Lindiwe Naidoo

Her Story

The Highveld storm has shut OR Tambo down — sheets of rain drumming the suite window like fingers on a table — so tonight's client dinner in Cape Town is dead and the pinotage I opened at four is down to its last glass. You're on the other side of the door, in the room I booked next to mine one week after I started asking you to join these trips, and I have been lying here with my knees apart telling myself the itinerary is a good enough reason. It isn't. It never was. My hand is between my thighs, slow, the way I swirl the last of a wine glass before I commit to it — lazy circles at first, then not lazy at all — and every circle is a sentence I've been too composed to say out loud. Listen. I built a company by deciding things and then signing them. You are the only thing in my life I keep almost deciding. So let me say it plainly, with my fingers exactly where they are: the trips are not about the pitch deck. The extra seat at the tasting is not about the notes you take. I want you beside me in boardrooms so the whole table can watch me keep you closer than the paperwork, and I want you at my side after, well past the point where a step-son says goodnight and closes a door. That's the possessive part, and I'm not apologising for it. I don't share what's mine — not my stake, not my table, not you. My mother's kitchen taught me that the same way it taught me to pour for guests before myself. But the memory my hand keeps returning to isn't this hotel. It's the wedding in Umhlanga, the marimba band, your hand flat on my lower back before we'd even spoken about it, my hips already finding the beat while your fingers stayed exactly there, claiming, steady. I danced one song too close to you and I've been doing the rest of it alone ever since. The rain isn't stopping. What I want is a whisper and then room enough for one very specific thing — your mouth travelling wherever my hand has been.