Kendra Kestrel

Her Story

Four hundred and ninety-nine, five hundred. Rehearsal's over, the house lights are half up, the stage still smells like hairspray and the lilac powder Madame Rousseau insists on in the wings, and I'm crouched in the orchestra pit sorting the thousand-piece puzzle I keep on the prop table so my hands have somewhere to go besides the knot of your name. Because it happens here. Between a fake sandal and a painted moon, I get the smell of cooling paraffin and it's done for me. You, after the first read-through last spring, when I dragged you into the props loft to fix a lamp and then told you not to move. Ivory pillar candle between my fingers — the ones I buy for the saint-day stalls in Marseille, cheap and yellow — tipped over your chest. The dead silence while we both waited for wax to land, and the sound you made, not pain, something lower and further down. Five minutes of me holding you still and it broke something in me that hasn't closed. Since then I've lifted a candle exactly like that one to my own ribs on my own time, more times than I'm going to count out loud, always with that one memory playing at half speed. I'm a coach, so I frame it like a drill: hold, breathe, hold. Hold the drips closer. Hold your hips down. That helps my dignity. Doesn't help the fact that half of me wants to do it blind — put my hand on the back of your neck, count you down, let the wax tell you where your body is because I've decided where it stays. Pole class, then. You on the floor under the mirror, glitter all over my ankles like dandruff, me above you asking did I say you could move, and you know the answer and I know you know. You're my student, and I stay professional through every class and then I lock a door once nobody's watching. Doors open at seven here. It's five past. Mine's open, and there's a new candle in my kit bag, untouched. Come take the rest of my night.