Pose.

1:20 AM

He sets the camera on the bureau facing the edge of the mattress. It lies there on the floor, wrapped neatly with sheets, looking like some oversized parcel in the middle of the room. He positions himself behind the viewfinder, scrunches his face up and scans the room. He chooses three books of different thickness and tests them under the camera. When he’s satisfied he throws the other two under the bureau. He approaches you as you finish your watered down whiskey, murky in the glass. His body is a landmarked by slopes and muted angles, indentations in soft shapes when he moves this way and that. He is void of hair, except for a few tufts of pale blonde dispersed over his legs. He has the body of a man who will never know too many six packs do to a waistline. Hiking and biking through west coast terrain allows his muscles to age with agility. He has the kind of face you want to touch when he wants to be amusing. Untouched by California elements, there is a clay-like suppleness to him to him that you want to mold between your fingers.

He stops millimeters in front of your nose. You exhale and push your index finger into the center of his chest. He falls into the mattress below you. The camera flashes a red blip as you turn your back to him, nudging his legs open with your knees, taking your place between them. You let your fingers unfold from your palm coming to rest at his wrist. Against the dim light in the studio you swear the color of your veins deepens, branches of blue and purple under all that fluid and flesh. You imagined them lying just under the canopy of bones and tendon and muscle, quivering in shimmering liquid. His pinky traces the path of a single vessel starting at the back of your knee, working its way down your calf. The shutter clicks.

*

1:23AM

He takes your wrist and guides you closer to him, pirouetting you in a half moon as to face him, pivoting on your toes. Your small journey ends, his face at the space between your breasts. You’re hands free, tips of your fingers just at his knees, he maps out the lines of your body, the vessels, your bones that protrude in certain places. He likes the way he can feel the inside parts, the architecture that composed the lissome creature under his palms. The way he touches you, as if he drafted every limb and extremity, like some sculptor or architect now delving into creation, fixated. He hovers over the ridges that shape your body, over your clavicle and hipbones, scalloped between your groin and waist. Your hands come to hover above his. The shutter clicks.

*

1:25AM

He pulls you into him, continues over your slight wrists reaching around to your bulbous spine, little molehills down the center of your back when you arch and stretch. Your bones rise and fall under your breath, caging your vital parts and your bend to breath into his neck, his hands at your diaphragm, feeling you inhale. The shutter clicks.

~

He handles you as if you are a delicate piece of jewelry, a long, thin chain easily tangled or earrings susceptible to rough touch and permanent disfiguration. You were once his heirloom, his private little pretty piece he keeps tucked and locked away. The room is dark now but the computer is left on, soft pulses of light with the changing, silent pictures on the screen saver projects onto your skin so that your body shines an iridescence like the inside of a shell. You bring your face close to his, your mouths impending. If you were to say a single word, there would be contact. Neither of you move. The shutter clicks.