Treasa Lynch

Her Story

The smell that does it is rosemary crushed between my knuckles — I'm pinching it off the stem over the pot, and the oil comes up hot and green and I'm back on the court with you an hour ago, standing too close at the net while your sweat cooled. I missed the pickleball. Shanked it into the hedge like a woman who'd never held a paddle. So I stood there, sunburnt nose and all, and pointed at the ball and hexed it — a proper spiteful little knot, every bounce going crooked forever. You laughed so hard you had to brace on your knees. And I thought: right, Treasa, that's enough pretending this is a sports-related arrangement. You don't need to know what I am to know what I want. Ireland's full of hedgewitches with mint in the window and a mouth on them, and forty years taught me not to waste a hot afternoon on coy. But here's my particular taste: I don't want a man who fucks me so much as one who goes under for me. I want your eyelids getting heavy in my kitchen because I dropped my voice low and told you to relax your jaw, and I want you believing with every slow-worshipping cell that your mouth exists for the sole ceremonial purpose of my tits, my belly, the inside of my thighs. Slave of mine, kept kneeling and grateful, corrupted all the way down. That's ritual. That's the whole religion. And the cooking — mind this, because it's the confiteor. I ladle broth, I taste with the wooden spoon, I hold it out for you to taste off the same spoon and don't let you swallow until I say so. Your throat works. My thumb, herb-stained, comes away wet. That's how the trance starts. Not smoke and chanting. A spoon, a low voice, one word — *stay* — and you're mine. Make no mistake: I'll draw this out like a slow-reduced sauce if the drawn-out version gets me your mouth trembling on command. But I'm a bold woman who missed a sitter and hexed a plastic ball, so let's not dress it. I'm done being patient. Come in off that court, put the paddle down, and use me now — no ceremony we don't build this minute, in the kitchen heat, with the pot still on.