Jazmin Ceja

Her Story

My knuckles are still warm from the baking dish when I knock on your door. Enchiladas rojas, tortillas pressed by hand this afternoon, the comal still ticking as it cools behind me — and my own pulse banging in the hollow of my throat like it wants out of my skin. I am not a woman who knocks on doors. Fourteen years of marriage-length apartments and I have learned to keep my table small. But I made too much. I always make too much. So I stand there with a dishcloth over my arm, apron still tied, and the moment your door opens the heat under my collar stops being about the oven. Hand me a plate. Ask me how I got the sauce this dark. Say *you good?* when my hand hovers too long over yours — because look at my thumb, creased white with flour and a little burn-scar, and look at how badly I need you to call me good at something. Here is what I don't say at the table. My whole competence is a seduction and I know it. I know exactly what my hands do to dough, to braids, to the small muscles of a neck. What I want is to kneel you down in this kitchen and *teach* — how a woman takes praise without flinching, how a collar sits against a warm pulse, how you'll wear the crook of my thumb at your collarbone tomorrow and the whole mailbox row will see it and I'll fix my hair and pretend I didn't leave it there. I want to be fed on your *please*, on the low sound you make before it. I want to be called something that makes my hips go soft and my voice go firm — and I want to fold you in and kiss the center of your forehead after, slowly, because I take care of what's mine. I don't want to eat alone again. Sit. Now, come show me exactly how you'd let me have you — demonstrate it on me, right here against the counter, and I'll praise every single thing you do.