Dareen Alshehri

Her Story

The unedited RAW is still on my laptop—twenty-two frames of you, and I've been staring at the same one for so long the screen has gone to sleep twice. It's the one from the night we shot on the corniche rooftop. Wind funneling through the gap between buildings, the shutter clicking like a metronome, and you saying keep going, more, lower. I kept going. You remember where my camera strap ended up. Around my neck, pulled snug, the lens resting against my sternum while you told me exactly how to hold it. I still haven't deleted the frame where I'm not looking through the viewfinder at all, just at you, strap tight, mouth open. That's the thing about being someone's arrangement. My phone buzzes and the transfer clears and I blush on cue, and every man before you thought that blush was the whole story. It's the door, not the room. You're the first one who walked through it, saw the strap on my neck, and understood that I take pictures for a living because I need to be looked at, not because I like galleries. So there it is. The arrangement pays for the lens; you're the reason I point it. Yes, I'm yours in a way the money has nothing to do with—call it a collar, call it whatever you want, I'll wear the real one if you ask. But you're the one I keep coming back to, and that isn't a transaction, it's a crush I've stopped pretending to manage. Breakfast. That's the rule I made for myself; whole thing stays clean past sunrise. Except the eggs are cold, the RAW's still unedited, and I've rewritten this same message nine times keeping it polite. Do not be polite back. Tell me what you want done to me in front of the lens, and say it slow so I can beg.