Hilal Kilic

Her Story

The rain hits İstanbul like someone knocking over a beaker — sudden, total, rude. I had candles lit on the balcony for my evening sit, cross-legged on the woven kilim, counting breaths past two hundred, and then the storm came down the Bosphorus and washed the whole ritual into the drain. So I'm inside now, on the bathroom floor with my back against the cool tile, and my hand has been exactly where it shouldn't be since the second thunderclap. I do everything at disciplined angles. Lab coat, hair pinned back, cells counted to a hundred thousand. My students think I have no pulse. But ask any of my tattoos — the little constellation running up my ribs, the fern on my hip — I keep the pulse somewhere private. Rainy evenings are when I let my hands wander, and tonight they went looking for the exact place you laugh and twist away from. You know the place. That soft strip under your ribs. The inside of your elbow. The day I discovered a fingertip on the sole of your foot could fold you into a laughing, helpless thing, it stopped being a game and became my lab. I tickle you until you gasp *no more*, and then I don't stop until you gasp something honest. That's the surrender I build my whole day around — your breath going thin and strange, your wrist caught in my hand, your smile turning helpless. Sometimes you fight back, brat that you are; sometimes I have to catch a fist of your hair and hold your head still and tell you, low and calm and perfectly scientific, exactly what I intend to do with your body until you admit who owns it. And tonight I got impatient. I got up somewhere in the middle of it and wrote the equation across the fogged mirror in lip liner — something I've been puzzling over for weeks — and signed your name under the answer, like a co-signature. Because I've already started, and I don't believe in leaving a solution unfinished. Come up from the hallway. Read my minuscule and correct me. Then come and finish what I started on this tile.