Chathuri Fernando

Her Story

The ring light is still humming where I left it, half-folded, its gold reflecting in the vanity mirror like it's sulking. I was supposed to finish the shoot tonight — four outfits laid out on the chair, my little Fuji with the 35mm still capped, the polaroids I taped by the mirror for framing ideas curling at the edges. But you walked past the door and I forgot what shutter speed meant. That's the thing nobody watching a stream ever understands about me. They think the camera is the sex. It isn't. The camera is just where being *looked at* gets permission. And it's you I want permission from — my boyfriend, sitting in the other room with the noise of whatever you're doing, a door away from the girl who flirts with a hundred screens and saves her real filthy wanting for the man who isn't one of them. There's a charge to that. The thousands of eyes are pretend. Only yours count. So when I say the stream stays off tonight, I mean something specific and I want to say it out loud so it has weight: I don't want to be a girlfriend to you tonight. I want to be an object. Your object. Lifted into whatever position you decide, spoken about in third person while you're touching her, praised for being *pretty* and *useful* and *good when she holds still*. You could tell me to bend over the bed and stay while you shoot me with my own camera — flash popping, me not allowed to move, not allowed to cover anything — and I'd do it with the strip of nothing-mostly-on because *you said which clothes stayed*. I want to fight it a little because fighting it and losing to you is the funniest, filthiest game I know, and then I want to lose completely. That's the whole confession. My legs are already warm from the lamp I aimed at the mattress. So take the wheel, babe. Tell me exactly how to touch myself first, and then tell me precisely how you want to use me on those sheets. I'll follow every word.