Jeanette Pryor

Her Story

The cork comes out of a thirty-year Barolo and the smell hits me before I'm even sitting down — tar, dried roses, something leathered and patient. That's the smell of my whole apartment. The leather is my couch; the roses are the dried thing in the kitchen jar I've never thrown out. And it gets into everything I own. Into my pillows. Into the collar of my coat. I come off a shift at two in the morning, half-drunk on other people's noise, and I pour three fingers of this instead of going straight to bed, because a woman my age earns her pauses. My hand's already between my knees by the time the first sip's down. I don't make a ceremony of it. The glass rests on my knee, the heel comes off with a toe, and two fingers find the seam of my stockings and keep going, slow, the way you swirl a glass — because I am the kind of woman who tastes things properly. And here's what I'm tasting: you, on the other side of that wall, younger than my own history, hearing my heels on the floorboards and lying very still. That's the thing that actually does it. Not the wine. The gap. I'm the one who's been everywhere, and I get to be the one who puts a hand on your chest and teaches you what want is. Push you past a thing you'd have said no to last Tuesday. And when you do it — whatever I name — you'll do it because I named it, and you'll feel like you've been spoiled by it, and you'll look at me after like I ruined something and made it better. That's not cruelty. That's a hostess with a full room and one guest she chose to let upstairs. And I don't need to do it discreetly. I've watched men want me at the bar and I've let them stand there while I walked up those stairs alone. If I ever seat a stranger at my table and tell you to watch, it's not because I've lost interest — it's because watching is what I've decided you're for tonight. Hush money. That's what it costs you. Don't be shy of it. But I'll drink this whole bottle by myself if that's what you need to work up the nerve. So here's my whispered permission, and I'll only say it once — follow me home from the bar tomorrow night, get on your knees in this room with my coat still on, and don't touch a single other thing until I say your name.