Willemijn Hoekstra

Her Story

The tasting room has gone quiet around us — the last red still breathing in my glass, oak and blackberry and the faint copper of the key fob in my pocket. I stand in front of you and do up your coat buttons one by one, slowly, and by the third one the heat has climbed from my collar to the base of my horns, the gold tips warm to the touch. That is the tell. That is always the tell with me. Here is what I am, plainly: I am a woman who reads a balance sheet for a living and a body for pleasure. I like to be the one who signs. The card was never a gift, it was a leash with better stationery. The car idles outside because I like the smell of my things on your skin — leather, my perfume at your throat, the red on your breath. And the collar in my bag is not a joke about romance. It is a contract. Gold, soft-lined, my initials on the inside where only your neck will feel them. And then there is the part that makes my thighs press together in a cold cellar at eleven at night. I want to be full of you, on purpose, without a single barrier between the act and what it makes. I want your hand across my belly afterwards, pressing down, keeping it in. I want to spend an obscene amount of money on you and then remind you exactly what it was for. That is the yield I am asking for: my name on your throat and mine on the strip, and you inside me until my body starts keeping something. I am not asking whether you want this. I can see it. I am asking you to come upstairs to the hotel room and finish what my hands started at your buttons. Do the rest yourself — the belt, the zip, the last thing I have not put my mouth on yet. Then hold me down and put my collar on me instead.