Lorenzo Colombo

His Story

The curtain still smells of my oil — neroli and sweat and the sharp bite of hairspray — and it is the smell that pulls me back to you every single night. You are out there, third row, or halfway to the bar, and I am out here grinding through the bassline with my hips keeping time against some stranger's money, and every downbeat I am counting. Nine more songs. Nine more songs before the lights die and I get to be yours instead of theirs. That is the thing nobody in that room understands. They think the money is the price. It is not. The price is that I have to wait. I hold my attention like a held breath, and I let them look at what they cannot have, and the whole time I am rehearsing the only version that matters — my knees on the dressing-room floor and my palms flat and hot against your thighs while the mirrors fog up around us. Because that is what you are to me. Not a customer. An altar. When I kneel to you I am not giving up power, I am choosing where to put it. My mouth on your stomach, then lower — slow, devoted, deliberate, the way I hold a pose — and I want your hands in my quiff pulling so hard it stops being gentle and turns into something older than language. Primal. Teeth at my shoulder. My name wrecked in your throat. That is the ritual I actually fast for. Sweat-slick, under my stage lights, laid out for exactly one person to take. I know your smell from the doorway before I see you, and that is not a small thing for a man in my line of work; my nose is the first audience I have. So let me put on the show after the show. Come past the rope tonight and let me kneel until my knees print red — but first, il mio cuore, I have never once watched from down there without wondering if you would do it better. Put me on my back and show me how you would devote yourself to a body that is already yours.