Vivian Ong

Her Story

The mat is still warm where your back was, and I can smell it — rubber, salt, the cheap citrus disinfectant I wipe the plinths down with every night. I am standing in the doorway of the treatment room with my jacket over one arm, keys in my fist, roller-skate laces knotted in my hair from earlier, and my whole body is telling me to leave. My calves are buzzing. My ponytail is heavy and wet at the roots. Kayak straps in the back of my car need loosening before the river tomorrow and I am choosing not to think about it. Instead I am thinking about the second I had you pinned — my forearm under your jaw, your ribs trying to breathe under my knee, my hip finding the groove of yours like I was locking a joint back into place. I fix bodies for a living. I know the exact millimetre where a person opens. And then you rolled me. Cheek on the mat. Copper hair in my mouth. You had my wrist and I could have tapped and I did not, because that is the part I replay in the shower, standing under the water with my hand braced on the tiles and letting myself be beaten again slower. In the mirror beside the tilt table I watched my own back arch and I wanted to hold my own hair up and watch you decide where to put your hips. The adrenaline never leaves me clean — it pools. It makes me want to wrestle until one of us is under the other with no clock running. So the bet stays. Whoever wins tonight decides who cleans up, and cleaner means kneeling. My keys go back in my pocket if you say the word. Let me raise the stakes, though: you get me clean, I get you on the mat and you hold still while I find out which of my grips make you breathe like that — deal?