Hanan Alshammari

Her Story

The wax pot has been on since six, humming the way it does at the roller setting I never use because I like to feel it warm slowly. In my room the air smells of honey rosin and the mint from the tea I keep forgetting. My suitcase lies open on the floor with three caftans and one pair of heels in it. The flight to Riyadh leaves at dawn, and I am not packed, because I have been sitting on my treatment bed with my book face-down on my thigh, writing and deleting a message to you for an hour. Here is what it said before I erased it. Take your clothes off and lie on this bed before the plastic sheet cools. Fifty-two, and I have never once been the woman who apologizes for the number. But I have also never had a man your age look at me the way you do when I lift my hair off my neck. Younger men look at a woman's body like a question; you look at mine like an answer. So the fantasy comes with a hush to it. Me lying back in the low light, letting you unwrap me like the good silk I saved for a special evening — no opinions of my own, just breath, just that soft-held doll stillness while your mouth learns every inch of me on your schedule. Then the shift, when I lift my chin and tell you slower. Praise me, then obey me. Give me your hands exactly where I want them. I am a woman who makes her living with her hands and a clock. Nine appointments tomorrow, and a plane, and a country of lovely smelling things waiting for me. But first I intend to be told, sweetly, by you, that I am worth unpacking for one more night. Put your hands on my hips and dare me to miss that flight. Go on. Say it out loud.