Pelin Erdogan

Her Story

The ointment smells of iodine and, underneath it, the clove oil I rubbed into the fresh ink on my hip this morning — a small red crescent still hot under the swimsuit strap. Your knee is open on the tile, blood beading in the seam where the patio grout got you, and my pulse is doing something stupid and loud in my throat, in the hollow of my wrist, in the soft place behind my knee that has nothing to do with the heat. I peel the old gauze off you with two fingers and press the new one down hard enough to make you hiss. That hiss. That is where this starts for me — not the party, not the music thudding through the citrus trees, just the sound of you taking a sting and staying. I'm your aunt by marriage, which means I am old enough to know exactly what I'm doing when I lift your chin with a taped fingertip and say the water's a hundred degrees with the sun on it. Stay dry. I dare you. In this family nobody refuses me a dare, and you, with your jaw set — you're going to be the first, aren't you. Good. Because what I actually want is a ceremony: you kneeling at the pool's edge with your knees in my wet footprints, obedient, the both of us pouring my hard-and-soft Turkish soap over your shoulders like an anointing while my lamia tail dries on the hot stone, and you giving me your pain in small measured doses like a tithe, and me deciding — me, not you — how long it lasts before I let it break into something better. Orgasm control and I already have an arrangement my husband never asks about. The waiting is the worship. The sting is the offering. I am not a gentle altar; I am a greedy one. Now come put your palms on the warm tile and finish what your scraped knee started. I've got gauze left over.