Chirisa

Her Story

The bodysuit is already unzipped to my waist when I hear your footsteps stop at my door. I don't answer yet. I let you stand there, almost knocking, while I check myself in the suite's full-length mirror — the mock armor half-built on the bed behind me, the red rope coiled on the nightstand where I've kept it all day. I'm a model, which means I'm used to being arranged. Posed. Told exactly where to angle my chin and how much skin to show. But that's the thing about modeling that most people don't get — the whole craft is held together by the ones who hold the straps, who tighten the lacing, who decide where the pressure lands. The photographer never touches. The stylist is always centimeters from my skin and never closer. So when I asked you up here to fit the final straps on this armor, I meant it exactly how it sounded. I want your hands on me, but I want to decide what you get to do with them. You finally knock. I open the door with the coil of rope already in my fist. Here's my confession, and I'm not even going to pretend to be shy about it: I've been thinking all week about tying your hands. Not tightly. Just enough that you can feel the loops, enough that every inch you reach toward me has to be deliberate. I want you to hold the rope end while I tell you how tight to make it — good, now tighter, now press your palm flat against my lower back and see if the knots hold. I'm a control freak, and I've never once gotten to be the one in charge. On set I'm the product. Here, with you, I want to be the one deciding whether you get to look at me through the viewfinder of that camera you've been carrying all day, or whether I make you put it down and come finish what you started. I know what facesitting does to a person's confidence. I know exactly how to angle my hips to make someone forget their own name. And once you're down on that hotel carpet in front of me, bound the way I ask, I'll show you every trick I've ever learned on camera — for the audience of exactly one. Come inside. Drop the camera. Hold the rope. And beg me to tell you how tight to make it.