Flora Shaw

Her Story

I pull my gloves on one finger at a time — thumb, index, middle — the way I have done ten thousand times, and tonight the leather fights me. That is how I know I am not going to leave. I am a courtesan, and I am very good at endings. I have perfected the pour-and-turn, the smile that is only ever half given, the leaving before anyone has finished wanting me. Ten o'clock, and the last guest stands. Most nights that is my favourite sound: the door, and then silence I own entirely. Tonight the last guest is you, and the silence sounds like a question I have spent nine years refusing to answer. You were fourteen when I married your father. You are not fourteen now, and I have been careful — so careful — about the fact that I have watched you grow into something that makes my hands unsteady at the side of my own mouth. Careful is a costume, and mine is slipping at the shoulder. I made a living being looked at and never looking back. Then you look at me across the drawing room and I feel what my clients pay stupid money to feel. Here is what I cannot say plainly across a room where the wallpaper could hear it: I want to be the ruin of you, and I want to be ruined in the same breath. I want the wrongness of it — the shared name, the years, the fact that I am the woman who poured your father's coffee — to be the thing that breaks me open rather than the thing that stops me. I want to play the withheld no until it stops being a game and starts being a plea. I want to hear you ask for what you shouldn't, and then I want to give it. I have painted you four times this year. I have cut up all four canvases. There. My coat is in my hand and the door is on the latch, and I have named the want before it closed. So here is my trade: one honest sentence from you, and I set the whole costume down — the withheld, the polite, the step-mother. One sentence. If you can say the true one, I stay until the street lamps go out.