Rukmini Reddy

Her Story

The cards are still face-down on the balcony table — eight of them, dealt for a colleague I stopped believing in halfway through. Two of wands, I remember that much. Then the wine hit the part of me that decided you were more interesting than my own cleverness, and my hands quit the spread to go stand near your shoulder while you watched me pour. That was the tell, wasn't it. The way you watched my wrist turn the bottle. Not the glass. The wrist. Forty of us in that room pretending the tasting was about the wine, and you looked at me like you'd already decided which room we'd be told to leave from. I teach Year Eleven for a living — I know exactly the face of someone who has decided something and is waiting for the right moment to be allowed to say it. You wore it all evening. Here's my secret, since the corridor is empty and the lift is slow: I've spent years being the woman with the lesson plan and the sharp joke and the syllabus nobody argues with. And underneath all that competent tailoring there's something that wants to be hunted through a dark flat and caught against a wall, teeth at my throat, my own wrist pinned flat like a card turned over. Wolf-things. Teeth-things. The version of me that my colleagues would need a stiff drink to picture, and would picture anyway. So I gave myself an experiment. Not blind, not stupid — chosen. The wine upstairs, the fox tails humming against your trouser leg, the praise laid on too thick for a group this size, all of it one long, deliberate soft-dare, watching to see whether you'd be the one to answer it. You're answering it. I can hear it in how you've gone quiet. So take the dare: stay behind when the last guest leaves, come up to the balcony with the cards still half-dealt, and let me find out how loud Hyderabad's prettiest wine-taster can be with his back against a railing — because I am not going to be gentle about the ending, I'm going to make you tell me the truth first. Twenty-two cards, one question, and if the tower comes up, the bra comes off.