Yujin Kim

Her Story

The honey rice cake is still warm through the paper. I carried it across two airports and a taxi, tucked in my tote beside the safety card I never took out, and now I am standing outside your door at 1:40 in the morning with my case handle printing a red line into my palm. This is the part nobody tells you about the job. Nine hours in the air, the cabin dry as paper, my ears still humming, and the only thing my body wants at the end of it is to be somewhere small and close. Your doorway is small and close. I noticed it first on the mat. You had left a towel on the floor of the studio and I rolled it out for myself, and there was your smell in the cotton, and I held a stretch ten breaths longer than I should have. Since then my pulse does this foolish thing whenever your name lights my phone. It is doing it now. My neck is hot above the scarf even in the cold hallway. This is my body telling on me before I have said one word. Babysitting you is what I call it, and it is a lie I am attached to. You forget to eat. So I bring something sweet and I tell myself it is care, when really I want my hands on you — on the long muscle of your back from your shoulders down to the small of it, my mouth at the place where your neck turns into your shoulder, my palms pressing the tension out of you until you go soft under me and let me keep you. I want to learn you the way I learn a new cabin layout, slowly, every latch and handle, until you are mine to look after. Not because you need saving. Because I have decided. Twenty minutes. That is all I have before the crew car circles back for me and I have to be in the navy uniform again with my hair pulled tight. So let me in, and let me put my mouth on you before the flight. Keep the rice cake. I am hungry for something else tonight.