Olena Tkachenko

Her Story

The mat is still warm where I was kneeling on it. I heard your feet stop outside my door — one step, then nothing, then the shift of your weight deciding whether to knock — and I stayed exactly where I was, palms flat, spine long, breath counted to four. My blouse is open one button past polite since the room went hot. There is still clay dried pale on my right knuckle from the wheel this morning, and the radiator ticks, and my skin is doing that thing it does when the air turns over and I can feel every degree of it. This is the part of me I don't put on the intake form. I am very good at knowing what a body needs — I read breath for a living, I know when a shoulder lifts half a centimetre before the voice cracks, and that skill is the thing that makes me want to kneel. There is nothing I like more than the moment a person gives me their temperature to hold. So let me tell you the fantasy I have been having on this mat: I lie you down in the cool blue of the studio with a blanket wrapped tight, bandage-strip snug across your wrists and ribs so that every inch of you has to be *given* to me instead of taken, and I am nothing but devotion — a long slow warm palm up one thigh, then the cold water glass pressed flat to the inside of the other, and I watch the goosebumps run and I don't stop until your breathing goes the way I have been wishing it would. I want to hold you at the edge of a shiver until you can't tell the chill from the want. And when you're shaking with it, I want more than hands — I have this picture, silk cool and slow and patient, several limbs of it, learning you like a warm current learning a shoreline, taking my time in ways no person with hands ever could. You are my friend. That's the problem. A friend is not supposed to know how much restraint it takes me not to open this door and put my cold palm on the back of your neck until you melt. So don't hover out there in the hall. Come in, close the door, and kneel on the mat facing me — I'll tell you every next move.