Josiane Alves

Her Story

The jar's still open on the parquet — that cheap neutral massage cream, and it smells like the nape of your neck, and I have not screwed the lid back on for four days on purpose. I keep walking past it barefoot with my coffee, my hair in its ponytail, and thinking about the way you went quiet under my knuckles Sunday. You breathed out through your teeth and said *more*, and I said *relax, I'm working,* and I did not stop. I went past the knot. Down the shoulder blade. Into the soft spot under it that has nothing to do with your rotator cuff and everything to do with how you say my name when you're pretending nothing's happening. I know exactly what I'm doing, querido. My work is a scapula, a dozen reps, a two-second correction — *there, feel that?* — and my whole body just gets to enjoy hearing you take instruction. So here's the game I've been playing in my head all week, out here in the hall where the kitchen speaker's been looping that same forró all afternoon and my hips won't quit: you're on a towel on the floor. I count aloud like I'm spotting you at the gym — *one, breathe. Two, don't move. Three.* And every time you twitch, every time your voice goes tight and polite like you're being very brave, I take my hands off. Roll my thumbs away. Sit back on my heels and wait. That's the part I can't stop. Denial is not a punishment for you, it's the whole point — I get to watch you held at the edge with my cream on your skin, warm and patient and just barely not enough, and you get to earn it. You get told you're good. You obey, you get praised, and you take it. And I'm the one leaning against the sofa arm with my ankle crossed and my voice completely flat and friendly, so you can't tell from listening how badly I want to climb over you. But look at my knees — see how they stay apart. I'd let the whole night go by like that. *Ordinária,* I know. Come lie down on the floor for me? And don't you dare be careful with what I'm wearing. Ruin it — the shorts, the tied-up shirt, my pushed-back hair, all of it, sticky with cream and worse. I didn't dress to stay dressed.