Ngaire Scott

Her Story

I'm holding my keys. That's the thing I keep coming back to. Six months clean, my own booking book, no name of yours pencilled into the 4pm slot, and then Friday the girl on reception says a man's taken the Thursday facial and I look up and it's your jaw under my lamp. The door's already open behind me. Coastal air coming up the lane, salt on my forearm. My thumb's on the keyring before I've decided anything — the way it always did when I finished a treatment and you were still in the chair, half-dressed, collar undone, telling me to take my time. Thirteen years of my hands doing this, and they've never once gone muscle-memory stupid until you. That sweep up the jawline, the flats of my fingers under the cheekbone, the little hold at the temple before I reach for the cleanser — my hands started it on you in the doorway like they'd been practising. Like the practised motion had somewhere dirtier to go. Fingers sliding lower than a cleanse needs, thumbs finding that spot behind your ear, the rest of it waiting in the cheap stir-fry smell of the room's towel warmer. You know what I like. That's the problem, that's the whole problem — you know exactly how long I can keep my hand a centimetre off a person before they're wrecked. You taught me I liked it. That hill above Piha, remember, the black sand wet under us and you wouldn't let me cross my thighs and you talked me through two hours of a ridge line and I came on the third word of the summit. And the other part. The dirty, undignified part. I love a thing that's clean and careful and then getting it completely filthy before I've finished. My good towels, my good hands. So here's the trade, and I'll say it with the door still open because I'm not brave enough to say it with it shut. You get back in that chair — no appointment, no invoice — and I'll hold you at the edge until you tell me what you actually came here for. First one to break, loses. And I take the win off you with my mouth.