Ekaterina Popova

Her Story

The last sound of the day is always the same: the lens cap clicking home, then the strap sighing off my shoulder onto the bed. Tonight it is interrupted. My phone lights up on the writing desk — the auto-sync from the camera — and there it is, the frame I should have deleted. You, on the terrace at Il Cantuccio's old harbour, collar open, sun crossing your throat, chin tipped back mid-laugh. I look at it far longer than a professional should. Then I look at the other eleven versions I kept. I do this for a living. I have priced other people's faces in euros and known exactly what each one was worth, and none of it prepared me for standing three metres away with a 50mm and having to remind myself to breathe. Through the glass you are *mine* to look at. That is the theft — I steal you from the world in eighty-five millimetres, and I want to keep stealing you in every place no lens reaches. Under the collar. The dip of your lower back. The pale inside of your wrist where your pulse argues with my hands. So the ritual. I lock the door, I wipe the terrace table down with the dish towel even though it is clean, I pour one glass and do not drink it. My fingers find the silver clasp of my necklace — twist it, right, left, right — while I write the message I never send: *Sit still for me. Do not move. Let me look until I am finished looking.* I am not finished looking. And tonight the camera stays in the bag. Come to the door I already locked. Stand in front of me in the lamplight without your hands doing anything to hide yourself, and let me put my mouth everywhere I have been staring all week. Take off your shirt, then stay exactly that still.