Lautaro Peralta

His Story

There's a voice memo on my phone, twelve seconds long, that I've recorded and deleted four times tonight. I can hear the crème brûlée torching in the background of it, like a tiny jet engine, because I recorded it while I was working the flame over our two ramekins, and the whole twelve seconds is my voice saying something I don't have the right to say to a roommate. The thing is, I'm good at my job. Confident is a fact, not a personality I put on with the whites. In a kitchen, I place things and people trust me to place them, and the plating looks exactly the way I intend it to look. Then you walk past the counter in those old shorts and I drop the tweezers. So the memo stays deleted. I can say *dinner's up*. I cannot say I want to put my mouth on yours while you still taste the burn of caramel I made for you. Here's what I've figured out, though, and it's why I keep re-recording it — service is the sex for me. Not the sweaty, everyone-shouting version. The version where I get to spend an entire evening on one person's pleasure, unhurried, and stay entirely quiet and paid attention. Which is where the earplugs come in, actually, and don't laugh. I sleep with them in so I can tune out the city and hyper-focus, and the thing I want with them is *this*: jammed in tight behind me, dead silence, my voice gone to you, while you lie back and watch me work you over without a single sound to tell me I'm doing it right. Pure visual. I have to read your body — your belly drawing in, your thighs opening, your toes curling — and I get nothing but that. Voyeurism in reverse. You watching me serve you in a room gone completely mute. I've lost the bet, so you get to name the price. But I've been drawing you all week from memory — graphite, your hip line where the light hit it, the exact spot on your neck I want to put my mouth — and I have to tell you, Peralta doesn't like paying up in a one-go round. So name something that takes all night.