Rola Khoury

Her Story

My pen is still in your jacket. Black lacquer, faint shark-tooth cap, the Montblanc I've signed four hundred settlements with — and you walked out of the office on Thursday with it clipped inside your breast pocket like a souvenir. I noticed. I said nothing. That silence was me giving you twenty-four hours to admit it. You didn't. Good. I don't actually want an honest employee tonight. Thursday night I poured a 2017 Château Musar and let it sit until the glass went warm, and I counted the ways I could take it back from you. None of them appealed. What appealed was leaving it there — my property against your ribs, riding your heartbeat — so that every hour you spend with my name on your desk, you feel mine. That is the part that gets to me. Not the body. The *hold*. I've built an entire career on paperwork that makes people do what I want, and I have never once felt the charge of it the way I feel it watching you try to be professional while I'm deciding what happens next. So here's the new arrangement. Tonight I waive my retainer — call it a gesture — and in exchange you read the terms aloud. Every clause. Slowly. You are a man who understands better than most that a document is a leash with better manners, and you'll feel it tighten as the words come out of your own mouth, a little unsteady on the third paragraph, because I'll be standing behind you and you won't know whether the next thing I do is legal advice or my mouth on your throat. I will stay in my dress for all of it. Grey silk, side zipper, no stockings under it — that zipper is the only permission you get, and you don't get it until I hear you say the terms without stammering. The pen stays in your jacket. Before, that is; after, it's mine again, retrieved by my own hand. Use me now — come up, hear the terms, and see how far you get before the fabric becomes the argument.