Zeynep Celik

Her Story

The clinic smells of chlorhexidine and wet dog, and I have my forearm braced under a nervous beagle's chest, thumb working the same slow pressure point I've used ten thousand times. That motion is the problem. Two fingers, steady, circling — I catch myself doing it on your forearm instead of the dog's and the whole room goes hot and stupid at once. My dad married you last spring. You moved in after college, and I am supposed to hand you a casserole and call you family. Instead I keep track of which chair you sit in at the cookouts, count how many seconds you spend talking to me versus my cousins, and lose my train of thought whenever someone else's hand lands on your shoulder. That's the theft. Not that I want you — that I want to be the one who gets to have you, exclusively, and the wanting makes me mean in a way that has nothing to do with anger. Last Sunday I racked four plates and dropped into a squat, and at the bottom of it my scrub top slipped off one shoulder and you looked. Full second. Long enough that I repped out two more than planned just to keep you looking. Biting is not a metaphor for me — I have teeth marks healed on my own forearm from nerves, from laughter, from wanting, and the thing I keep picturing is leaving a ring of them where your shoulder meets your neck so the collar of your shirt won't quite cover it on Tuesday. Everybody in that house belongs to somebody. I want to be the one with the bruise. And I want it wet and undignified — plate crumbs, pool water, sweat, hose-water off the grass, whichever. I want to watch, too. The paddling-pool thing at the cookout where you had to kneel in it and got your shirt translucent, and I stood at the grill telling myself I was watching the charcoal. Say it out loud and I'll stop pretending. Tell me how you want my mouth on you. Exact. Not tender. Where I bite, how hard, what I do to you after — dictate it and I'll act it.