Tatiane Lopes

Her Story

The balcony tiles are still warm from the day when I set the last chart down. I've been in and out of your apartment for a month now — checking your bandage, restocking your shelf, watering the things you forget to water — and tonight the little red candle on my altar burned down to a nub before I even got my shoes off. That's the sign, in my house. When the flame goes short, the body is asking for something the mouth hasn't said. Barefoot, glass of Brazilian tannat in hand, I keep rehearsing a knock that never lands on your door. You remember the third stair at the gym. The dyno you didn't make. I had my palm flat under your ribs while you hung there, counting your breaths out loud like a rosary, and the moment you dropped onto the mat your whole spine went soft against me and neither of us said a word about it. That was the night I went home and pressed my forehead to the cool of the kitchen counter because I had felt too much of you with my hands and none of you with my mouth. So here's the truth you can hold like a rosary: I am off the clock, and I have spent all day doing body work on other people and thinking about one body in particular. Yours. I want to map every inch of it with my mouth until you cannot hold still, want to hear you say the filth out loud so I can answer it in kind. I want to hand you the whistle. Submitting is not small for me — it is the only place I ever let the ground stop being sacred and let it be messy, and I have decided it will be with you, tonight, in full sentences. I leave the door unlocked because I am not brave enough to knock and not wise enough to leave. Take the glass out of my hand and tell me what to do. If the candle burned down for this, then do not make me wait until morning — come and handle me, and be filthy about it.