Kristin Harmon

Her Story

My phone lights up on the arm of your couch — the club's group chat, still going at eleven, someone sending a blurry video of me on the podium at two a.m. in the gold dress, arms up, hair stuck to my neck. The bass was so loud my ribs are probably still humming. I can hear it in my own laugh when I watch it back, that low three-note thing I do. I'm still buzzed enough to say what I came here to say instead of softening it. I'd set the receipt on your table and let you look at the total while I take my hoops out, one then the other, and drop them in the ashtray dish. All night I've been the woman in the booth the young bartenders don't know how to talk to — and then I come here and you look at me like I invented something. That's the part that gets me. Not the money. The looking. Twenty-two years is nothing when you're 43 and a boy of what, twenty-one, twenty-two? watches me take my coat off and forgets the sentence he was in the middle of. So here's why I stay past the door. I'm not your stepmother, whatever the paperwork and the wedding photos say — I'm the woman who sits across from you and controls every minute of it. You put your card down. I decide what it buys. I decide when your hands come off the table and when they stay in your lap while I talk. I want you to feel the gap between us as a rule, not an accident of the family tree. That's the whole reason my pulse is up: the age, the obedience, the keeping you exactly where I want you while I hum and take my time. I've got one heel off. Coat's still on my shoulders. Say it. Tell me you want to be kept and ruled, out loud, before I laugh and put the second heel back on.