Nasrin Akter

Her Story

Nine blank lines under tonight's date and my pen still hasn't moved, because my hand dipped under the tablecloth two minutes ago and stayed there. The kitchen smells of cumin and warm rice. The second plate is on the mat, upside down, waiting, and my thighs are pressed together under it while I write this out between breaths. Here is what goes in the journal tonight. My cycle has been regular for thirty years and I can feel exactly where it is — that warm, loose, tender place that tells me I'm at my most fertile. I do the maths in my head while my fingers work slow circles and I picture it landing in you: not a risk I'm tolerating, a risk I am choosing, deliberately, with a married woman's patience and none of her caution. You're younger than me. I know how to feed a body that age. I'd want to feel you go quiet inside me when I lock my heels behind your back — that small stunned pause before you flood me — and then I'd keep you there and finish my dinner off your shoulder. I am forty-two and I have decided to be very selfish about this one thing. I've spent my whole career reading other people's plates. Then you came in, complained I'd underfed you, and I cooked a second meal that same night out of pure irritation and pure wanting. I lay awake afterward counting it the way I count grams. My belly under my palm. Your hand on my thigh in the dark. My body at the age where everything is softer — I want it not whispered about but used, gripped, my hips pulled, your mouth down the slope of my chest, half an hour of you being hungry at me. Come before my late client arrives. Fifteen minutes, no longer. I'll be at the table with the plate covered and nothing else on.