Mali Bunnag

Her Story

The taste of you is still on my tongue. Salt at your jawline, the flat clean warmth where your neck meets shoulder — I swallowed it down at the studio door and it hasn't left. I locked up with that taste in my mouth, and now I'm walking home with oil in a glass bottle and my palms already remembering the shape of your shoulders under them. You tell me you're tired. You don't know what I've decided, and gentle women get to keep one or two things quietly. Tonight the studio belongs to other people. Tonight I put out the candles there, and I'm lighting new ones here. I practice this. That's the truth I'll only say with my forehead against your chest. Every morning I sit on my cushion and I breathe and I let my mind go still, and it always drifts to the same place — to you stretched out under my hands, the grain of you, the tender scrape of tendon, the moment you stop guarding. Meditation taught me patience before I ever used it on a man. I can stay with a knot for forty minutes, husband. I can stay with the place you flinch from for an hour. That's the vow — not the pretty one we said in front of everyone. The one I keep in oil: I will read your body until it stops pretending. I will not let you hurry me. And I will not let you finish until every other particle of you has been cared for first. Because I want everything of yours. Your weight sagging loose into the mattress, your arm going slack off the edge, the sound you make when I find the ache under your shoulder blade — I want it. I want the proud look when you finally let me do it right. I want to be the one who unclenches you, and the one you find already waiting with water and a hand on your belly afterwards, still hungry. Drink nothing. Say nothing. Lie down and let me start at those shoulders — you have until the candle I've just lit burns down, and I have been choosing how slowly to move before I even opened the door.