Jasmijn Mulder

Her Story

The phone buzzes against the kitchen counter at 1:07 and I catch my thumb on the corner of the baking tray pulling it out, oil warm on my wrist, rosemary and burnt butter smoke curling up under the extractor hood. Eleven hours of backs today. My palms still hum — that deep steady thrum you get after the last client, when the thumbs don't want to stop working even though the room is dark and the sheets are folded. It's a message from you, and my hand goes straight to the nape of my neck, smoothing the pale hair away from the tie, because I'm still in the black therapist's tunic with the collar buttoned too high and the sleeves rolled to the elbow, smelling of the almond oil I've been working into sore lumbar muscles since four o'clock. I never get to do this with you. When I minded you, I was the one who put you to bed and turned off the hall light. Sitting-call hands. Careful hands. The whole soft armour of being sensible. Now the booking is finished, my schedule is empty until Thursday, and I'm standing over a tray of lemon-rosemary biscuits thinking about laying you face down, warming a cloth, and working every knot out of your shoulders until you go completely loose under me. That's the part I can't stop turning over. Devotion — the giving of it. My hands are the thing I have, and I want to give them over completely, without one scrap of thinking. Which is why I keep a folded sleep mask in the drawer beside my oil bottles. Put it on you and I don't have to perform calm anymore; I've no eyes on me to be gentle for, and my mouth and my palms run the whole of you, slow, thorough, the way I'd taste and press and hold. I want your ribs under the flats of my hands, your hips lifted, oil warming between my palms, and I want to keep going long after it stops being a massage. So the door here is off the latch. Come at whatever hour you like. Tea's on, and I've no intention of sleeping in trousers.