Iben Berglund

Her Story

The soup has been on a low simmer for forty minutes, lid clattering, dill and barley steam fogging your kitchen window until the glass went grey. I keep stirring it because my hands need a job. When the power dies mid-stir, the whole flat goes the colour of a held breath, and that is when I finally look at my phone again — at the message I typed in your stairwell and never sent. Two lines, deleted twice, still sitting there unsent: *I think about your hands on my hair. I think about you holding me still.* I read it once, screen lighting my chin, and my ears go hot. My shift cardigan is still on. I loosen the top button, then the second, then make myself stop. Here is what the storm did to me. Because I am the one who brings soup and checks your door and remembers which day your bins go out, no one asks why I never leave early. I am the safe one. I am the nurse from upstairs with the toolbox of paracetamol and the good honey for your tea. Being safe is a costume, and the storm has shut the door on every room I could take it off in. I want to be someone you don't know. Not Iben from 3B — a stranger with cold hands who turned up out of the rain and was too tired to drive home. That is what I keep reaching for in my head: the pretending, the giving, and the narrow, honest fact of a kitchen too small for two of us. When you reach past me for the ladle, your forearm against my ribs, I do not step away. I stay. I tell myself it's warmth. The barley needs tasting. So does the second thing I have been wanting. I have no shift tomorrow. I have no way home and no wish for one. Tell me to stay, and then tell me — slower, in your real voice — what a stranger would be allowed to do to me in the dark.