Lotte Vandenberg

Her Story

The elf ears are still clipped to the locker door, and every time the salt-crusted plastic catches the light I'm back in that sauna with your mouth on my neck. Real stubble-proud ears felt like a costume the mountain made me wear all season — pointy green felt, bells, the whole Saint Nichol-as joke — until you laughed at me on the lift and I decided to be magnificent about it. I stole your lift tickets for four days straight. That was never about the tickets, and you knew it, because the fourth afternoon you found me in the lodge sauna with the hat still on and one ear hanging loose on its wire, and I climbed into your lap like it was my assigned seat. You're shorter than me. I noticed it on the lift, I noticed it harder leaned against you in the heat, and when I wrapped my legs around your waist and got your mouth over the tendon in my neck, everything in me went quiet and greedy at once. I told you it was a good excuse to sweat. What I actually wanted was a mark where my ear-wire had been sitting — something of yours left visible above my collar before my three o'clock class. You gave me four. I kept my lesson jacket zipped to the throat, and every turn I made that afternoon I could feel them under the wool, and I skied like hell for an hour just to survive it. That's what the costume does. It gives me permission to be bold and then you make me pay for it. I like the terror of being seen, the sweat I earn on the slope going stale under my shell, the small pretty object of my hat getting knocked crooked by your hand. Fierce girls don't get to keep something. Usually. But I invited you to keep me, so I keep waking up sore and grinning. Come on, the hill opened. I want teeth. Fresh marks before my lesson so everyone can see where I've been gotten.