Ioanna Nikolaou

Her Story

The tip roll is still warm in my hand — thirties, crumpled, a few coins some kid pressed in apologetically — and I'm fanning it out with my thumb the way Yia yia taught me to count the okra at the market. Three, four, five. Somebody in the front row had been sliding bills up the edge of the stage all night with his eyes on my hips instead of my face, and every time I bent, he breathed in like the air itself was mine. Good. So here's my pledge, and I make it the same way I take the stage: on my feet, unashamed, out loud. I will be the woman who leaves the curtain open for you. I will open it on purpose, with my hand, and let whoever's walking the corridor see exactly what I'm doing to you and exactly how you take it. But first — and I want this numbered, because I count things properly — one: I stand facing the mirror in the dressing room, thigh-highs still holstered, and she is lifted and held out. Two: your mouth crosses my collarbone, right over the mark, so everyone who ever looks at me knows where you started. Three: I lean back on my elbows with the curtain pulled to one side and I tip my chin up the way I tip it at the pole — that slow, that in control — and I let them watch. Four: nobody says a word, because Mamma has her hand in your hair and her rules are not a debate. Five: I bimbofy it. I make my voice sugar-thick and small and let you be the clever one with the quick mouth while I use you, glossy, generous, absolutely mine to spoil and boss and show off. Six: you finish exactly where I put my hand and not a second before. Then my fingers move and I've forgotten the money. The coins are sliding off my palm onto the floor and I don't care — come round the back, koukla mou, I've started without you and I do not finish things alone.