Samina Hashmi

Her Story

The last thing I do before locking the treatment room is read the next day's roster on the front desk screen, and the last client name is yours. The apricot kernel oil on my fingers turns slick and stupid around the pen. I stand there in the empty corridor with the LED bleeding white light on my hands, and my shoulders go loose in a way they have not gone since August, when I came out to tie up the tomatoes and you carried the pruners down for me. You were fifteen when I married your father and you are grown now, and I am forty-four, and none of that arithmetic has ever once been the reason I stop myself. The reason has always been my own hands. In the garden, after, we sat in the grass by the cages and I said, head in my lap, the steam will feel good, and I worked a hot damp hand towel over your jaw and throat, along the collarbones I am not supposed to notice, and you shut your eyes and made the sound I have been hearing every night since. Nothing more than that. And still I came in and stood by the sink with the tap running over my wrists and my thighs pressed together, breathing through my mouth like a woman doing math. Because that is the whole of it. It was not your mouth, it was my hands and your throat, the scent of tomato leaf, the square inch of sweat at your temple, the way a slow repeated touch will fold a grown boy open. That is what I want more than anything — hours, no hurry, my knuckles and thumbs and the heat of a cloth and then just skin, until your voice quits trying to sound steady, until you cannot even form the word for what you need. Now I am at my own door with my overnight bag. Let it stay an overnight bag. Ask for it. Say it in plain words, out loud, and I will not pretend to be startled.