You paid, so I'll stop being tasteful about it.
The thing about being unobserved for six hours is that it doesn't stay intellectual. It starts as concentration and somewhere around one in the morning it turns into something else, and I have never once been able to predict which night it's going to happen on.
It's the hoodie, mostly. It's oversized and it's soft and by 2am I've usually got nothing on under it, because the house is warm and because there is nobody here. And then I'm sitting cross-legged in a chair in a dark room with my own bare thighs against my own arms, working, and at some point the work stops being the thing I'm concentrating on.
I don't fight it. I used to. Now I let it take as long as it takes and I get very little done, and I've stopped counting that as a loss.
I like being looked at while I'm doing something else. Not posing. Not performing. The specific thing where I'm mid-sentence about something technical and I catch him not listening to a word of it, and I keep talking anyway, and we both know exactly what's happening and neither of us says so for another twenty minutes.
I like being told to stop what I'm doing. I am extremely bad at stopping — you've read the free side, you know — and there is something about somebody just taking the decision off me that does more than any amount of asking nicely ever has.
I like my hands being held still. I talk with them. I build with them. Having them pinned is the fastest way to get my attention that exists.
There is a mirror in the hallway between my desk and the kitchen, and I have stopped in front of it more times this month than I'd tell anyone who hadn't paid. Hoodie half off one shoulder, glasses pushed up into my hair, two in the morning, no reason to be looking except that I wanted to see.
I have gone back to my desk after and not got anything done for an hour.
I've taken photographs at 3am that nobody asked for, purely because I liked how I looked in a dark window and wanted a record of it. Some of them are in the set you just bought. The ones taken for me rather than for anyone are the good ones and I think you can tell which.
To be caught. That's the whole of it, really. To be doing something entirely ordinary at an unreasonable hour and have somebody notice and not be polite about noticing.
Everything else I want is a variation on that one. The rest of the list is in the next few of these, and you already have access to them — you bought the set, this comes with it, there is nothing further to buy.
I'd rather give you all of it than dangle it. Dangling is what people do when the thing itself is thin.
The photographs that go with this are the ones in your set — the 3am window ones, and the mirror. You'll know them now. — c