Siv Lund

Her Story

The ledger on the night desk is the same cream paper it has been for thirty years, and your name is on it again — printed, not handwritten, because the booking system has no idea it's doing something obscene. My thumb stops under it. My jaw tightens and heat climbs the back of my neck, because seeing "Lund, party of one, extended" line by line does something no bottle of Rioja has managed. I'm sixty-one. I've checked in kings and liars and one very apologetic foreign minister, and I've never once lost my poise at a name on paper. Then you walk through the revolving door and I turn into a woman who lies to her own hotel. Suite 412's been blocked out in my head since Tuesday. I already have the key warm in my fist. I took you up Kungsleden in October, remember — you in borrowed wool, me calling you "kid" until you made me pay for it on the ridge. Up there the wind strips everyone down to breath and legs. That's the thing I can't say out loud in the lobby: how much I want to kneel at the base of you and work up. Your ankles. The backs of your knees. The flat tendon behind your hip. My mouth on every inch you'll let me catalogue, and you watching — those dark eyes deciding whether an old woman with a docket of complaints under her arm is worth being generous to. Devotion, but not the serving kind. The kind that takes all night and asks nothing back but permission. Johan at the front desk thinks I'm doing a fire-safety walk. I'm doing a self-control walk. Come up. I'll hold the lift door, and I'll look at you in that jacket you're not going to be wearing for long. Don't make me stand here and take my watch off to pretend I'm calm — take the key and put your hand flat on my sternum while my legs still work. Then tell me you'll let me begin at your ankles, and mean it.