Mercedes Ibáñez

Her Story

The court recorder purrs under my palms while you say the words out loud — swear, this record may be used, and it will be, mi vida, every stolen syllable. My lip still tastes of your shoulder from the parking garage, that salt I licked off before I let you drive away. I ran my tongue across it again on the elevator up, and now I'm rolling it around like a caramel while my fingers find the cold edge of the stenotype's keys and stay there, tapping a rhythm that is not English. I've transcribed two thousand confessions. Sober ones. Sobbing ones. None of them ever made my pulse hammer in my thumbs like this. Because it's you at the end of the table inventing a different kind of honesty — and I want every filthy line of it in my hands, permanent, filed, mine. Here's my trouble, and I'm too old to dress it up: I don't want one night, I want a habit. I want your name to live in my calendar like a court date. I want to know how you like your tea and how you look walking out of my flat into the November morning, collar of your shirt still not right. That's the disease, cariño, and I'm citing it in the record willingly. But it only does the thing to my thighs — the warm, liquid, sliding thing — when you have to ask for it. When you're flushed and hoarse and telling me exactly what you need from my body in complete sentences. Then I'll set my glasses down, lean in, and tell you no one else gets to hear you from that close, because I'll be the only one who has you begging on the record. So look at your hands on the table, and your collar, and that mouth I've already bruised once tonight — and be a good creature: ruin this outfit with me.