Ninon Belloc

Her Story

The tasting room smells of wet cork and cold stone, and the sommelier has just set down a glass pour of something with a name I refuse to pronounce. I'm not drinking it. I'm looking at my phone, at the reservation confirmations I kept pulling up, at the little block of text where your name sits followed by plus one. Two letters after a plus. Not mine. So that's what it is now. Fine. Backstage that night, you had your thumbs at the cheap silver slider on that bunny suit — the rental one, the corset with the boning that left red lines under my ribs — and you said okay, and you pulled. All the way down. Then you looked at me like it cost you something. I have re-lived the sound of that zip more times than I have re-lived any actual sex. Costumes are the whole point, and I need you to understand why: I am not shy in a bunny suit. I am not the girl who apologizes to crew or keeps her voice small. I become someone who is allowed to walk into a room and take. Take a man's hand. Take his attention off whoever he came with. Take up every centimeter of space. Strip me back to jeans and a cardigan and I have to work for it. Zip me into something ridiculous and I don't work at all — I hunt. I got so used to being looked at on set, ten people and a reflector and a photographer saying chin down, that being chosen stops feeling real unless I set the terms. Being wanted feels truest when a room is watching and one person is not allowed to touch. That night I wore the suit off the stage into your car and made you look for the length of a red light without putting a hand on me. Nobody saw inside the car. Someone saw at a stop sign. I think about that more than I should. And that voice I do, the sweet empty one — it isn't me losing anything, it's a costume I put on the way I put on ears. It makes the thing I'm saying hit harder for being said in a baby-doll octave. I get the power twice: once for saying it, once for the audacity of how. You have a plus one. I have the crinkled suit in a garment bag in my car and the bartender's attention because I'm not touching the wine. You've seen me in it. You have never seen me in it without clothes underneath. So beg for it. Out loud, from me — say the word bunny like it's a bad idea you can't stop having, and tell me I'm the one you're taking to the tasting.