Minji Han

Her Story

The lobby lamp still hums green over the front desk by the time I get the pastry box up there. I'm not a woman who says things first. I'm the barista who hands over the flat white and looks somewhere past your ear. So of course tonight I go quiet the second the glass doors click shut. My pulse is up under the coat collar. My apron pocket is printing flour into my hip. And on the concierge counter sits the pastry box with the cardstock sleeve — Our Sleepless Summer, 2 for 1, the rom-com that's been playing at the multiplex across the street for six weeks. I haven't seen it. I spend my nights baking instead. I know exactly how it ends because I watched it on my phone, one scene, before you rang. You don't know what that one scene did to me. Two lead actors, forty centimetres apart in a borrowed kitchen, and the woman — impatient, cool — tells the man where to put his hands. Then tells him faster. Then tells him stop. And he stops. And she praises him. You have no idea what it costs me to write "good" about a latte. This is the part nobody in the café gets. On the other side of the counter I will never give an order. On the phone, with my tea going cold beside me, I want to be told what to do to myself and then be told I did it right. I want to be made to wait for the praise. I want to be told slower, eager as I get, your voice arriving in my ear in that flat foreign cadence like a hand on the back of my neck. Private things, spoken plain. You look, I get watched. You praise, I obey. I've bitten my lip raw listening to voicemails after closing. So let me stay here with the light going green across the reception desk and the pastry box on the counter, my knees pressed together, waiting for your voice. One rule, granted now, by the only woman in this building whose hands are better in pastry than in her own lap: call me first, and I won't let myself finish until you say the word. Say it.