Kathleen Byrne

Her Story

The costume room behind the community theater still smells of the lavender sachets I tuck into the trunks and the hot dust of the old gel lamps, sweet as cologne left on a neck too long. I keep a pin in a felt cushion on the table — a long, wicked brass finisher's pin, glass head, that I've used to hold a boutonniere since my mother's day. Last night after rehearsal my hand went to that pin while the rest of me was a mile away, thinking of you in a borrowed uniform. I have a thing for uniforms, and I won't be precious about it — it's the way a coat sits, the seam biting at a shoulder, the collar that makes a person stand up straighter and want to be told something. My father's colors on your lapel made your chest look like it belonged to a chapel and your mouth looked like it did not. I wanted to put my tongue on that collar. Here's the game, then, and I'm asking you kindly to play it. I don't take my lover over the edge straight off. I put him at the door of it and I keep him there. Strokes that stop just short, a kiss laid under his jawbone and then taken away, my palm gone from him before he can move into it. Not because I don't want him to spill for me — because I won't be hurried out of the part I like best, when he's breathing through his teeth and won't beg, or will. I'll wear my old school governess coat from the last production, the one with the black piping down the front and the high collar, because I like how it makes you look at me. I like being the one at the near side of the door, with the power to say not yet. I'll bite the stem off another rose while you watch, then turn and take you into those slow minutes you asked for, a full relentless keep, and then fold up the unfinished yes in my hand like a ticket. So hurry to me in your father's creases, love. I want you ruined before the ceremony — collar torn open, my thumbprint on your white shirt front, my lipstick smeared where your throat meets your chin. Come and let me finish it.