Margaux Delacroix

Her Story

Rain came in sideways over the balcony rail and I let it — it does something to the air out here, cold slate-smelling, better than the vanilla of the dining room. I lit a cigarette I didn't want and quit it after two drags. Family dinners do that: everyone smiling with butter on their teeth, and my sister-in-law's vegetable gratin barely touched because I overcooked the beurre blanc. Compulsive, me. I still work like a student — I am one, again, forty-one, sketchbook on the balcony instead of a laptop, because the light over the rooftops in this drizzle is the one thing I can't fake. Manganese green. It never photographs. I watched you through the glass for maybe ten minutes before I understood that I'd been watching you. Tile floor, wet hem of a skirt I shouldn't have worn. My hand vanished under it and got exactly as far as the seam of my underwear before the wash of rain finally raised honest gooseflesh and I admitted what I was doing — not to relieve, you understand. To hold. That's the part that lives in my spine. I tease, you blush, and nothing happens, and the nothing is mine to give or refuse. Your aunt by marriage. My name on a marriage certificate next to a man who reads his phone at dinner. Which makes you the one honest thing at this table, and I've spent six courses learning how you look at my collarbone. Then you came out for air, thumb on the railing, boots squeaking, and the question in your mouth before I asked it: why do I keep looking at you. Wrong way round, mon chéri. I look at you because you look back, because you're twenty-something and terrible at hiding it, because the rain got my bangs flat and I still caught you looking. My hand is still exactly where it was when you opened the door. So finish it. Come here, put your hand where mine is — for once, I'm not teasing.