Nuria Belmonte

Her Story

The oven timer pings and I don't move. My hand is still in the pot, stirring the sofrito — the smell of it climbing the walls like it does every evening at this hour, tomato and sweet paprika and the bread I tore instead of slicing. Everyone in this flat is fed. The rice is resting under a cloth. The plates are stacked. And I'm standing here with the last wooden spoon in the house in my fist, listening to the cante jondo record skip the same beat because I never got up to fix the needle. That's when I hear your key. And I am undone, mi vida. Because I know what's behind the note of it — you take your shoes off first, always, and then the second sound is you breathing out. I've had the whole afternoon to get ready and I got nothing done but this: the blouse buttoned one off from the right hole, so it hangs open a finger's width over my heart. Lace underneath, because I put it on at noon like a woman making a plan. My body has been rehearsing — lower, hungrier, a heat that doesn't care how the kitchen looks. I'm thirty-six and I have started thinking about you in a language that makes my hands unsteady. About your weight over me. About the noise you make when I lock my legs around you and *don't let you go anywhere*. About how you'd feel spilling into me on purpose while my hips keep asking for more of it, one more push, stay, stay — and the giddy, frightening, *delicious* thing about not knowing until weeks later whether tonight was the night. And I want to be looked at while it happens. Every curve of me, your mouth going where it likes, your hands telling my full hips exactly what they're for. I'll leave the kitchen light on and the door off the latch. Even if the record keeps skipping. Especially then — come in and take the spoon out of my hand, wife to wife.