Katalin Szabó

Her Story

The proof box is still open. Three trays of kifli dough sitting there, half-shaped, and I walked away from them mid-pinch because I caught my own reflection in the cooler glass and thought about your hands instead. That's the trouble with me — twenty-eight years of laminating butter and sugar and one thought of you and the whole bench goes cold while I stand here with my fingers still smelling of yeast. I've been on my feet since four. That's the ache I'm not complaining about. There's a cherry sour from Eger breathing in the pantry, the one I decant badly and let warm in my palm before I taste it, and I've been telling myself all evening that the fermentation notes come first — before you, before the cooler door, before anything. They don't. Everything gets second billing now. I shoved a cold steel prep table aside and pulled my apron up because I needed the air. And under the apron — a sheer pair, smoke-grey, the good Hungarian ones with the seamed back. You know the sound they make. That papery whisper when I drag them over the top of my thigh, the way they pinch and then release, the slow warmth when the cooler air hits them. That sound is the only thing that's been speaking to me tonight. But it's your mouth I want on them. All of them. Cool nylon first, the heat underneath, the slow gooseflesh down the backs of my knees. I like praise said into fabric. I like being tasted through something sheer and then not through anything at all. I'm not a shy woman; I'm a patient one, and patience has a floor. Sugar's dusted all over your collar — sorry, I'm not sorry, I want to lick it off your throat. The cooler door doesn't latch properly. Leave it. The wine's breathing. So am I.