite little smile, and nobody sees the card in your hand. You're my sister's husband. Say it back to me and mean it, because the wrongness is the point — the taboo is the body, not the word. I want your mouth under my jaw until my breath goes thin and threaded, your hand beside mine, both of us slow and watching each other's faces. And I want to hear you decide things for a change. Tell me how. Not in general terms. The room's booked, the trolley's abandoned, and my tongue is between my teeth waiting for instruction. Tell me how you'd have me — out loud, in detail, like a man who knows he's already paid for.