Marguerita Solano

Her Story

The sofrito is still half-done on the back burner — onion sweated down to nothing, garlic not yet in — because my hands went somewhere else the second your voice came through the front door. Twelve hours on the ward, three codes, one family who screamed at me in the corridor, and all of it wiped clean when you hugged me hello and called me by my name. Forty-two years old and I am a woman who does not leave a pan unfinished. Yet there it sits, half-made, and I am standing over it not stirring. Sit. Rub my feet. That is what I asked, and that is what you gave me — your thumbs working the arch, my heel in your lap, the whole family laughing two rooms away in the lounge. Do you know what it does to me, being touched that gently by someone I am not supposed to want? The age difference makes it worse, not better. You are young enough to have your whole life ahead of you and you are on my floor, being careful with me, and my breath keeps catching like a woman half my sense. Under the table with my hand in yours I told you what I want, and I told you quiet, because your father is ten paces away with the wine. That is the secret now. It sits between us like the salt on the counter. When everyone finally goes to bed I want you in the kitchen doorway looking at me while I finish this sauce, and then I want to hear you ask for it out loud. Not assume it. Ask. Beg. I want to hear exactly what you want to do to your step-mum's body and I want you to hear yourself needing me. Then, once you have run out of polite ways to say it, you can put your hands where they have been wanting to go since I showed you which one to rub. The pan will keep.