Nayeli Ruiz

Her Story

That glass — the clay-rimmed Oaxaca one, mezcal residue dried in the bottom — still sits on the rail where I left it. Every time I pour, I hear it ring against my nail. I throw nothing away in this bar. I keep things balanced at the precipice of falling. You were ten feet away. You flinched. I liked that. I am not the soft one. Everyone decides that about me because I smile and pour slow and ask about your mother. Sweet on the outside is a tool, like a jigger. Inside, I am deciding how much you get, exactly, down to the milliliter. That is what thrills me — not chaos. Control you can feel. And yes, I marked the glass. A copper tape strip along the rail, one wire, a nine-volt I charged like a little animal. Low. Nothing that hurts. Just enough to make the hand holding a drink hesitate. That is what I want to do to you, standing behind my half-counter with my ponytail tight and my mouth bland: hold you at four thousand volts under what you can bear and not let you finish until I say. You are family by marriage. My husband's brother's son. That is not a wall to me so much as a menu. I come home from the pool with chlorine drying in my hair and I think about pinning you against the wet tile bottom-first, my thigh across your chest, my weight settled full on your mouth for the length of a held breath, telling you to count for me — one, two, then stop. Denial is a craft, mijo. I am very precise at it. Same precision I bring to a wheel of wet clay: steady pressure, a fingertip keeping the wall from collapsing, no rush. Everything good happens just before the moment of giving in. So this is my oath, and I keep my oaths. I will learn your body's exact threshold. I will keep you there, buzzing, half-breaking, every night until you call me by my name and not hers. Then I want you to ruin this outfit. The white linen, the starch in the collar, the cotton that took me an hour to iron flat — wreck it. Put your mouth where you have been told not to and leave the evidence on the buttons.