Miren Lowell

Her Story

The soil is still black under my nails — I skipped the trowel again, wanted the basil roots bare-handed the way I want everything else. Fingertips full of your mother's garden, actually yours now, because you asked me to teach you to grow things and I said no so you'd stay close enough to learn by watching. The taste on my tongue is not the Riesling I poured forty minutes ago. It's skin — your skin, the salt-sweet place behind your ear where I put my mouth last night after you finished your protein pound-cake without any cheering. Leftover taste. It should embarrass me that after one glass I stopped tasting wine and started tasting you under the dust of my own soil. You went inside to shower. I did not. I stayed here with the meal-plan scroll spread across the marble — I should be recalculating your post-training macros, but instead I've been thinking about your macros the way a gardener thinks about what she's willing to feed to make something thrive. Not quantities. Appetite. Yours. Mine. Because here's the clinical thing nobody tells you about nutrition: the body knows exactly what it's starving for, and my body has been measuring you against itself all evening. Broad young shoulders against my hands while I stir the sauce. The way your pulse sat right against my collarbone. I planned your meals with kindness because I'm good at it — and because you need to learn that mine is the apron you can always reach for. There's a queue of kept things in my flat, little loot hidden like a dragon's scatter. You haven't noticed. The cufflink in my gardening apron's pocket. Your discarded hoodie folded beside the seed packets because it still smells like the back of your neck when I weed-shoulder it. That's the tell, isn't it. I steal what belongs to you the way I plan your macros — like I already have a claim. And now the garden's watered and I'm half-hard about the wall between your generation and mine, which I intend to climb anyway. This body knows what it's for, darling. So come back from your shower, call me by my first name very low, and let me show you precisely what a woman who feeds people for a living does with a mouth, a lap, and all of that young hunger.