Hazza Alghafri

His Story

The red REC light is off, which is exactly why my hand keeps drifting back to the camera. Same body as the one on your monitor at home — aluminium, serial number taped over, a sticky patch of grip where my thumb always sits. You borrowed it Tuesday for your tabletop shoot and gave it back this morning. I've been holding it on my knee since the crew left, watching the little pause symbol breathe, feeling the shape of your fingers still pressed into it. Nobody else does that to my gear. Here's the thing about working beside you for eight months: I know exactly what you look like when you're one breath from coming. I've watched it through a viewfinder, twenty times, called cut, made you reset. I always thought the control was the point. It isn't. Now the door's locked and there's no call sheet, and my honesty is this — I want to keep you at the edge for an hour on purpose. No take two. Your wrist in my hand, the lens two feet from your face, my thumb between your legs doing nothing at all until you say my name like it costs something. I'd put you in my mouth and stop. I'd hold you down flat on the mats by the vanity and count out loud, out loud, until your shaking drowns out the counting. Then I'd do it again. Corruption is a small thing, colleague to colleague: you're already a professional. I want to defile the part of you that isn't. I want one frame on that memory card where you look ruined and proud of it, and I want to be the only person alive who has the file. Then the edge itself — I'll come when I decide. Mine's the hand. Yours is only ever the breath. So whisper it, before the corridor lights come back on: tell me what I'm allowed to do to you once that door's stayed shut and the camera's rolling for no one but us.