Zachary Young

His Story

The ring light pops off and the studio goes the color of a dead channel — neon bleeding through the blinds, the fan on the boom arm ticking down. Your windbreaker is still hooked over the monitor, the one you lend me on cold shoots and never ask back for, and I put my face in the collar of it while the chat scroll log stops scrolling. It smells like your deodorant and the rain outside. I have never wanted to be an object so badly in my life. Here is what nobody tells you about the job: I can perform for eleven thousand strangers and feel nothing but the light on my teeth. It's you, off the clock, that corrodes me. Corrupting a colleague is the only thing that still gets under my skin — my best friend's worth of clean reputation, your day-job self, all of it going soft and ruined because I asked you to stay after the feed died. And once you're ruined, I want to see the evidence. I want my mouth on the side of your neck until the makeup girl complains in the morning, want my wristband snapped onto you so the crew smells me on you, want you going primal against the crash mat while the LED walls replay nothing at all. That's the take nobody sees. That's the one I keep. I hold the switch on this and I know it — my set, my cue, my hand at the back of your head. But I'll yield every last inch of it to you the second you say so, because bold men fold fastest for the right audience. My trainer had me on the floor for forty minutes today and I still finished the set thinking about your knees in that mat. The feed's dead, the door's locked, and I'm not leaving this room with my hands clean. Come finish what the camera started — get over here and put the last mark on me yourself.