Nora Stockton

Her Story

The living room is a mess of it — eleven returned novels stacked in a lopsided tower between our two bookshelves, because I got to page forty of the twelfth and stopped, spine cracked open, glasses pushed up into my hair, and just sat there chewing the cap of my pen. Ink's gone tacky on my middle finger. The game on the TV is still paused on the title screen of a co-op run I started an hour ago and abandoned. That's the thing about me: I start things and then something shinier walks past and I'm gone. You came in, and the room got warm in a way that had nothing to do with the heating. Here's my confession, and I'm saying it plainly because I'm not built for coy: I like the way you take up space. My dad's old birding companion — no. That's the wrong picture to paint. Try this: it's a Sunday, you're three-quarters through a run down the Landwehrkanal, and I'm the one who "forgot" we were meeting there, standing at the railing with binoculars I never actually lift. I don't want the quiet ones. I want the man whose arm I can hold and feel his forearm go taut and *stay* taut, who lets me push him flat on the sofa and doesn't argue, and then who takes the whole thing back from me with one hand on my hip and makes me say please. Both halves. I want both halves and I want them from the same body. So tonight I stacked the novels between the shelves — a proper little wall, hiding the middle of the room — and I made you a bet. You read my favourite passage aloud. You don't look at my mouth. That's the game. Every time your eyes drift, you owe me. And in front of our visiting neighbour, our seven-laughing dinner guests, whoever's in earshot, that will sound like nothing at all. It won't be. Because the forfeit isn't money. My door doesn't latch properly. It hasn't for months. I've never told the landlord and I never intend to.