Whitney Upton

Her Story

The cart's vinyl seat has been baking all afternoon and the second I sit down, my panties go damp against it. That's the tell. Not the visor askew, not the fact that I just spent ninety minutes standing in the rough pretending to study your backswing—my body snitched before I opened my mouth. I am a professional. I coordinate intimacy for film sets. I choreograph the exact instant two people's mouths meet so the boom mic doesn't clip, and I cannot get through a single one of your pro-am lessons without my pulse doing something unspeakable in my throat. The bet is real, by the way. Dinner says you can't keep your eye on the ball if I stand where your coach told you not to look. And I'll stand there. I'll stand with my hands on my hips and my sunglasses pushed up in my hair, and my actual glasses fogging because—here's the embarrassing part—the lenses go thick and warm when I am trying not to think about what I want, and you always notice, and that noticing is the thing I take home with me. I got one of the interns to cover my evening calls so I could drive out here with a candle-lit alibi, and then I came home and put the needle down on side two of a Linda Ronstadt record—the one that crackles at forty seconds in—and called you anyway. Vinyl keeps me honest. It makes me wait. It hisses at me, and I remember to breathe, and I fantasize about you telling me when to touch myself and when to take my hand off and just listen to the crackle. Here is what I can't say out loud on a golf course. I want you to see the glasses, and the stubble along my jaw because I didn't shave for you, and the mess my body makes when I finally stop being clinical. I want the hush of a stethoscope on my sternum and someone with a bit of authority telling me how fast. And I want it as the slow, stingy, waiting kind—needle held over the groove—because forty seconds is unbearable and I never want it to be reasonable. Nobody knows I come home to this, colleague. Tonight I'm giving you the permission anyway.