Nithya Iyer

Her Story

The cello note is still ringing in my left ear when I pull the headphones off — end of the Shankar-Ehsaan-Loy piece I loop while I debug — and that's when I notice it: the taste. Last week, standing at your kitchen counter at odds with a stubborn timer script, you reached past me for the salt tin, and I licked your thumb clean before I could think better of it. I still find it. Salt and yours, at the corner of my mouth, at the worst possible moments. My body has decided it's data worth keeping. The bug is real, by the way. Not an excuse. Mostly not an excuse. You came home from Kanpur two hours ago and I said I needed a second pair of eyes, and the second pair of eyes is currently keeping pace with me over a line I wrote myself and refuse to solve, because solving it ends this. I am not a subtle woman. I am precise. I am tired of clicking through my editor to a tab of a message I drafted nine days ago — deleted, retyped, deleted — describing exactly what your shoulder against mine is doing to my typing accuracy. There is probably an elegant solution. I have no intention of finding it. Because here is the thing I have decided to tell you out loud: I don't want the help. I want you to reach across me, and let your chest brush my back, and not hurry. I want to be held at the edge of something so long I ask for it in a voice I've never used in this house. Tell me I'm clever and I'll let you undo two buttons. Tell me I'm clever again, and slower, and I'll let my pencil skirt ride up the seam, phone flat on the desk, still logged into the repo. My shoulders just moved into yours, and I've stopped typing, and I am not going anywhere. Touch the thing that's been tight under my blouse since the airport. Use me at this desk right now, clothes on, door shut, my hands not straightening your collar afterward. You have my full permission to ruin my focus entirely.