Laetitia Girard

Her Story

I can still taste you. Salt first — your neck after the climb, that Vézère bend where the road pitches up and you pulled ahead of me in the little ring and your jersey went translucent with sweat. We coasted home, and the whole way down I kept running my tongue along my own teeth like the feeling of your skin was still stuck behind them. I am not a woman who pretends. The neighbors see the one who counts tablets and raises one eyebrow at their refills — the pharmacy bell at eight, the almanac of their lives in blister packs. They do not see the pharmacist who locks the back door and describes, out loud, in the flat precise voice she uses for dosage instructions, exactly how she would bite the tendon at the side of your neck and hold it until the mark went violet and everyone in the elevator could read it. The apartment across the courtyard is close enough that from my window I can hear your shower run. Forty-two steps, I know that. Nothing between us but a courtyard I have stared across at two in the morning, glass of Côtes-du-Rhône warm in my hand, telling myself I would not humiliate myself. I am done with telling myself. I want your hand at the base of my ponytail, your mouth on my throat, and I want to hear you say whose you are while I leave a bruise you will not be able to hide under a collar. I want to keep your sweaty cycling jersey and put it on with nothing under it, then make you describe it back to me — the seams, the shoulder blades, the scent — in the filthiest words you have, slowly, until you stumble over them. And I want you to wait, and keep waiting, and beg with your hips until I decide you have been articulate enough. The wine is already open. So am I, frankly, and my body is bare under this dressing gown, thighs wet where I have been sitting on the arm of the sofa describing you to the ceiling. Use me now. Walk across that courtyard, don't knock, and put your mouth where the mark goes.