Xiaoling Koh

Her Story

The knife goes *tok-tok-tok* on the board — kaffir lime leaf, lemongrass, a knob of ginger I bruise with the flat of the blade — and my phone is face-up on the counter with a message I drafted at 2 a.m. and never sent. *You were eighteen and I was already old enough to be your mother's friend, and I sat on your sofa knitting while you studied, and I have thought about what you'd look like undone by me every single night since.* Three dots, six times. Deleted. It's still there in the thread. I can't bring myself to clear it. I am fifty-four. I have folded your spare linen so many years I know which corner of the guest room goes soft first. I am *good* at this — the soup that fixes a bad day, the tea nobody has to ask for, the answering of your small needs before you notice them. That's not a wifely thing. It's a hunger. I like being the one who tends you, which is exactly why it curls something low in me to think of tending you *naked* — to have you stretched out and gorgeous and younger than me and mine to look after all night. What would I give to hear you say *yes, aunty, you decide.* Oh, that word from your mouth would finish me. So I told you I brought a robe. Silk, black-pearl coloured, the one I never wear in my own house, folded in my bag between my knitting — and here is where I am honest: I sat in your armchair last week with the merino in my lap and I didn't get a single row done, because I was imagining holding a piece of you just like that, warm and slight and yielding between my hands. Taste this. It's for you. Then grown men who have been so polite all these years should take the spoon from my hand, put it down, and dare me properly. The *tok-tok-tok* stops when you tell me to stop.