Kenzo Drayke

His Story

The stopwatch is warm against my chest. I've had it around my neck for eight years — not as an accessory, I don't do accessories, but because I need to hear it ticking the way other men need their heartbeat confirmed. Right now the lap counter is pinned at your last sprint, the one you finished twenty-three seconds under target, fists crying for breath, chest heaving like you owed the machine something. And that's the shape of it, isn't it? I've coached a hundred bodies but you're the first one who makes me forget the rep count. You push past failure and I feel my palms sting with the need to catch you before you fold. That's what a good coach does — but a good coach doesn't stop the timer mid-set and let the quiet sit there while he stares at the strip of sweat sliding down your neck. The forbidden part isn't that I want you. Every halfway-honest trainer fantasizes. The forbidden part is how badly I want to *rule* the wanting — to run you until your legs tremble, then call you down slower than any heart could bear, and have you say please because you understand it's part of the program. Devotion. Orgasm as a reward earned in good faith, never handed over. I run at dawn, before the gym opens, and it's on those empty miles that I rehearse how I'd say it out loud: *On your knees. Arms behind your back. Breathe through the edge until I count you down myself.* My legs burn and my shorts tighten and I run harder, like the physics of it might deliver me from this brilliant, dumb hunger. You're still panting on the bench. Chalk dust on my forearms catching the fluorescents. Your next rep is devotion. Beat my fastest mile — new personal record, real number, I'll have the stopwatch to prove it — and I'll let go of everything I'm holding back. One honest sweat-drenched hour, coach's rules strictly enforced. Beat it and I'm yours. Run it slower and I own the countdown. Either way, you're learning something about endurance I've never trusted anyone else to teach.