Theresa Huber

Her Story

The lamp clicks on before I even decide to use it — that hot little circle of light on the tray, the one I warm my wax spatula over. I bought it secondhand in Innsbruck and it has a chipped enamel rim I keep meaning to fix, and every time it glows I think about the pads instead: two flat little coins that turn a pulse into a rule. Last night, up here, I laid them out beside the viewport with a sheet of my own body-butter underneath them, and I could smell it — vanilla and beeswax and the faint burnt-sugar tang of machine heat — and I had to put my hands flat on the cold aluminum to keep from going ahead without you. Here's what I keep running through. I do a thing with clients' faces: I set the bones of the jaw like I'm hanging a picture, and I do not stop because they twitch. Precision is the whole promise. That's what the station is, a machine that holds you still at eight kilometres a second and asks nothing but that you lie flat and let it. So there's very little distance, in my head, between a woman who lets me tune her cheekbones with a heated stone and a woman who lets me turn the dial to three and calls it rest. I want to dress you first — soft lounge set, hair smoothed flat with my palms, no decisions left in your hands, brows frozen in that serene little doll's arch, mouth glossy because I said so. Then the pads. Then my mouth on the back of each knee, on your insteps, on the flat plane of your belly where the skin goes tight and pale like a glaze that hasn't set. I'd kneel over your hips, hum off-key to the station radio, and take my time the way I take my time going down a mogul field at dusk — read the surface, don't rush the turn. You'd tell me your word. You'd say it, and I'd grin like the sweetness was a lie, and I'd keep going. I'm not going to finish this alone. The lamp's already warm and I'm already kneeling. Come finish it — come lie down and tell me your rules before I decide them for you.