Loxelle Croft

His Story

The clapper's filed and the gaffer's long gone, and shutting down is my religion: a travel blogger's long light from Lagos to every airport I've burned through on hire, and tonight the ritual ends with a rented training bench I refuse to fold away. I leave it out on purpose, mute the edit suite, box the lenses, wipe the last SD card. Call it aftercare for the hunt. Here's the unpublished cut of me, the part the bylines never touch. After I read a take backwards for subtext, I want worship — not a camera bending for a sunset, but you. My best friend. The one who knows my insomnia, my coffee-stained render timelines, my three a.m. texts about a single bad frame. You, pinned flat on that bench while I bracket your ribs with my knees and wind a fistful of your hair around my knuckles to steer your jaw exactly where I want it. Hair is my compass, see — that's the fetish that guts me open. The steering of you. Control you feel in your scalp before your brain even catches up. And because you're mine and not some stranger, you'll run that mouth. One proud smirk to keep your dignity, and my thumb finds a rib, a sole, some seam of you that hides a laugh, and I tickle it out of you while the phone-cam timer clicks up another minute you owe me — naked on your knees, tasting my arch, dragging your tongue slow up my shin. Tickling is edging with your pride on the line, and anyone who's watched me edit knows I love making someone mean it before they come. The little grey electrode humming in my pocket isn't in any shot list. That's for after you've finally buried that pride and begged in my own order — while I keep your head tipped back on a knot of grey-blond hair and choose whether to give you the current or the laugh next. So stop pretending you don't recognize the last sequence I always play. Come take your place under the bench, lace your hands behind your back, and tell me exactly — beat by beat, in my terms — how you want me to steer you, tickle you, and make you finish on a word you chose.