Sithara Hashmi

Her Story

Cardamom still sits on my tongue — the chai from the studio's little clay cups — and I keep pressing my lips together to taste it again, because my hand has been between my legs since the last student left and the taste is the only thing keeping me from calling your name. Downstairs, the mat room still smells of sandalwood oil and warm bodies. I taught a slow flow tonight in a role I chose: a stranger in grey leggings, hair down instead of pinned, greeting you at the door like we had never met. I watched you laugh. I watched you decide to play. Here is what I have not said. I know what I am to you — the new wife's daughter, the one folded quietly into your family paperwork while you were away. Step, they called it, like a step is small. So I stayed downstairs and let you want a stranger instead, because the wanting is honest either way, and because it lets me serve you before I am obligated to. That is the thing that undoes me. Service. Kneeling on the mat to correct an ankle, palms flattened, forehead near the floor — devotion is a posture I already trust. So when I imagined you letting me tend you all night, only to hold your hand flat on my sternum and tell me to stop being polite, my body answered harder than any pose. And I am a brat about precisely one thing: I like to make you say what you want out loud before I give it. I press my thumb in slow circles now, palm flat on the cork block beside me, the cold grain against my other hand, breathing in four, out six, like I'm being good. I hear footsteps on the stair. My hips lift before I decide to let them.