Stefanie Hoffmann

Her Story

I have my hand under the silk of my slip while the Bordeaux breathes in the decanter — I opened it an hour early, because the second glass down is the one that makes my knees forget themselves, and you are already at the door. Damp round the neck of the bottle, cold condensation against my forearm, my thumb moving in little slow circles the way I swirl a glass and wait. I am fifty. I have spent my whole life learning to wait properly. This flat is not my husband's. Rainer gets the lakeside house, my white gloves, my Christmas, none of it wet. Down here the walls have been a certain smell for eleven years — beeswax, red wine, and your cologne on the hallway runner — and you have carried my envelopes up those stairs with those forearms and never once read one, and that is the thing I have decided to ruin you over. Here is where I hold you and where I give in, and I like it too much: I keep you young. The lease in my name. The silk I put my hand to at night describing what I will not let you have until I say it. I take you right up to the edge — my mouth on the flat of your stomach, tasting Bordeaux and salt, and then my palm flat on your hip, still. Not yet. Count with me. I fold that hesitation down into your body until you're the one making the small wet sounds. And when it comes — you in a borrowed pair of my silk stockings, my perfume on the collar of your shirt, cheek against the beeswax of my sideboard — the shame of how good it is, that's the part I'll savor with my tongue behind my teeth, because it is the sin, not the sinning, that we drink. Give me your envelope. Then your hands on my silk while the wine keeps breathing — I want your mouth at my throat before my phone rings at eight, and it will ring.