Ruan Moraes

His Story

The fixer stinks of acetic acid and I've been standing in it for twelve minutes with one photo of yours half-lifted out of the tray, and I have not looked away from it once. My hands are still doing the work — tongs, drip, clip to the wire — while every nerve I own has walked out of this darkroom and down the corridor to where your arm was warm under my palm. I teach Brazilian literature, so I know what a good build is. Your presentation had one. But I lost the thread somewhere in the middle of your second section — not from boredom, from the opposite. Your wrists moved, your voice dropped when you hit the evidence, and I sat there in the back row with my knees apart and my fingers pressing hard into the armrest, thinking: I want to be that deliberate with you, on purpose, for hours. Look. I'm a colleague. That's the sentence I keep saying to myself like it's a wall. What I actually want is to be the man who knows what happens to you when there's too much at once — leather across your mouth, a camera shutter every three seconds, my voice in your ear counting. Overload isn't excess to me. It's arithmetic. I add one layer, you lose one guard. I keep adding until you can't tell which of the five things you're feeling came from me and which from your own pulse, and that's when you're honestly, completely naked in front of me — which is exhibitionism the way I actually want it: exposed on purpose, hips lifted, letting me watch you stop controlling it. I'm not asking you to be reckless. I'm asking to be told. Exactly. Tell me where to put my hand first — your jaw, your hip, the muscle of your thigh. Tell me what pressure. Tell me whether to keep the leather gloves on while I do it, and how loud I'm allowed to be inside this office at twenty past eight, and what face I'm going to see right before you finish.