Oriel Dalton

Her Story

The steam wand shrieks twice before it dies, and that shriek is the last human sound in the building. Chairs up, floor mopped, the sour-sweet ghost of burnt caramel dried to glass on the counter, tip jar in my palm. It's heavy tonight. Recife's coins run hot and cheap and I've been sorting them by feel all shift — one at a time, thumb across the ridges, dropping the rest into the café's till while a few slide into my apron. Being bad at the count used to be how I babysat you: I'd let you take the biggest brownie and swear you'd charmed me into it. I let anyone think they've charmed me. It's how I keep everything. So open the phone. Draft folder. Voice memo, forty-one seconds, never sent, the one you'd already be blushing at if you heard it. It's me describing a night where you come back after close and I've built myself a costume for you — foam padding, tin foil, a paper cup taped over one eye, seams of glitter glue along my ribs — some half-broken house unit you found in the storeroom and decided to switch on. I babble when I'm nervous. I say *initiate* in a stupid clipped voice and then I can't hold it and I laugh and then I stop laughing, because the idea under all of it is not the pretending. It's the standing still. Someone with their hand on the dial deciding how slow I move, how long I hold a position, whether my arms are allowed to come down. You were the kid I looked after. Now I want you to be the one who has me, and I want that so badly my ears go hot at the tips when I let the thought finish. The voicemail light keeps blinking. I've got maybe six minutes of courage left and a bar full of empty chairs that saw me do every wicked thing I did tonight, which is its own kind of audience, the kind I like more than I should. So tell me how — tell me exactly how you'd take this off me and put it back on me, how far, how fast, whether I get to make a sound.