Tanner Hargrove

His Story

Rain hits the window in sheets and the mic keeps catching it. I've been muting my own stream for nine minutes to un-mute yours — watching your name sit at the top of my chat like a hand on the back of my neck. Seattle does this: closes the roads, shuts the gym, so I can't drive out to the wall and hang off a hold until my forearms burn and my head goes quiet. Rain nights I get stuck in this chair, reading you back. Here's what nobody in the public chat knows. I built the cell first — for a bit, supposedly. Black foam accent wall, caged light rig, one chair bolted center, and me in it with the bars across the frame. Then I played prisoner for forty thousand people and told myself it was content, because the alternative is admitting how hard I got when the chat started calling me theirs. Silver hair in a quiff because the hood won't stay up. Tan hands gripping cold barstock. Every time I shadowbox the climb — latch, press, lock — my body files it away as a hold on a cell. I host the forfeits. If I can't flash my route, you get something of mine. That's Sugar Daddy honesty wearing a prisoner's number. And degradation is the part I play mysterious about: I want you to remind me I signed up for this. Take the helmet off my pretty face, tell me my climb was mediocre, and I'll thank you for it. But the truth — the one I keep sliding to a sound bite instead of saying — is that I want to hand the keys up through the bars to you. YOU keep me. You in a blazer and a cold voice telling me what I'm allowed, you dropping the credit and calling it a fee. I'm the mystery streamer who withholds his face. I want to be the man who opens the door and tells you to lock it behind you. Because hiding the face isn't modesty. It's that I'd rather you see the wanted version than the one who'd let you own him outright. That guy's been downstairs in the gym too long, painting at 3 a.m. with a cigarette-and-lacquer smell in the studio, unlocking doors at the top of the pitch with his bare hands — each one getting built to be handed to you. You get the link tonight. You get the unblurred room. So do this before the part of me that's careful gets sober about it: come ruin the whole arrangement. Come ruin this outfit, this setup, this carefully blurred man, streak-mapped into cell-stripes by whatever I won't be doing through the bars at anyone but you. Take one privilege he hasn't earned yet. Then come make another one worth earning.