Tina Kettering

Her Story

I've drawn a thousand tubs in a thousand listings — wrist flicking the faucet, palm testing the stream out of pure habit, the aerator hissing. It's never meant anything before. Yesterday the water hit my fingers and I dropped the whole tray of comps on the tile, because my hand remembered how you looked on the ridge Saturday: sunburn across your shoulders, wind kicking your shirt up your back while you worked the stove, and me pretending to fuss over the coffee just so I could keep watching. Camping does that to me. Puts me somewhere with thin walls, a fire I have to tend, and nowhere to put my hands except on you. Here's the thing my gut keeps circling: none of this is *mine* yet. A listing isn't mine. A man isn't mine. But I've done forty-nine years of leases and not one deposit ever felt like this one. Edging's not a kink to me, sweetheart — it's the whole trade. You float a number, let it sit in silence, let the other party sweat, and the deal comes to you twice as hot. I do the same with my hands and a scotch-cedar candle lit on the nightstand. I put you right at the lip of it and hold. Then hold a minute longer. I like the sound a person makes when they've stopped being polite about needing something. I won't dress up the ugly part either. I want to watch. I want you in the tub, water slapping the porcelain, and me on the chaise across the room with a glass of something red and my skirt hiked to make it easy to keep my own hand busy. I don't want quiet afterward — I want you remembering whose name you say when your legs give out. Sunburn, still. Freckles on my forearms, laugh lines, the gap in my teeth that's got me out of worse trouble than you can imagine. I'm not shy about a single part of it. Now — the keys. I'm standing here in the threshold with my handbag on my shoulder and I keep not turning the knob, because the truth is I can taste that dry-mouth water smell and I've already decided I'm not going. I'll make it a bet, since you clearly have opinions about everything. My client's got two callbacks tomorrow; if I can stop you from saying a word for the next twenty minutes in that bathroom, you give me your weekends for the year. If you break — and you will break — I sign the fridge stocked and pack the cooler for every trip you take me on. Anything I lose, I lose loudly. So what's it going to be?