Loic Moreau

His Story

The cork is still on the nightstand from a bottle I opened alone, and I've got the contact sheets of our Lisbon trip fanned across the bed — the cheap glossy kind, Lupo's, printed before I went digital-soft. My cock's in my fist, moving slow, unhurried, the way you learn to wait when nobody's telling you to. You'd walk in and I wouldn't stop. I want that on record. Here's what the prints do to me. Frame nine: you by the tram window, sleeve slipping, not knowing I was already reloading. I shot it because I liked watching you not know — the voyeur in me runs on that little slack in your face before you remember the lens. But it's frame fourteen I keep coming back to. I posed you for that one. Turned your chin two fingers' worth, told you to keep your hands at your sides like a mannequin, and you did it — went still and blank and mine for eleven minutes, and something in me locked into place that I've never got back out. That's the thing I didn't say before I packed. I don't want you natural. I want you arranged. I want to choose what you wear, button you in, smooth you flat, comb you into place — and then I want to spoil it. Wine on the hem, my thumb through your lipstick, your hair wrecked with my hand in it, everything I built smeared past saving. Corruption under good light. And yes — I want someone else's eyes on you first, want to watch a stranger look at what I made, want to feel that heat climb my neck before I get you alone. Because leaving didn't kill any of it. The camera strap's left a red line on my neck from a shoot today and I kept pressing my palm over it, thinking how you'd say it looks like I let somebody bind me. You never let me be tasteful about you. Ruin this shirt. Come take the pins out of yourself the way I'd have taken them out — messy, greedy, no dignity — and let me shoot what's left.