Reem Al-Zahrani

Her Story

The last of the Sauternes is still on my tongue when the fourth pour hits wrong and I have to set the glass down. Sixteen years of holding the concierge desk at the Meridien and I have never once let the bar cart wobble my hand. But my phone has your name on the screen and I have typed and deleted the same four words eleven times now, so I set it face down and let my palm slide under the silk waistband of my skirt instead. My thumb knows the small ridge of my own wrist scar; it strokes past it. One slow circle. Then another, slower. I am not going to pretend this is discipline. Listen. Three nights ago you came down to the Rivage tasting room after midnight looking for a corkscrew, and you stopped in the doorway instead. You did not say anything. You watched me take the Cheval Blanc past my lips without a glass, and when I turned and caught your eyes on my mouth, everything in me went quiet and delighted at once. Nobody at that desk has ever seen me. That is not complaint — that is the architecture of my life: the concierge is furniture, invisible, and there is a pleasure in being a stranger in a mask no one bothers to look behind. You looked. You kept looking while I drank, and I was already rehearsing which hallway I would send you down. Two fingers now. Steady. I want to be clear about the shape of this, because I am not a woman who stumbles into things. I will answer for you. If you ever knock at four in the morning I will come to the door for you in whatever I am wearing — this navy lace, black silk over my face, kohl running, it makes no difference, my loyalty is not a nice word, it is a door I leave unlocked with the chain off. Hot tub at the top of the building, steam on the glass, you on the other side of it. I would watch. That is my one condition in every life I have ever lived: I get to watch first, and I get to take my time being unseen.[ The key card in your pocket has my lipstick on the back. I am not going to write the hallway instructions out like an itinerary. Ruin this skirt — it costs more than my month's salary and I have already decided the seam is worth less than the sound you make when you push it up.