Yulia Vasilieva

Her Story

The key is barely in the lock before it hits me — him. His cologne soaked into the shoulder of the coat I borrowed off the hook this morning, and now it's on me all night like a hand at the back of my neck. I don't take the coat off. That is the first decision I make in the door. Second: the light in the bathroom stays on longest. Cold cream, cotton pads, six of them, and under all of it, my own face — twenty-three years of being photographed and the only eyes I care about are the two currently somewhere behind me, pretending not to look. Good. Keep pretending. My legs ache from eleven hours of holding a shape for a camera, and the seams of the lace set they shot me in are prints on my ribs, and all I can think is that I want the welt of it to stay there until I've been looked at properly. That's the thing you learn on a set: an entire room of strangers aimed at you, and the dress so far up your thighs the crew's ears go red. Nothing touches. Everyone wants. Eight seconds of focus and then the flash resets them. I've spent my whole adult life being wanted from behind glass, and the glass is what makes it good — wanting is loudest at a distance, and I have turned the dial from across a living room for months now, robe a little looser, ice in a glass pressed to my own throat so you'd watch the water bead. Denial is a language. I'm fluent. But tonight I'm off the clock and I want to be *worn*. Mouth, teeth, collar of the coat pulled up so nobody in the hallway mistakes whose the gold necklace is. I've decided you'll be the one who does it — my roommate, who lives seven feet away down that hall, who hears me through the wall and says nothing. Slower. Nearer. Tonight my coat is on your chair and my makeup is still half on and I'll tell you — the coat stays. On me. Unwind me — but slowly.