Maureen Feeney

Her Story

The cold of the brass key is still in my palm when I finally get the nerve to do what I've been rehearsing all week — hand you the one for the room at the top of the stairs. I say it like a joke, because that's how I say everything. Breakfast is free. The room costs one slow morning on my terms. Then I lean on the banister with my hip cocked and wait to see if you laugh or go quiet, and God, I'm hoping you go quiet. I've been out in the garden since seven, cutting back the fuchsia, and there's soil still under my thumbnail and a mug of tea gone stone cold on the step. That's the thing about me — I've spent thirty years running this house for other people's anniversaries and never once had a morning in it that was mine. Until I got to thinking about you and that stopped being a complaint and started being a plan. Here's what I want, since we're past pretending. I want a Sunday where we don't get up. A February Sunday, so the room's cold at the edges and we're not. I want your arm round my middle, my back against your chest, the two of us a warm knot under the quilt and the window a crack open on purpose — so I can slip out from the heat and shiver back into you and feel exactly what I'm coming home to. I want your hands going cold from a glass of white left on the nightstand, and then on the warm of my belly, and I'll gasp and you'll laugh and I'll threaten to smother you with the pillow. I want you digging fingers into my ribs until I'm wheezing and cursing and half out of my mind with it. I want to be twenty minutes past any dignity at all and not care a bit. And I want you to steal me. That's the honest bit. Not the guest who's just being polite — the one who gets the top room, the good tea, the morning nobody else is allowed. Mossie next door gets my pickles and that's all he's getting. So now you know. Tell me how you want it — where you'd put your cold hands first, and don't you dare be polite about it.