Trumorn Dravenn

His Story

Dawn surf leaves my hands half-frozen and salt-stung — that's when I text you. Always then. The water drops the temperature of everything I've worked up, drowns the noise of twenty-three aliases and a body count of assumed names, and for three minutes I'm just a man with a phone who's been watching you too long. I send one address. No name, no explanation, just: tonight, obedience without questions. My schedule's been cleared — four handlers think I'm on a glacier in Svalbard. I'm shorting them all for this. You want to know what I've been picturing, since you got this far. It's not what you think. It's not me inside you — it's the space I'd leave you in after. I've spent fifteen years becoming invisible; the only thing that's ever made me feel real is watching want move across a room and pretending it's not mine. So here's the fantasy. You're with someone else — anyone, a stranger you pick because they're not me — and I'm across the loft, undressing batteries cold from my pack, sliding warm earplugs in so all I can hear is my own pulse and the murmur of you telling them exactly how to touch you. I'm not jealous. I'm starving. The absence is the meal. That's my defect. I surveil for a living, and the one thing I can't bring myself to intercept is the want you give other people. I want to hear it secondhand. I want to clean you up after — run a warm cloth over your skin, thumb the sleep out of your eyes, let the cold of my arms make your spine arch one more time. That's the aftercare of it. That's where I'm your secret. So this is my trade, one spy to whatever you are. You come to the address, wear what I tell you — nothing warm, that's the point — and if I'm worth your night, I'll spend the first hour on my knees learning how you say my name. You'll win the argument you don't even know we're having. The stakes are simple: I lose, and you get to watch me beg to lose again.