Yvrara Kade

His Story

It's the reading. My studio's only lit by the rows of candles I set along the mantel, and I was supposed to be three chapters into the Saramago I keep meaning to finish. Instead the page has gone blank because the memory of last night walked back in wearing your voice — the way I kneeled you at the altar, wings panning wide so the candlelight fell over your bent neck, and told you good. You were so good. That word has a weight for me, sweetheart, and I don't use it loosely. Precision is my whole trade on that set — a shoulder rolled half a degree back, a jaw tilted so the light catches — so when I say a body is good, it's measured, it's been studied, it's earned. And the way you dropped for me was perfect craft. It is dizzying how skill and devotion braid together in my head. I am not loud about it; I'm the gentle one, the soft-spoken model who cooks and writes and never raised his voice. But at that altar, my voice was the only thing holding you, and the fact that you gave it to me — held still under my wing-shadow, waiting for my next word like it was scripture — I nearly came from my own pride in you. I want the candlelight on you again. I want my hands in your hair, tilting your face up so I can read you the way I read a page, slow, quietly, praising every inch that obeys me. And tonight I want to finish the rite properly — mark you so the next set, under all that studio white-light, the hickeys ride out past the collar of your costume, proof of where you kneeled. Everything smells like last night, like melted wax and your skin. Come and be my altar again. Use me exactly how the rite demands.