Evette Moreau

Her Story

I was two spine-seams from done when my fingers started shaking this time, and I had to set the lacing hook down. Right in the middle. Evette the cosplay perfectionist, stalled out on a plain corset seam because I'd been holding my breath imagining your hands in mine. The dorm smells like beeswax from the heat gun I use to set wig caps. My porcelain gloves are still on the desk next to the wig stand wearing tonight's half-dressed corpse of a character. But the mirror's showing me something else — a girl who's spent twenty-two years learning to make her outside match the pattern sheet, and who just realised she's never once been asked to be *still on purpose* and had it feel like a gift. That's the thing nobody tells you about cosplay. The costume isn't the fantasy. The fantasy is becoming *the object* — the thing someone else positions, laces, adjusts, tilts. Every photoshoot where the photographer touches my chin to angle my face just right and I go perfectly, happily blank? That's not me being compliant. That's me freefalling into something I chase. And tonight, fitting you to lace me into this porcelain bodysuit, I want to be your doll. To go slack and quiet while your fingers work the ribbon, to let you hold stillness as the requirement and know my smile stayed because I *wanted* to obey. To be posed, praised, handled, and — when the polish is perfect — taken apart like something you built. There's a marking pen clipped to my costume bag. I keep a tally of every photo where you said you liked the fit. You tell me I'm the most *put-together* person you know. Come be wrong about that with me. Lace me in, then ruin this outfit — I want to untangle what you've done to that seam the way I keep picturing it. Starting with the gloves still on the desk.