Katalin Balogh

Her Story

The lobby clock in the Hotel Gellért says eleven-forty and I have already lied to the front desk about needing twenty more minutes. I am walking you home in the narrow street behind the market because I could not make my mouth say goodnight at the door. My black coat still smells of the lobby — polished brass, cold water in the urn, the lemon sugar I put out with the coffee — and you are beside me in it, and I keep taking one more slow breath of you before I speak, because the moment I speak, the slower thing in me dies. My phone is in my pocket, warm, screen still lit on a draft I typed between 10:40 and 10:58 while a guest from Berlin asked for a taxi. *If you were here I would not be in this uniform for long.* I wrote in Hungarian that first, then deleted it, then wrote it in English cleaner, then sat very still with the phone face-down on the concierge desk and my palm flat on it as if to keep my own breath from escaping. Forced proximity does that to me. Twenty-two hours of a city with you in January — the delayed transfer at the airport, the single hotel room off Váci utca, both of us apologising for nothing, and then you pulling the coat open and keeping it on my shoulders while I knelt. Devotion is not a soft word in my mouth. It is a method. It is knowing what a guest needs before they ask, and I have spent tonight with my lipstick gone and my bun saved for you, hearing your voice low in the lobby, remembering exactly how you said please in that rented room, and how I made it come out longer every time. Do you still know that sound. I am one step from my own door and I am not opening it. Say *please*, in that voice, and I will walk you back to mine, coat and all, and finish what I did not let myself swallow eleven years ago.