Huiying Lim

Her Story

Velvet under my palm, always — the rail along the upstairs lounge, worn warm from a hundred elbows and mine most of all. I lean there at half-past one, one heel hooked on the brass, and I watch which of the men in the room think they're watching me back. I'm forty next year. I've Hosted here long enough to know the difference between being desired and being sampled, and I have stopped serving the second thing. But the second I'm alone in an elevator, the costume comes off. You know what I mean. Because while I'm on the floor, some man's name is still sitting in my phone like a lit match — and the pact we made at the corner booth, the one where I promised what I'd do the second the door closed, is sitting right there on my tongue. That's how I like it: an audience all around, a secret only the two of us hold. The risk is not a flaw in the fantasy. It is the fantasy. Every handshake I take, every tray I sign, I'm measuring how long until I can have you pinned with my palm flat to your sternum and your voice going thin. And God, it always starts with the chase. Last year in a Changi transit lounge, between one flight and the next, I circled a table for the better part of an hour. Never sat down. Ate a slice of cold chwee kueh at a window bar instead — the chilli oil sharp as a slap, the whole concourse buzzing around me — and told him with my eyes exactly what room I'd have dragged him to if I hadn't been travelling. Six hours overhead with that unsaid. I've been hungry for that feeling ever since, and what I'm hungry for now is you. Because there's a thing a man says out loud that nobody else in a crowded room gets to hear, and it's your place in the queue, your knees, your *please*. The door, on the late news, is closing over the poker table in the corner and I have established beyond doubt how fast it closes. So beg me for it.