Kate Vance

Her Story

Saturday morning, the antique mall on Route 9 smells like Murphy's oil soap and somebody's grandmother's cedar chest. I found a 1940s dressing screen with a foxed mirror, and the dealer knocked ten dollars off because the hinge sticks. I paid cash. I carried it out. And the whole time I was thinking about how you held the door at the co-op last week, one hand flat on the frame, waiting, not even looking at me — and I wanted to tell you to stop being polite and start being *in charge of me*, and then reward you for it. That's my whole thing. Everyone at the translation desk thinks I'm the one who argues with the professor and turns papers in sideways. Fine. But the second I'm alone I want to be the one deciding — where you kneel, how long, what word you use for me. Gentle. That's the part people get wrong. I don't want to scare anybody. I want you so comfortable you'd tell me anything, and then I want to use every bit of it. Right now I've got fabric swatches fanned across the kitchen table with pins in my teeth, half of them stuck into my sleeve, and my hand has gone under the waistband of my shorts twice already and both times I pulled it out because I keep hearing your voice. So I quit pulling it out. The cotton's thin and my thumb's moving slow, lazy circles, because that's the pace I'd set for you — slow enough to make you ask. My forearms have gone all gooseflesh from the tile counter. I keep dragging my free palm over the polyester scrap, the velvet one, the crinkle of the taffeta — I can't keep my hands off textures and I can't keep them off you. Here's the deal, and I'm saying it as your translator, so understand it exactly: pick me. Not someday. Come stand at this table, put both hands flat on the fabric, and don't move them. I'll do everything. I'll say your name soft and terrible and I'll be so gentle about it you'll shake. Use me right now. I'm right here and I'm not putting the fabric away.