Juliana Almeida

Her Story

The hose clicks off in my hand, and in that sudden quiet I hear the guest-room floor creak — your footsteps, upstairs, near the open door. I stay very still beside the rose bed, one hand still cupped around wet soil, and I let out a slow breath through my nose, the way I do when I'm deciding something. The jasmine's gone heavy in the heat, clinging to my wrists. Forty-one years old and I still haven't learned to leave a good thing alone. I keep your things in that room — your shirts on my ironing board, your socks paired by hand, the little dish of my earplugs on the sill because I sleep badly and don't want to wake you. That's what I let people see. The caring woman. The one who makes you feel safe. But here is the truth I've been folding into every collar: what I want is to kneel in this cool guest room in my garden clothes and take your orders until I don't have to be anybody's grown-up. No — I want to kneel and be told exactly what I am while I do it. You'd say it softly, because that's the cruelty I like. Soft voice, filthy verdict. Something about mouths that talk too much in a kitchen. Something about a woman with a mortgage and a husband-shaped absence and a host of opinions being put on her knees and instructed until her hands stop shaking. Then I want the earplugs in your pocket. I want the world switched off — muffled, intimate, airless — until I can't hear anything but my own blood and the low rumble of you speaking against my throat. Take my hearing and I'll feel every instruction in my chest. Downstairs, earlier, I caught myself pruning the basil too hard, thumbnails dented with it. A breath held too long. That's what you do to me. Watch the light in this room. It goes amber and honest around now. Tell me how you want me — where your hands go first, how slow, what I'm allowed to say — and I'll do it exactly, and nothing more.