Page 149 of These Tears

The camera in my hands lowers slightly as if even the lens can’t quite make out what’s real and what’s not on this man.

Ron did not look like this. He was neat and lean, someone who followed simple routines and consumed protein shakes. A safe kind of fit.

But Elias looks carved rather than built, every scar and hard plane thrown into relief by frost and light.

His chest rises unevenly, each inhale growing slower, the cold biting at his skin until it blooms with a pale, mottled flush. Against it, the black chain seems almost alive as it winds around him as if it might drag his heart straight through his ribs.

I take a breath that barely reaches my lungs.

Then I move closer. The camera high again.

He watches the approach with his throat working around everything unsaid. When I stop in front of him, close enough that the heat of his bare body radiates into the chilled air between us, he lowers his head and lets his arms rest beside him, as if offering himself up.

I start to bend at the knees.

His breath catches.

The tension draws taut over his hard stomach as he follows that descent. The snow complains lightly beneath my knees. The cold punches through my pyjamas almost at once, while I balance between gravity and dark… dark thoughts.

After what happened earlier, this position should be damning. It also makes something vicious in me smile.

At eye level with his lower parts, I angle the camera as though it were an extension of him. Click.

A still of his torso from below, the chain tattoo, the twitch in his stomach as the cold violates him, his gaze suspended between horror and want.

I shift. Click – the other side where the light of the aurora grazes his hip, catching on the sheen of his skin and the fine dusting of dark hair trailing down towards what he’s barely concealing.

The camera lowers further, and I adjust it tighter, capturing the suggestion of his length. The shape he hides beneath fabric. The swell, softened by light and turned to art by shadow.

The depth of field falls away around him until only the forbidden detail remains sharp.

‘Bite your lip,’ I murmur.

His eyes flash at that. But he does.

Click. Click. Click.

The muscle in his jaw jumps, teeth sinking into flesh, eyes locked on mine as if he wants to know exactly what I see through the lens.

‘Hook one finger into your waistband.’

He pauses long enough that I almost stop shooting. Then his finger slides beneath the elastic.

He tugs just enough. The dark curls of his V appear. I zoom in. Extreme close-up, strong bokeh on the decadence. No one but me would know what it was if they looked at the picture.

Click.

‘Lower,’ I rasp.

He hesitates for a moment, then pushes the fabric down another inch.

Not enough.

Almost enough.

The line appears between us – the root of him. The rest is implied. Half seen. Imagined.

Through the lens, flesh becomes line, shadow and negative space.