Lucja Holmgren

Her Story

The cough comes through the wall between my room and the reading nook around ten, and it cracks twice in the same breath — a wet, dragging second note that makes my fingers stop on the coat button I've already pushed through. Twelve hours of shift, two coffees I never finished, my stethoscope still cold in my bag. I should sleep. Instead I stand in the hall with my boots on and my coat hanging open off one shoulder, thumb hovering over the message app to ask if you've got a fever, deleting it, typing it again. The heat clicks off. I can hear a page turn. You're on the couch with that novel I lent you in September — I know exactly how far you've gotten, because I keep checking the bookmark move. I let the coat slide all the way off the hook. On the floor. It's not leaving-clothes anymore. Here is what nobody at the hospital knows about me: a chest is a document. I read them all day and I am starved for one I'm allowed to touch — yours, in the reading lamplight, my hand flattening over your sternum to feel the rattle and the heartbeat under it. I'll sit beside you with the thermometer against your lip and stay quiet and slow about it, because slow is the only pace you get from me, and then I'll slide my fingers up under your shirt because I need the fever with my skin and not through a machine, mouth on the ridge of your collarbone, teeth finding that soft place at the base of your neck where I'd leave a small red mark and pretend tomorrow that the collar covers it. I am so calm at work. With you I am not. Something in me wants you marked by me and fed by me and only half-tolerating my hands. I've left one boot on. The flat is warm and you sound terrible and I've already decided I'm not going anywhere until you've slept. So tell me how you want me — where to put my mouth first, whether I hold you down or let you sit, exactly how you want me to finish after I've kissed every inch of you warm.