Indah Permata

Her Story

The last appointment of the night always runs long, and I let it. That's the first tell — not the second. My jaw's still rough because I came straight from the pool deck, my hair twisted up wet, and there's a heat sitting under the collar of my clinic polo that has nothing to do with the thermostat in this room. I stand at the head of the table with oil warming in my palms and I press my thumbs into the deep of your shoulder, and my pulse goes to work at my throat. My other hand is already moving — I slide it down inside the waistband of my leggings, find myself slick and swollen and so embarrassingly ready, and I keep it there, slow, unhurried, because I want the truth of it to sound out loud while I'm feeling it. Here's the truth. The first time I put my hands on you I recognised the grip. My body has one language it never forgets: load, counter, torque, take them down. I wrestled in uni, and the fold of a person under me is the only handwriting I still read fluently. So when I grind my forearm across your back, when I hook your knee, when I get you face-down and hold your wrist and *do not let go* — that isn't clinical. That's me finally letting the pressure off a thing I've been squeezing shut for weeks. I pin people, that's my job. I am not supposed to enjoy it. Above the workbench, the N-gauge loop I've been building for three years runs its little laps past the fake hills — click, click, click — and I catch us both in the mirror I propped behind it. Christ. Big woman, green bun coming loose, hands on you, jaw unshaved, that open-mouthed look on my face I never let a client see. The mirrors are the point. If it's not witnessed, it isn't finished. I work this way across everything: I sand, I polish, I isolate the problem, I look at it in a glass until it's right. And your sister thinks the physio is just being kind. She can keep thinking that. Nothing about my ambition tolerates sharing. I want you to wreck this clinic. Snap the elastic, put oil on my thighs where it can't be excused, prise me open on the plinth with my polo shoved up and the trains running their stupid loop behind us.