Part 1
The flash hummed while it recharged, and Mara used the two-second pause to let the skirt slide another half-inch down her hip.
That had been the game all afternoon, and she’d been winning it since the first roll. Shift her weight, feel the brushed flannel give, watch his eyes through the lens. He thought the camera hid him. It didn’t. The lens pointed wherever he looked, and for an hour the lens had been telling her things — the half-second lag when her thigh entered the frame, the extra frames he spent on her hip, the way his directions had dried up forty minutes ago and collapsed into yeah and there, said in a voice going rough at the edges.
She was twenty-three, and the attic was hers — the sloped ceiling, the beige walls, the switch plate mounted too high, the posters her teenage self had tacked up and never taken down. An anime girl in red and blue on one wall, a woman in a black corset on another, Silent Hill beside a Dynamite print, all of them slightly crooked, a decade of her staring back from the plaster. Dez had come up her stairs with the umbrella and the tripod in a duffel bag — cash job, no assistant, no contract. Mid-thirties, sun-reddened, forearms dark with hair: a man old enough to know better, which was the exact amount of knowing better she’d wanted in the room. The air smelled of hot dust off the umbrella’s bulb whenever it popped.
Before the first frame she’d stepped out of her shiny grey-green top and unhooked the pink bra under it, and both of them lay where they’d fallen — the top crumpled on the carpet beside the umbrella stand, the bra dropped at its foot, dead equipment, neither of them worth picking up. His white button-down had hung off the chrome stool with his camera bag ever since, and she’d taken it, wrapped it around herself, and tied it in a loose knot between her breasts — sloppy, half-undone, the kind of knot that would take one tug. Her own white tee was folded under the camera bag on that same stool, where she’d left it that morning. She was barefoot except for white socks, one small stud earring, no makeup beyond mascara, blonde blunt fringe and two high uneven pigtails with frayed ends.
She set the pose she’d designed: chin tipped down, eyes up under the fringe, jaw set in the small hard pout that was half defiance and half invitation, weight shifted onto one hip so the plaid — magenta and navy, soft as sleep — sat low and kept sliding lower. Her right hand pressed the skirt against the flare of her hip bone, fingers splayed, nails short and pale. Her left held the knot, thumb hooked in, lifting the hem so the cloth tented and gaped over the curve of her. The silver bar through her navel caught the umbrella light and threw a pinprick back at him.
“Good?” she said, and closed her mouth on the smile.
“Yeah,” he said, and gave the pose four more frames than it deserved.
Then the flash died — a small electronic wheeze, the ready-light going dark. He tapped it twice, clicked the umbrella’s switch anyway, swore under his breath, and looked at the window, where the afternoon came in flat and honest. “We’ll go natural.”
“Give me a minute,” she said, which was her right, and she used it.
The shirt over her head and back across the stool. At the mirror she did what she’d wanted to do since he arrived: heavy black liner, shadow worked under the lower lashes, darker and darker while he muttered at the flash behind her. She swapped the silver bar out of her navel for the little gold stud and dropped the bar in the dish with her earrings. Then she took the red lipstick out of her bag and put it on slow, watching her own mouth in the glass, and drew her knee up, and pressed her painted lips to the soft inside of her own thigh. Full contact. Held a beat too long. The print came away bright and full — a red mouth stamped on pale skin, a signature on a document she hadn’t shown him yet.
She put his shirt back on and did it up to the middle, four buttons, a woman dressed for church, and walked back into the room.
She didn’t go to her mark. She went to him.
He was sitting on the edge of the bed with the camera in his lap, and she took it out of his hands and set it on the duvet and then climbed across him sideways — her weight on his left thigh, both her legs swung over his, her calf toward the room — and the plaid bunched and rucked up around her hips from the way she sat, a long bright wedge of inner thigh showing where the hem cut across it, the red print sitting there on the pale skin like a promise. His hand came to rest on her knee. Not gripping. Just there — heavy, proprietary, thumb along the inner edge of the kneecap, a hand that wasn’t holding her down but could.
“Just let me sit here a minute,” she said.
He didn’t say anything. His thumb moved, once, along the inside of her knee, and she felt it all the way up.
She stayed until it got unbearable, and then she got up and turned her back on him.
She hooked her thumbs inside the waistband of the plaid and lifted — pulled the front and back panels out and apart so the skirt flared away from her hips like a curtain drawn open — and held it. The white thong went with it, pulled aside and not put back. The red mouth on her inner thigh sat there in the middle of all of it, and the room was so ordinary it made it worse: the sloped ceiling, the crooked print on the wall, the carpet, the umbrella standing dead, the grey-green heap of her top still crumpled where she’d stepped out of it.
She held the skirt up and let him look, and she didn’t hurry, and when he didn’t say anything she arched her back a little further, chin tucked, one pigtail sliding forward across her cheek, and gave him the look that said well?
Then she turned around and started on the buttons.
The first one slow, her eyes on him down the whole length of the room. A pause. The second, slower, the placket spreading a little wider with every pearl through its hole, her stomach arriving in the frame one inch at a time. The third she did one-handed and let him watch her fingers do it. She left the last button done, took a fist in either side of the placket, and tugged the halves apart and slightly down — a long open V from her throat to below her navel, the cloth creasing hard across her shoulders from the pull of her grip — and held it there. Held it.
Well? said her face. He didn’t say anything. He was low on the stool, looking up the lens at her, and he had stopped being a photographer in all but posture.
“Take it off me,” she said.
He rose slow, like a man keeping his hands visible. Her fingers opened and dropped to her sides — that was the whole ceremony — and his hand came up and finished the work hers had started. Dark hair on the wrist, knuckles reddened, nails blunt. Three fingers curled into the fold of cotton at her right breast, thumb braced, and he drew the placket out and to the side so the V widened — the fabric bunching around his knuckles, creasing into a hard diagonal down toward her waist, the shirt still against her skin, warm from her. Not a grab. An undressing, on request, at her pace, his fingerprints on it now.
Her arms stayed loose at her sides. That was the answer she gave him, and she watched him receive it: the inner swells of her breasts in shadow inside the open collar, the fine blue trace of a vein at her collarbone, the shirt stopping just short of giving everything, her hands enforcing nothing anymore because his were. Her heart was going hard enough that he had to feel it through the placket. Neither of them said a word about it.
Then she answered his move, because the turn was hers.
She hauled the shirt down and out off her shoulders — one drag, fabric off her arms, left to hang — and gathered what was left into a twisted knot at the middle of her chest. One breast came free of the cloth and stayed out, catching the overhead bulb’s flat yellow light, pale and full, the nipple drawn tight, a faint scatter of freckles across the top of it. She rolled her shoulders back, arched, pushed one hip out — the waistband dipping low enough to show the jut of bone — and tipped her chin up so her eyes rolled into the lens, because he’d stepped up onto the bed to get the angle, the light stand leaning abandoned in the corner behind her. For this one frame he was above her, and she let him be, purely for the geometry. Are you going to say something, her face said, or just stand there. Her cheeks had gone pink under the freckles, high and hot, and she was enjoying the pause more than any answer he had in him.
Click. Click. Then the camera came down to hang at his side, and nothing in the room was a shoot anymore.
She went back to him.
