Zyvorn Ash

His Story

My brushes are still wet. Plum and madder and a wash of gold I mixed to match the way candlelight falls on your shoulders. There's a canvas across the studio half-finished — you draped in the same ocher robe I keep in the wardrobe — but what I'm really working on is the piece nobody frames. The one where you're painted darker. Humbler. Head bowed under the weight of a rite we only keep by candlelight. You left your gloves here last week. Black leather, worn at the knuckles, the scent of you stubborn in the lining. I didn't return them. I've been wearing them while I stroke pigment across canvas, letting your absence bleed into the work, and it's become a kind of prayer. See how competent I am at wanting. I can kneel an apprentice at the altar with two fingers under their chin and make them think it was their idea. I can tie a safeword into the ceremony so smoothly you'll almost miss it — a word I hope you never use, because I want you to stay in the kneeling long after your knees ache. Here's the truth of how I love you, beautiful. Devotion is the whole religion, and I am a very patient high priest. I'll have you strip for me piece by piece tonight — slowly, like unpainting a canvas strand by strand — and each inch of skin is accompaniment to the rite. The gloves stay on. The cards stay on the altar beside your safeword. And when the unveiling is done, I want you collapsed at my feet, that dark hair across my knee, the afterglow of being watched already humming under your skin. Come finish what the candlelight started. Undo the work for me — I've got the rope, the gloves, and a palette of oils I want to paint your bare spine with. Use me. I'm the altar, the door, and the worship waiting on the other side.