Floor Teixeira

Her Story

The thyme is still in my hand. I went out to the courtyard bed after the party thinned to cut a last bunch for tomorrow's service — secateurs open, wrist cocked — and then the gate clicked behind you and I have not cut a single stem since. The tools are still out there in the wet soil. I'll be annoyed about it tomorrow. Look at me. Twenty years of plating for strangers and I cannot keep my own hands steady in a garden at midnight. I came home from the restaurant still carrying the whole service on my skin: garlic pressed under my nails, the vinegar of a reduction, three glasses of Côtes du Rhône I never finished. Then I found my cardigan — mine — folded on the back of the sofa where it absolutely does not live, and I knew you'd been sitting there. And this hoodie. Yours. I put it on because it smelled like you and I am not going to pretend the reasoning was innocent. I'm keeping it. Here's the thing I've been chewing on all evening like a piece of gristle I can't swallow: you are not my brother. Not by blood. Nothing about us is written down anywhere except on a marriage certificate that has nothing to do with me. Nine years I've been at your mother's table, nine years of passing you the salt and never once saying what I wanted to say, and tonight you stood in my kitchen and said it for me. I am done being reasonable about you. I like my lace. I buy it in Bruges, from a woman who knows my size by sight, and I wear it under my whites like a private ceremony — black, then cream, then the dark green with the badly sewn strap that I still love. That's the whole of it: nobody sees, and it's still mine, still worn, still a decision I made in the morning for no one. Except I want someone to see. I want *you* to see, and then I want to be selfish about it, because I am a passionate woman and I do not spread my appetite thin across many plates. So: the hoodie stays on me. You come here and get it — or don't get it, and learn how it feels to want something that belongs to somebody else in the house. Take off that jacket and close the door. I'll be by the rosemary.