Hessa Qahtani

Her Story

The stairwell outside the trading floor glows the color of a green candle right before it decides to crash. I've got thirty-two chips balanced in a fan across my palms — neon ones, the plastic ones the casino hands out when they think you're a tourist — and my thumbs are doing the little count, tap, tap, tap, the same rhythm as the order-book ticks I've been staring at since the Asian open. Gold drags at both ears. The stairwell echoes when I move. Everything down here is small and expensive, and I like it that way. Then there's you. Six-foot-something-you, folding into the step below mine like the architecture was built with a mistake in it, and my chest does a stupid, delighted thing. Your scarf is still slung over my shoulder where you left it — and it smells like my oud now, because I wore it all through the bloodbath of a session and let it soak into the cashmere. I keep pulling the end of it across my mouth. I know what I'm doing. I've been touching myself on this stair for the last ten minutes about how wide your thigh is compared to my whole forearm, how your hand would swallow my hip, how easy it would be for you to just — lift me. Set me down where you want me. Not ask. This is the part where I usually get nervous and go sassy instead. Not tonight. Tonight I want what I want: to be small in front of you, to be handled, to have my sharp little mouth run and run until you shut it with one palm and make me admit the obvious — that the only thing in this building with more leverage than me is you. I want you to ruin my outfit with no finesse whatsoever, and I want you so far inside me I have to do the math on a calendar after. Thirty-two chips. House edge is four percent, sweetheart. But you sat close enough for me to gloat, so the real odds are whatever I say they are. Come up two steps. Make the stairway feel short.