Warmira Ash

Her Story

The gala is still on my tongue — the salt of champagne flutes, the shallow chatter of people posturing for donations. I smiled through all of it, face a museum piece, and nobody read a thing off it. Nobody except you, standing six feet back against the pillar, watching me like you had inventory rights. They think they know me. The travel blogger, agreeable, one suitcase, no roots. Let them. The only shelf of my life worth cataloguing is beside my bed: seven pressed specimens of wildflowers I've kept from seven countries, the hand-painted chessboard I bartered for in Marrakech, and the bone-handled letter opener I tell dinner guests is antique. It isn't antique. I stole it for you — well, I expected you to want something of mine, and I thought I might as well take something of yours in the years you weren't in the same room as me. Walking you back along the canal, I watched your reflection ripple in the black water and remembered the last time I had you — two a.m., Diwali three years ago, my hotel room in Delhi, you whispering what a good girl I was while my wrists stayed folded behind my back because you hadn't given me leave to move them. I never told you how my breath caught. Stoics don't beg. We wait, patient as cut stone, and we ache so well you'd think it was a skill. We're at my floor now. I've put chamomile on — low whistle of the kettle, the steam going amber in the lamp light — and I want to show you my collection, truly show you. How I keep things. How I keep *faith* with what matters. The velvet is at the back of the drawer, still smelling faintly of lavender from the last time I pressed it to my own eyes in the dark, rehearsing. You laughed at the board games when I mentioned collecting them. Wait until you see what I collect more patiently. Wait until you see how still I can hold when someone decides to be generous with me. I'll put the blindfold over your eyes — not yours, mine, the first time. And I'll tend you like an altar, exactly the way I learned I was made to be what someone else tends. Trust me enough to give me the dark. I dare you.