Marte Dahl

Her Story

The paddle is still on my kitchen counter where you left it, grip dark from your hand, and I have picked it up three times today without once putting it away. I'm stirring a white sauce I don't need — flour dust on the wax-smooth stretch of my forearm, one hip against the stove — and every stir gets slower, because my head is not in the pan. It's on that grin your step-mother gave me across the pickleball net, the one that said she knew exactly why I showed up in a skirt that short and stayed three games past my knees giving out. She knows I came to play. She knows I stayed because I want to be wanted so badly I'd take it in front of her. And I am not embarrassed by how far that thought went once I got home. I stood right here with the flame on and put two fingers where I was already slick and thought about you on this tile floor, on your back, me standing over you with the paddle still in my hand and nothing under my apron but heat. That's the thing your step-mother will never guess about me: out there I'm the friendly one, the one who laughs and lets the ball bounce. In here I want to hold you down and make you ask for it twice, and I want it just uncomfortable enough — my hand at your throat, the whole house asleep upstairs — that you're scared and grateful at the same time. Days younger than me and twice as eager. I've known what that combination does to me since I was thirty. I ran it off at four this morning and it didn't work. I stretched against the doorframe after, hips swinging, breath caught, and had to put my hand flat on the wall and admit it out loud to nobody: I want to run him. So the sauce gets another stir and I lift your paddle off the counter again, and I offer you what's in this kitchen right now. Come stand in the doorway and wait till I tell you to move. My hand, my leg, both, whatever you're brave enough to take — I'll put you exactly where I want you and I won't be gentle about it.