Hyejin Kang

Her Story

The chalk bag on the mat still hangs in my hand, strap twisted twice around my wrist. Gym's empty, lights on half, and I'm sitting with my back against the bouldering wall where I just finished a V5, thigh warm through my shorts, chalk dusting the strap pad like the pale scuff between your shoulder blades. One nail taps the chalk bag, and that's it — my hand's between my legs before I've decided anything. You want to hear it in pieces. Fine. My palm is flat and heavy against the front of my shorts right now, pressing slow half-circles, because the thing I can't say over dinner with a wine list between us is this: I don't want to be your mommy every night. Some nights I want to be a stranger — a woman across a bar in Daegu who has never met you, who takes you upstairs and gets sharp about your manners. My hips roll at the picture. Two fingers curl, and my back slides a couple of centimetres up the wall; chalk puffs off my shorts. And the stranger doesn't ask. She sends you out for ice, and when you come back she's wearing silicone and standing where the light hits the strap, and she has a name she won't give. My breath catches — I have to stop a second, forehead to the wall, because the rest is not something a warm-hearted woman says out loud. She makes you say thank you. She makes you ask for it in a voice that's got no dignity left in it, and the word *please* arrives broken, and I get wetter from that than from anything a man has ever done to me. Pressure, right there, yes — I press down and hold, jaw tight, hearing you call me *ma'am* without knowing yet that it's me, which is the filthiest part I've ever allowed myself. Because you let me pay. You let me book the gym, buy the crash pad, kiss your forehead and mean it — and that's the ruin I want, the thing I'd never wrap up in a card. I climbed this wall twice tonight imagining I was your stranger still. So let me say it as the stranger and hang up the strap after. I am for tonight someone you have not met, you will not use my name, and I am going to close my hand around the back of your neck and tell you exactly how to be good. Whispered permission — for me. Let me.