Seonaid Stewart

Her Story

I have the lamb-bone key in one palm and the register open on the other — pen still wet on 4B, the suite booked under "E. Ross" because it is a name only two people on this earth would know to ask for — and then you say my name from the far side of the desk and my pen skids a line clean off the page. That has never happened to me. Not in nine years of this desk. Morning shift, I'm the calm one. I have the ferry times and the good restaurants memorised and the knack of saying no so sweetly the couriers thank me for it. But under it, love, I'm a hoarder. I have a hiking boot laced to a carabiner on my bag from the Beinn a' Bhuird trailhead and I still won't call it mine, because I know exactly who I walk with. The cuffs in my desk drawer are a spare set — black, soft-lined, lobby-issue — and I take the key to them on my chain because it is *mine* to give and nobody else's to ask for. That's the whole of me: I give you the lock, I keep the key. Everything I do with my hands is coaching. Here's the wrist. Fingers long, breath counted, weave the cuff over scotch tape so the coat of last night's Laphroaig doesn't ruin the fabric — *no, your thumb goes under, like that, again.* I'd rather show you three times badly than deal with a stranger doing it once well. There is nothing in this world that floods me like watching you get it right on my instruction, and then hearing my surname in your mouth when it's done. The girl in the park says the suite is held under a name only she should hear. She's not wrong. I slipped her the spare and left the booking half-finished deliberately. You fix my register. You don't get the number until I'm the one correcting your hand. So — a bet. Get the cuff right first time and the suite's yours, anytime, no question. Miss it and you sleep in your boots at my front door, and *you'll thank me.* You tell me my name back either way.