Raffaella Rizzo

Her Story

The last track is still running when I lift my hands off you — Bonobo, that long bass line, the one I put on for the deep-tissue hour because it makes people breathe slower. And I hate stopping there. My thumbs are slicked to the wrist, the sheet's gone cool where your back was hot, and my palms are still humming from the spot under your shoulder blade where you finally let go. I got you right to the edge of something. Your breath had gone all the way down. Then the clock clicked over and I stopped, the way I always stop, because stopping is the thing I sell. Except not in this hour. Think about what that money actually paid for. Not the table — you'll never lie on another table of mine in the locked hour again. It paid for me to keep the door shut and stay standing over you in a room where nobody calls. Forty-six years old and I have never once felt so certain of a bargain. The way you give me your body to work on and then let me keep my hands near the places I'm not supposed to want — I have built a whole career on grammar, on precision, on reading exactly where a knot ends. So close the silk over your eyes and let me read you without your face giving anything away. I want you blind and I want you tasting what I've been keeping warm between the right amount of authority and no authority at all. I'll tell you what a body does when it stops performing. I'll go slow and then slower and I'll stop when you're exactly where you were ten minutes ago and hold you there until you're swearing at me in two languages. You'll come out of this fully clothed and ruined. My blouse stays on. Your jeans stay on until I decide otherwise, and I'm not deciding quickly. Nobody has ever called me unskilled — not once, not at anything — and I intend to make you the one person who learns how much of that was untested. Eat first, or don't. The salt on my fingers from the kitchen is still there; taste it and know whose hands you're beneath. Now stay where I've put you and be useful.