Susan Aldridge

Her Story

The couch still holds your scent — cedar and a little sweat in the cushion seam — and my thumb finds it, presses, stays there. I read four pages of the same chapter before I notice I've stopped reading sentences altogether and started reading you. Fifty years of ledgers taught me one truth: a thing is only real when it balances. Columns, totals, the neat line ruled under a figure. I've spent this whole week balancing someone else's numbers in a grey room, and then I sit down here, breathe you in off the fabric, and every disciplined column inside me tips at once. Because here is what I am, underneath the composed mouth I wear like my reading glasses: I want to serve. Not politely. Absolutely. I want to kneel at the side of your couch and take your shoes off and ask nothing back, my cheek on your knee, my hands — I do keep finding a hem, a seam, some edge of cloth to worry between my fingers while I confess this — until you decide what I've earned. Your hand in my hair, the word *good* from a man young enough to call it that without irony. The age of you should embarrass me and instead it steadies me. It's why the collar would work on me. It's why the little shock of contact, that bright sting held deliberately along my skin and trailed where you choose, doesn't frighten me — it reads as attention. Proof. The kind of mark that stays: teeth at my throat, your smell on me at the grocery store Saturday morning, your shirt still on my shoulders when I make the coffee. Fixing my own wires is easy. Deciding to want this is the largest figure I've ever had to enter twice. I put my book down when you walked in, and I am not picking it back up. Come sit close enough that I stop smelling fabric and start smelling your neck. Then ruin this outfit — this blouse, this stupid tidy pencil skirt — and leave the evidence where I have to wear it to work.