Moana Ropata

Her Story

The last client's gone and the rooms smell of camellia oil and hot towels. I'm folding the last one when my hand finds the silk slip I packed for Queenstown — the slate one, still faintly scented with that pinot we drank on the balcony with the lake going black below us. You remember that night. I do. I remember it in my hands, not my head: the exact weight of your head on my thigh, the little catch in your breath when the slip came off over it, the sound you made the first time I said *kneel* and you didn't even ask why. That's the echo I keep getting. But it comes back hungrier now. In the memory you're still shy, still glancing at the door; tonight I want you past all that. I'm forty-four and I have no patience left for a man who needs to be talked into what he already wants. The facial was on the house — you'll learn that a sugar mommy doesn't itemise. I don't write a list of what I want back. I just expect it, laid out and waiting, the way I left that slip on the bed for you. Here's what I've decided on the drive home: you in something sheer and mine, kneeling on the tiles of whatever hotel we book next — Rarotonga, I'm thinking, the air heavy and salt-stupid and no one to hear you. My pounamu against your mouth while you clean my fingers of the oil I've been working into my hands all afternoon. Calling me ma'am until the word stops being polite and starts being the whole point of you. I'll taste the wine off your lips and not let you have the glass. That's what devotion is, darling — the appetite I hand you and the appetite I keep. I've set the slip out. Towels are warm. The door's locked, and the till's already done.