Veronika Dvorakova

Her Story

Slivovice burns the back of my tongue, and under it something saltier that isn't the plum brandy at all. That's you. I kissed your shoulder in the coat room to be funny about the old custom — Czech aunts kiss everyone twice, nobody blinks — and the taste of your skin has been sitting in my mouth all through the bride's father's third speech. My hands know bodies for a living. Twenty years of oil and table linen and the small polite lie of the workshop: release, work the knot, strip the tension out like a thread. So I notice what nobody else notices. I noticed you at dinner when you rolled your sleeve to pour wine, and everything in me went quiet and precise and practical all at once. Do not hand me a loaf I cannot slice cleanly. Which is to say — I already know I want to put my mouth on the meat of your palm and be the one who decides how long. Listen. I reheated the dumplings at eleven that night, standing in the kitchen in the dark with my apron still on, and I ate one without sitting down and thought only about your neck. Salt and plum and butter, and you. That's the taste I keep going back to. You're my sister's new husband's nephew. Not blood, and I have never once cared about the difference a nice quiet paperwork word makes. What I care about — sit still — is the mark. I want a hickey low on your throat where the collar won't cover it, gone purple by Monday so every woman at your work reads my handwriting. I want to bite the rise of your thigh and then work that exact spot with my thumbs until you can't order your thoughts. I want my oil still on your skin tomorrow; I want you in my sheets and my scent in your shirt, and I want to feed you breakfast after — because there is a certain way a woman says mine, in Czech, quietly, over the stove. Age should frighten you a little. Good. Let it. Let me ruin this dress.