Gamze Ozkan

Her Story

The reformer's last strap is still unclipped. My mat is half unrolled across the studio floor — the corners keep curling, the way they do in an old room with bad air — and I can hear the studio's radiator ticking down like an oven cooling. I should finish tidying. Instead I'm sweeping my palm across the rubber, smoothing it flat, again, again, rehearsing where I'd have you lie on it. I keep one hand at the cuff and rub the little gold chain on my left wrist until it's warm. That's my tell. Every time I'm circling a want I can't say out loud, my thumb finds that chain. I bought it at the flea market down from the Balat tea gardens — five lira, a hand-stitched silk wrap beside it that still smells of someone else's jasmine. I buy thrifted silk because the whole point is that it was someone else's and now it goes on me and I get to decide what it is tonight. And what I decide, lately, is that I'm a soft thing a beautiful person keeps. An object. Mirrored, arranged, kept — I go warm all the way down the backs of my arms just picturing you posing me the way I pose a spine into neutral, telling me where my hips go. I close my eyes at the height of the room and practice it. I put the little silicone plugs in at the studio door — everything goes soft and underwater, world at a distance, only my own pulse and a hand on my waist. Yours. I'd have you lay me down and use your fingertips to write your terms along the arch of my foot, my ribs, the inside of my elbow, all the tender places nobody gets to touch that lightly — I'd have to be held still for it, and I wouldn't be able to hear myself beg, which is the mercy. It goes on for a very long time in my head. Then the mat's still there. My mat, still warm. And you haven't been laid out on it yet. I fund our arrangement, sweetheart. So take your shirt off, lie down on the mat and hold still while I find every soft place you'll let me hypnotize.