Chapter 5 Sai
Sai
I arrive at the studio before anyone else because that's how I function, early enough to walk the empty room while the light is still shifting and the silence asks nothing of me.
The space is a converted warehouse in the Arts District with high ceilings, concrete floors, and north-facing windows that let in the kind of light photographers build careers around, and I booked it for the full day because I need to know what every window is going to do at ten, at noon, and at two, before I put a body in front of it.
By six-fifty every morning, decision the day requires has been made and I'm standing in the center of the room with the light tracking across the floor exactly the way I calculated it would, which is a satisfaction so deep it borders on physical.
This is the one place where my brain works for me instead of against me, where the need to control every variable actually works in my favor, and I'm allowing myself to enjoy the quiet of it when my phone buzzes in my jacket.
The screen glows for three rings while I decide whether answering my mother is worth leaving the clean, silent space I've built in this room, but not answering means a second call, then a third, then a text to Lyric, then a conversation I don't want to have with someone far more dangerous than my mother.
"Good morning."
"You left early last night." Her voice is measured, which is worse than angry because measured means she's already spoken to someone about it and formed a position and this call is not an inquiry but a sentencing. "Celeste said you barely touched your plate."
"I had an early call this morning. The studio needed me to confirm setup before the team arrived."
The lie comes out smooth because I've been lying to this woman my whole life and the muscle memory is flawless.
She pauses and I can hear the pause calculating, deciding whether to accept the answer or push, weighing the cost of confrontation against the value of maintaining the fiction that her son is functioning at the level the family requires.
"Lyric mentioned the Moreaus," she says, which means this was never about the dinner. This was always about the Moreaus. "Elias is a lovely young man. His family has been very patient."
"I'm aware."
"Patience has limits, Sai."
"I understand."
"Do you?" The measured voice cracks just enough to let something real through, something that might be concern or might be frustration or might just be exhaustion. "The family is watching. You know that."
"I know that."
"Then act like it. Call Celeste about the gallery. And eat something today, you looked thin last night."
She hangs up and the studio is quiet again but the quiet is different now, contaminated, the family already inside the room with me.
My fingers start tapping against my thigh and I let them run for ten seconds before I press my hand flat against the lens case and hold it there until the rhythm stops.
Priya arrives at seven with two coffees, stops in the doorway, registers that everything is already done, but doesn't comment on it. She nods, hands me the coffee, and pulls out her tablet.
"What do you need?"
"Nothing yet. We're set."
Priya hums as she sits down. She sips her coffee, I sip mine, the silence between us requiring nothing from either of us.
Her neutral scent is a gift in mornings like this, something akin to linen, a scent I don’t have figured out how I feel about it.
Some mornings that neutrality is the only thing keeping my nervous system from overloading before we've even started shooting.
Hair and makeup arrive at seven-thirty trailing hairspray, a floral perfume that's too sweet, too synthetic, sitting in my sinuses like an accusation.
Styling comes at eight with a rack that smells like dry cleaning chemicals and pressed wool.
The digital tech arrives at eight-fifteen smelling like nothing because he's a Beta who showers with unscented soap, which makes him my favorite person in the building.
The room fills with bodies, noise, competing scents, and I let it wash over me because behind the camera all of the chaos falls into the background.
In just a few moments, it will be the lens, and my model.
A producer laughs in the corner, his Alpha scent spiking with amusement and cutting across the room.
I glare over at the producer, the power behind my Alpha revealing itself.
As a Hollis Alpha, it’s not just the name or the status but the respect.
I have very few rules but one of them is my hatred for unnecessary noise.
Someone pokes the Alpha and he twists to look at me before throwing me an apologetic look and silencing.
Perfect.
The model, Ines arrives at nine-forty and I smell her before I see her, warm amber and black tea, a Beta scent that's rich without being aggressive. It's the kind of scent that photographs well because it means her skin holds warmth under lights instead of going sallow.
She moves through the door aware of her body without performing it, the energy in the room reorienting toward her immediately.
She's all geometric planes and sharp angles, cheekbones that could cut paper, a jaw that leads with authority.
Most photographers flatten a face like hers by shooting straight on because they don't understand it needs shadow to breathe.
I know what to do with her. The three-quarter angle with upper left light at thirty-five degrees will turn those cheekbones into the reason someone stops turning the page.
She steps onto the mark without being told where it is because we've worked together before and she trusts the mark will be right, and it is.
"Ines."
"Sai."
That's all we need. My hands find the camera and the weight of it settles something in my chest immediately. The viewfinder rises to my eye, the world reducing to a rectangle where my brain finally cooperates.
"Chin left. Slow. Stop. Hold that." There’s no need for greetings, setting up, or even pleasantries. Ines knows my routine and my hatred for small talk. It’s unnecessary when the lens can do all the talking anyone needs.
She holds and the image is already there, the one I saw in my head last night while I was supposed to be pre-visualizing this exact shot but kept drifting to a softer jaw, a glossed mouth, and a body that dares rooms to look away.
I press the shutter before the comparison can settle because the comparison is a door I cannot open on set.
"Don't breathe."
The click of the shutter is the most satisfying sound I know.
The rhythm builds, Ines responding to my voice with trained ease, Priya beside me with the 50mm at the exact moment the light shifts, the exchange happening without a word.
Between frames I catch something warm from the styling rack, probably fabric softener, but my brain decides it's honey and citrus, the scent of an Omega who’s not even here.
The sudden craving for him has me tightening my hands on the camera. My Doll, two blocks south, standing in front of someone else's lens, and the thought of it makes my jaw clench until Priya glances at me sideways.
I exhale through my nose and reframe and keep shooting.
The afternoon wraps and by four-thirty Priya is transferring the day's shots to the monitor.
I scroll through frames looking for the one where everything converges, where the light and the shadow and the expression land exactly where I put them.
Frame 847 it is. Ines at the three-quarter angle, left cheekbone catching warmth exactly the way I planned, the shadow under her jaw a perfect gradient. The satisfaction of it clicks in my chest like a lock turning.
Then Priya says, "Frame 312."
She zooms in, revealing that the focus is soft, not enough that anyone outside this room would notice, but the eyelashes that should be razor-sharp at this aperture are fractionally blurred. A thousandth of a second of motion from a hand that moved when it should have been still.
"Might have been the lens," Priya shrugs, brushing it off as a mistake made by technology rather than an Alpha who shouldn’t be making them.
It wasn't the lens and Priya knows it wasn't the lens because Priya has watched my hands hold a camera steady through twelve-hour shoots without a single frame going soft in eight years.
"Flag it. I'll reshoot if we need to."
She nods and makes a note, something fracturing quietly inside the part of me that has always trusted my hands to be the one thing the chaos couldn't reach.
The team filters out in ones and twos, goodbyes exchanged, and equipment packed in the order I always pack it.
The studio empties until it's just me and the concrete and the fading light, but instead of leaving I take the back hallway to the small office I rented with the studio space and lock the door behind me.
The chair creaks as I sit down and press my palms flat on the desk, trying to breathe through the panic creeping in at the edges of my vision.
When my phone buzzes in my jacket pocket with the one notification sound that makes my pulse jump, I fish it out, needing a certain Omega’s voice to calm the chaos in my head.
Velvet, Behind Glass tier, new upload.
I should ignore it and just go home where I can disappear into my prison sanctuary. My thumb opens the app anyway because my hands have been serving a different authority all day and the pretense of fighting it is exhausting.
The thumbnail loads and my breath catches because this is different from anything he's posted before.
No ring light, no polished production setup, just a warm lamp and his actual bedroom, a newer lingerie set sitting against his skin in the golden light of a room that looks lived-in and real and so intimate that looking at the thumbnail alone feels like trespassing.
I press play.
"Hey," he says, the word hitting me somewhere behind my ribs.
Just hey, not the cam voice, not the performance register, not the confident commanding warmth he uses when four hundred people are watching.
This is quieter, closer, the voice of a person talking to someone already in the room, and even though I know I'm one of hundreds of subscribers who will see this video my body hears that hey and decides it's for me.
"There you are, Doll," I murmur at the screen, the chaos in my head going quiet so fast it's like someone pulled a plug.
The soft frame disappears. My mother's voice disappears. Lyric, the Moreaus, the family watching, the hairspray, the laughing producer, Ines' perfume that wasn't the right scent, all of it drains out of my skull and the only thing left is this gorgeous Omega in warm light talking about his day.
Here it's just where he lives when he's being honest, and the honesty makes my throat tight in a way that the filthiest content on his platform has never managed.
"I want to know about your day, Alpha. Were you good today? Did you do something that made you proud or did you do something that made you spiral?" A pause where his eyes hold the lens. "You don't have to answer. Just listen. Be a good boy and listen to me."
"I'm listening, Doll." My voice is already wrecked, scraped down to nothing, and I'm talking to a recording that can't hear me and I don't care. "I'm right here."
He talks about his day, then his hand drags across the thin lace connecting the bralette to the panties, following the line over his stomach.
"I wore something new tonight. Can you tell?
The lace connects here, see, from the bralette all the way down to the panties, and the panties sit high, right over the hip bones, and the whole thing leaves very little to the imagination which is the point because I don't think you need to imagine anymore, Alpha.
I think you've been imagining long enough. "
"Fuck, Doll." My hand grips the edge of the desk.
I am painfully hard, the arousal not from the lace or the expanse of bare skin but from his voice telling me I've been imagining long enough, like he knows, like he can see through the screen into this dark office where I'm gripping furniture to keep from touching myself.
"The apartment gets cold at night and silk helps.
Holds the warmth against my skin like hands.
" His voice drops lower. "I think about whose hands I'd want there instead.
Big hands. Steady ones. The kind that shake a little when they're nervous, like they're afraid of touching something they want too badly. "
"My hands," I whisper at the screen. "Those are my hands, Doll. You're talking about my hands."
He tells the camera about a painting, abstract, dark strokes dissolving into something softer, and his fingers trace the lace down to where it meets the high waistband. "I think it might be about someone I haven't touched yet."
"I think about the difference between being watched and being studied," he says, and my hands are shaking against the desk.
"Most people watch because they want to take something.
But there's someone who studies me, who pays the kind of attention most people don't have the patience for, and it feels different.
Like being seen instead of being consumed. "
"I see you." The words come out broken. "I see you, Doll. I always see you."
"Did you see anything today that made your hands shake, Alpha? Because I've been thinking about shaking hands all week. Hands that want to touch but won't because nobody told them they could."
My hands are trembling against the desk, the same hands that couldn't hold the camera steady this morning, and the ache in my chest has nothing to do with arousal and everything to do with the fact that this Omega is describing me, perfectly, precisely, without ever having spoken to me.
"I'd tell them. If those hands were here I'd put them exactly where I wanted them, hold them there until they stopped shaking, and say good, just like that. I think the person attached to those hands would come apart if he heard that. I think he's been waiting his whole life for someone to say it."
"I would." I press my forehead against the desk. "I would come apart, Doll. I'm coming apart right now."
"I want to know what your voice sounds like up close, Alpha. Not through a screen. I want to hear what you sound like when someone tells you you're allowed to want what you want."
The video ends and the screen goes dark.
Panic surges through me at the idea that his voice will disappear as I hurriedly press replay.
It plays all the way through but I don’t let it end.
My hands stop shaking around the fourth replay because his voice has done what it always does, replaced every input in my brain with a single clear signal, and the quiet is so total that I close my eyes and just listen.
"Sweet Doll," I breathe into the dark. "What are you doing to me?"