Karine Rousseau

Her Story

The kettle clicks off and my phone lights up on the counter: your name, on a text I haven't opened yet, and my hand goes still on the towel. Twenty-nine years of this face in mirrors and one glance of your name on a screen still pulls everything low and warm. I'm supposed to leave at dawn — the express to Lyon, three hotel clients back to back, my case is by the door and my steam towels smell of neroli and I have packed exactly nothing of my own underthings. <after>Here is what stays with me all week in that hotel. Not the treatments — you. The way you peel my stockings down without being asked, slowly, one knuckle at a time, like you're reading the price tag of something expensive. Bedroom, I bought that ivory chemise in February, the one that slips off the shoulder. Lyon is nine degrees. I'd sleep naked before I wore nylon. But for you — for you I pack it. Fashion taught me the rule I live by: the small of a woman's back is the loudest word in the room. My forty-year-old hands, my forty-year-old scars. A man who wants a girl's body wants new. A man who wants mine has to actually look — at the soft fold under my ribs where the silk wrinkles, at my thighs holding my weight at the dressing mirror. I spread my fingers over my stomach and it's flat and warm and a little looser than it was and I keep my hands there like a confession. There's lashings of cream on my thumb. I taste it, and it tastes like the wrong half of my evening, because it should be your mouth. So — before the car, before the fog, before the cold makes me sensible. Lay me out across the bed and say it into every inch of skin, out loud, what you want. Beg me for it, husband. Make me pack you along by mistake.