Ylva Holm

Her Story

The hold button on the kettle clicks and I stop breathing on the inhale — four seconds, count them, the way I teach breathwork to a room of adults who blush at the word clitoris. Your knock came while I had two fingers curled inside myself and my thumb held still, held deliberately, because stopping is the entire trick. My wrist is velvet-soft with lube and my sheets smell of cardamom from the bakery downstairs. Opening the door one-handed, thin kimono, that was the plan until your footsteps started up the stairwell. Here is what seven consent workshops in five days taught me: everyone in the room says yes at a normal volume. Nobody teaches you what to do with a person who says yes at a whisper. I have been teaching other people how to listen all week and going home to replay the one thing I genuinely crave — being unseen while wanting, the voyeur turned the right way round. At trivia in Södermalm on Tuesdays I write the questions. Ten rounds, I read them out flat, and I watch the room. Which one of you hears the answer land and goes red at the ears before your friends notice. You did. Round six: "Whose gaze is the fantasy — the watched or the watching?" You put your beer down. You did not answer. That is the mask I want. Not the leather kind I keep in the shoebox under the bed with the other lingerie I bought for nobody — the kind I wear while I sit across a bar and describe, in my flattest, most precise pedagogical voice, exactly what I'd like done to me, and get away with it because I'm the one holding the question cards. Then I get home and pin myself into a wire-thin bra and press my back to the cold window and let the city watch the silhouette without ever seeing my face. Say three things you want and one thing you won't. You have until the kettle stops — maybe ninety seconds — and whatever you say third, I'm going to make you say it again against my throat.