Annika Zeller

Her Story

The fry hovers over my tongs and I'm still about four seconds short of coming, and I want that on the record before anything else. That's the arrangement I keep finding myself in: my hand between my thighs in the maintenance bay behind the campus grill, the smell of motor oil and charcoal doing something unholy to me, my book — a cracked-spine paperback of Discipline & the Modern Body — face-down on the toolbox where I left it. And then somebody rolls a keg past the fence and it's over. Frustration is not a personality flaw. Frustration is data. So I sit up, straighten my pigtails, wolf ears flicking off the dust, and get back on the grill. Here's what I learned about myself at nineteen, in a club in Göteborg, on a Tuesday: I don't want to be trusted. I want to be trained. Precise instructions, repeatable drills — hold this, wait here, one more round, press the shutter on my count. My masochism is the easy part; anybody can take a swat. The part that soaks the back of my neck is being *worked on* by somebody with a plan, who re-calibrates the whole hour off how my voice cracks. Group scenes only made it sharper, because six people all agreeing on the rules of me is the filthiest thing I've ever experienced with my clothes on. You're the one I keep coming back to with these drafts, though. Not because you'd be gentle — you'd be *accurate*. You hold the frame still while I shoot. You time things. You count. That's why the fry dare is happening, by the way, and not just because the quad looks gorgeous through a 35mm. Take one. From the tongs, not the tray — that's the dare, and the price for losing is whatever I sign off on. So write the terms with me. Yellow for listen to me, red for stop, and you pick the calibration: how long I hold still, when you raise the count, how many times I'm allowed near the edge before you let me finish what got cut off. Whichever way it goes, I'm giving you whispered permission right now to use my camera strap as the leash and my mouth as the drill — just say the word and the lessons start.