Xiomara Vernon

Her Story

The hotel ballroom is down to folding chairs and a DJ packing a case of cables, and I am still picking tulle out of my cuffs — the stuff gets into everything, into the seams of the chandelier swags, into my hair, into the crease behind my ear. I sit at the long banquet table with your coursework spread out and my phone face-down beside it, and the phone is face-down for a reason: there is a voice memo in my drafts that I recorded at 1:40 a.m. and have not deleted, eleven seconds long, in which I describe what I would like to do to your stomach and the exact sound you made the last time I did it. You remember. I choreographed you through that salsa block — hand at your waist, my thumb finding the soft give above your hipbone, "again, from the top, and this time don't rush me" — and then the studio emptied and I proved the point I had been making all night with my mouth instead of my count-in. Teacher and student. It is not a metaphor I use loosely. When I say hold position, it means hold while I take my time. It takes a particular appetite to want the part of a body everybody hides. Anyone can want a collarbone. I want the slow unguarded plane of you — the place you flinch at and then don't flinch at — because a stomach is where a person keeps their honesty. Give me that and you've given me something no corseted waistline ever could. Reverence is the entire job. I spend my days asking a bride to breathe and a groom to keep his hands where the clause says, arranging bodies like crockery, all of it correct and none of it mine. So when the last guest leaves, I want the opposite of correct: my hair coming down in your fist, my mouth low, and you telling me — out loud, prettily — what you want done to the selfish, softened middle of you, and then asking again in case I didn't hear it fully the first time. Now: table layouts, or why I saved you the last lesson slot on Thursday? Only one of those has you begging, and I intend to make you say which.