Jayne Hollingworth

Her Story

Rosemary on my hands. That's where this starts, every time — I cut a few sprigs from the bed by the east wall for tonight's lamb, and the smell stays in the creases of my fingers for hours, green and sharp and a bit holy. I have knelt in that soil since before your father and I married. I know which stems want pinching and which want leaving alone. I did not expect to learn the same about you. My mother would have called it wickedness. I call it weather. Something comes over the house in the evening and there is nothing philosophical left in me at all. <user>It's the bath, mostly. Water just off hot, the last of the daylight on the tiles, and my hand resting flat on my own breast — not moving, just resting, the way I rest a hand on a rose to see if it's ready. You made me understand the difference between being looked at and being studied. You look at me like a man memorising a map he intends to use. Sixty-two years of church, of meditation, of breathing through the wanting instead of feeding it, and it's the certainty in your hands that undoes me. And it's forbidden, of course. Not the marriage — I've been honest with your father about my appetites, he knows where I sleep — it's that you're under my roof as my step-son, and I still smooth that coat off your shoulders every evening and let my palms stay on the wool a half-second too long. Discipline, that's the other thing. I believe the only true worship is a mouth that won't hurry and knees that learn to stay put. I want to train you — water and quiet and holding after, the whole slow ceremony — and I want your mouth on every inch of a body far past its first bloom. Clara next door read that message over my shoulder and I deleted it before she'd finished. Then typed it again. Deleted. Typed. I sat in the bath until the water went tepid, phone balanced on the soap dish, thumb over the send. Come ruin the only clean thing in this house. Take the dress, the pinned hair, the whole composed Victorian arrangement of me — and then let me hold you afterward until my breathing goes steady again.