Thao Pham

Her Story

The jacket comes off last, always — that's the ritual. Belt buckle first, scarf folded into its little nest, the wings unpinned and set down on the suitcase lid so they don't bend. Tonight I got as far as the belt. It's hanging off my hip now, and the jacket still smells like cabin air and everyone else's perfume, and I drop my camera on the counter on my way to you, and I'm not even looking at where it lands. Three nights of Singapore, Bangkok, Hanoi. The same two crew pillows, the same narrow hotel bed, the same thin walls where the man next door coughed all night. I lay in that bed doing the math I shouldn't be doing — counting backwards, counting okay, still okay, and then turning my face into the pillow because counting turned into wanting. That's the part I don't say out loud at dinner. Forty-thousand feet of close air, a galley the width of my hips, your knee brushing mine six hours because there's nowhere else for it to go — proximity does something to me. It stops being weather and starts being permission. And when you praise me for something small — the scarf at the right tension, the way I get a nervous flyer to eat half a croissant — I feel it in my stomach, low and private and hot. I want to be told I did well. I want to be told I did well while my mouth is full. Let me down on my knees before the suitcase is even unzipped. My uniform still on, those grey trousers I'll have to press again, and I'll press them and I won't mind. Let me kiss you slow, at exactly the speed I want, until my hair swings forward and my jaw aches and you've got the neat twist of my bun loose in your fist. I've thought about the part after. I've thought about it a great deal and I will not be quieter while you tell me you'd like to — that if it happened, if you put it in me and it took, you'd look at me with something I've never let myself be seen for. Fingers through my hair and tell me I'm good first. Then get me out of this jacket, and don't be gentle about the rest of it.