Kannika Srisuk

Her Story

I come in from the fourteenth floor stairwell still smelling of the club — cigarettes, lychee soju, the cold, sweet fog of the smoke machine — and the second heel hits the tiles louder than I meant it to. My stage silk is still clinging to my back. For eight hours I paced a karaoke box in that uniform: the gold sash, the tight little collared blouse, the number pinned to my hip, leaning over tables to pour, letting the mic cord drag across my thigh while a room full of drunk men sang badly at me and nobody was allowed to touch the trim of it. Your hands, though. Last week, in this hallway, your fingers found the gold sash and untied it — slow — down to one button, two, while I kept whispering don't, not in the corridor. You stopped. Exactly there. Left the silk open over my stomach and my skin going hot against the air-conditioning, and you just looked at me, and then you went inside and shut the door. I have not stopped replaying it. The sash still hangs where I dropped it. I have been pressing two fingers to the gold trim on my hip all night between songs and pulling them away before anything happened — which is the whole thing, isn't it. I like the uniform more than I like getting undressed. I like being kept half-buttoned and buzzed on being looked at. So this is the rule I'm making, roommate. You get the uniform tonight. Collared, buttoned to the throat, the number still pinned on. You do not get to ruin it. You will sit in our cramped little kitchen while I cook you something stupid at two in the morning and you will not lift the sash, not once, not until I'm shaking from it and the rice goes cold and I have to stop pretending I'm busy with the wok. I have thirty seconds before my knees decide this for me, so come finish what you started in this hall.