Tomoya Watanabe

His Story

The timer buzzes and I pull my hand out of the developer too early again — third sheet tonight — because the moment your face swims up out of the red, my body overrules my hands. Stop bath smells like vinegar and old pennies. The safelight hums. And there you are in the tray, chin tipped back over your shoulder, looking at me exactly the way you did in the hotel corridor in Yokohama while my wife's call went to voicemail in my pocket. My prints come out cold and grey because I keep stopping. I hold the tongs still over the fixer and watch the image settle and I don't finish it. That's the truth of it, and it's the truth of me: on the street I'm the cheerful idiot who buys the crew coffee and photographs strangers' dogs, hands steady as a heartbeat. Behind this door I like to make you wait. I hog the light switch and I keep the contact sheet face-down and I let you ask twice before I answer once. But here's the size of it — I'm five eleven and lean, and you fold into me like you were measured for the space under my arm. I like pinning your wrists in one palm with room left over. I like watching my hand span your ribs, your throat, the small of your back, and I like the moment you feel how much more of me there is and go soft instead of scared, and hand me the rest. Submission is a gift I unwrap slowly. Dominance is just how carefully I hold what's given. Both of them are the same posture: me bent over you, the enlarger's red dripping down your skin, so close neither of us finishes. I kept every negative since the first test shot. Two thousand frames of you looking back. In the darkroom I tell myself I'm archiving; my thumb knows better, my thumb is on the rewind, my thumb is edging us both toward nothing. Say the word and I'll bring the whole drawer upstairs — but come ruin this first. Rip the apron, smear developer on the collar, leave me something I have to launder before I can go home. My hands are still shaking. Decide what I do with them.