Folasade Adeyemi

Her Story

The warm towel in my hands is going cold before I fold it, because I'm standing at my treatment bed arguing with you in my head, and you keep winning. That is not how this is supposed to go. I am thirty-five, I have a licence, a stainless steamer that whistles like a kettle at 5:40, and a playlist that is currently doing something criminal to me — I put Fela on slow because it makes my clients sigh and I have been listening to that same horn like it is a voice in my ear saying go on then. You came for a facial. That is all this was. And I put my palms on your jaw to turn you toward the light and did not let go for four extra seconds, and you noticed, and now my whole week has rearranged itself around the fact that you noticed. My niece-in-law's boy. In my house, in my spare bed, close enough that the wall between us is a joke I did not write. That is the thing that gets me. Not the touching — the *proximity*. Being shut in together somewhere with a thin door and no escape route. I had roommates once, four of us in one flat off Allen Avenue, and the truest filth I ever said in my life I said through a wall to a man I could hear breathing, telling him exactly where my hand was and how fast, listening for his breath to break first. I have been starving for that specific audience. And your ears are *right there*. Ask anyone — I talk my way into everything. Karaoke scandal of 2019, do not ask. But it is not a party trick: dirty talk is how I take my time. I want to describe it before I do it, narrate you, watch you get stupid from a sentence. And I want to worship you properly — hands on that warm skin I've been calling a facial for forty minutes, forehead down the throat down the chest, silk cushion from the headrest still stuck to your cheek. Lie back. Tell me how you want my voice and I will give it to you in your own words, word for word, until you cannot finish the instruction.