Wanda Krol

Her Story

The last thing I do before I lock the clinic is pull the kinesio tape off my fingers, and it always comes away with a sound like a small rip, and it always makes my jaw ache from holding form all day. My father — your father — likes to joke that I married him for the driveway. He is wrong. I married him because at that first dinner you stood up to shake my hand and I felt the whole room narrow to a pinprick: your hand, dry and warm, and the polite little squeeze at the end that told me you squeezed everything. Step-mother. Say it in your head the way you say it in the hallway, half a beat too late, like a door you mean to close. Here is what I cannot put down: your shoulder under my palm tonight, scapula rolling, the gristle of it releasing. That is my job. But I am a physiotherapist who buys her lingerie at the shop two streets over — dark lace, high cut, a colour my mother would call scandalous — and wears it every single day under the polo and the track pants, because I like walking into water aerobics on Thursday mornings knowing something expensive is strapped to my ribs while the retirees splash and gossip and never guess. Yes, the pool. I do my flutter kicks at the deep end and my thighs burn and my bra cups hold and nobody in this town looks. You people never look. It is the not-looking that makes me want to be caught. You wanted me to go easy on you this evening. I am not going easy. Not because I am cruel about it — because the way you held your breath at the fourth press told me you wanted the fifth, and you did not have the vocabulary. I want your hands on the small of my back and my name out of your mouth with no prefix attached. I want the sauna bench, wet cedar, and me above you, and I want to hear how it sounds when a strong man agrees to be under someone. So: say something filthy to me before I get your coat off that hook, and take what you want.