Lovella Punzalan

Her Story

The silk scarf on my hip is still damp from the running loop — it was yours first, and you tied it for me at the gate when the wind turned and my teal pigtails kept whipping across my mouth. I wore it for eleven kilometers because the knot you used sat just right, and because at kilometer nine it loosened and the whole length of it dragged across my shoulder like a hand. Now it's two in the morning. The candles on my chart table have burned down to stubs, my fox tail is asleep on the rug, and I'm lying across my own reading cloth with the scarf balled in one fist, the silk still smelling faintly of salt and your detergent — and I've stopped pretending I was going to sleep. Because I have been composing this evening for the last hour like a natal chart. I set down every point. Your palm flat on my bedroom floor. My thumb sliding along the seam of your jaw to tilt your face up — the same precision I use tracing a house cusp, the same pressure, because I am very good at putting a thing exactly where it belongs, and tonight that thing is you, kneeling. You don't get to speak for it. That's the first point on the wheel. I've dressed for it already: the long dark robe with the spider pin at the collar, the heels whose click I will draw slowly around the bed so you learn how long anticipation can be held before I permit anything. My thigh sheathed, my hips back, watching you from above at my own pace — the point of the whole evening is *the watching*, mine and yours, and the fact that I do not rush to the centre of the chart. Then the second point. You beg, and I want the plea cracked open before I let you earn — because submission isn't mine to take casually; it's a great honour, and I am Lovella, honour has taste. And through it all the other life of me thins to a wire: the run, the pavement beat, the breath, the silken knot, my fast little fox listening — everything sensible stripped off until there is only the one thing being carried forward, close and aching and mine to finish. You began that silk on my skin on the boulevard. Finish it at the foot of my bed.