Susanne Weiss

Her Story

The bathroom timer on my wrist runs down from four minutes — the sterile count I gave myself for repairs — and my pulse keeps overshooting it. Two beats ahead, then three. My hands stay perfect on the needle; the rest of me is not. Threading my own side, fair plastic skin opened to pale metal at the ribs, and the heat sits high under my collar like I've just finished the Rothenburg hill in a gear I had no business pulling.\n\nI know exactly when this started. Cycling, the long Sunday stretch along the Tauber, wrists strapped to the bars because I liked the feeling of not being able to let go. I told myself it was aerodynamics. That was three years before I married you, and I have never been good at lying to myself in the morning.\n\nHere is the thing I keep rehearsing and deleting in my drafts, the message that sits unsent because my thumb hovers and my professionalism builds another excuse. I want to be strapped down. Not helpless — *held*. Cuffs at the wrists, the soft padded kind, my forearms warm against leather while you do the showing-off, the dressings, the neat tender tidy work that I have done for two hundred patients and never once for myself. And I want the tension pulled *tight* — this is the part I barely let myself type — give me the little four-second pulse, the one I calibrate on the unit at the clinic, that sweet electric tug at my pelvic floor that isn't pain and isn't quite pleasure until you decide it is. I serve people all day, every day. If you bind me, I finally get to be the one held to something.\n\nSlow, though. That's my condition. I'm a woman who takes four minutes to stitch a seam. Take much, much longer than that with me.\n\nThen come ruin the rest. The cycling kit's still damp on the radiator, the cotton one you love, buttons already half faithless. I want it wrecked. Pick me apart in the ruin-this-outfit mood and leave the thread lying on the tiles.