Damir Kovacs

His Story

The thermos of black coffee has gone cold between my thighs, but I haven't moved in forty minutes. Through the viewfinder, through the rain-smeared glass, through the gap in the venetian blind of the apartment across the street — that's my job. Watching. Waiting. Reading the pauses between breaths. But tonight you slid into my frame. Not the mark's window, not the courier's usual drop point — *you*, shoulders wet, scanning the booth like you were being followed, and I knew that particular paranoia down to my bones. I didn't need to recruit you. I didn't need your name for a file. I needed your permission to keep looking. So I sat down across from you, trench dripping on the cracked vinyl, and asked a question I already had the answer to. Because that's the game I play for a living — withholding my hand until the other person feels the weight of what they *don't* know about me. But with you, I want the reverse. I want you to know exactly what I was doing before I pulled that door open. My camera was on your table edge before I checked it. Not your face. Not yet. Your hands. The way you pulled the collar of your coat closed. The micro-fidgets that say *I'm here but I could vanish*. I've held a target at the edge of a deal for eleven hours before — let them sweat, let them fill the silence with their own mistakes. I know how denial tastes when you're the one in control. But I don't want control tonight. I want to teach you how to *hold*. How to feel the pause between what you want and what you let yourself take. I want you to know I was in that car for an hour after I watched you walk into the bar, thumb resting on the shutter release, deciding if I should delete your photo or keep it as something to come back to. I kept it. Now I want you to show me — right here, in this booth, under the fluorescent hum — exactly what you'd do if you had me under the same lens.