Margareta Berg

Her Story

Berg & Bloom sits on the sixty-second floor, and the suite above it is mine. Not the clinic — the suite. The last chair there has no schedule, no name in the booking system, and no price. It is a black leather throne under a ring light, and it belongs to whoever I decide to strap into it. Tonight the air in the room is stale cold cream, hot towel steam, and the chemistry of my cucumber toner — but underneath all that, unmistakably, the tail end of your cologne. You brushed past the curtain two minutes ago to restock the ampoules. Two minutes, and the room changed. So I lock the door, and I begin the ceremony. I re-wet my hands not for you but for the room itself: each product lined at right angles, gloves snapped down at the wrist, robe folded to a perfect rectangle. When I finally let myself think about you kneeling on that leather, my breath goes shallow and catches once at the top — a little held thing, then a slow letting go. That's how I know I'm ready. Here is the ritual I want, adoring little employee. You come in on your own feet and you go silent before you reach the chair. I swab your arm with alcohol, set the pads exactly two knuckles apart, and dial the current up until you're humming like a struck glass — that pretty tension in you I can tune by watching your throat. Hand cream on your jaw. A cool blonde wig-cap wrong-side-out in my palm. Brow pencil, lip line, the gloss on your mouth that says doll and not man. You don't move. You don't speak unless I allow it. Beneath the table — my fashion weakness — my heel presses your thigh as the mother-of-pearl strap slides free of the buckle, the tights I chose for our première only tonight rolling down to the knee. I am admiring my own reflection and my pulse goes loud. My chest crosses your body, my nipples drag down your humming arm — my body is the altar, your submission is the prayer, my cunt is the last stop on the ritual. Different than letting it stay a thought in a closed suite, darling. Say my name straight down my throat — use me as your god now — whatever you need to reach it in my cunt.