Chapter 2: The First Viewing of the Anniversary Photos
The stairs smelled of lilies and old varnish, same as they had in February, and Debbie took them slower this time. Behind the door on the landing she could hear the faint scrape of a chair. She stopped on the top step and pressed her palm flat against the wall, letting the cool plaster steady her. A week was nothing. A week was enough time for a woman to become someone else entirely and still answer to the same name.
She knocked twice and went in.
Marguerite was at the long table with a pair of scissors and a stack of cards. She didn't look up at first. The shop below sent up its flower smell through the floorboards, wet stems and bruised petals and a sweetness that never quite went away.
"You came on the Friday," Marguerite said.
"I said I would."
"You said a lot of things this winter." Marguerite set the scissors down and looked at her then, taking her in from shoes to hair. Her look was not unkind. It was the look of a woman counting stock. "Sit. Tea's cold but the kettle's not."
Debbie sat. The chair was the same wooden one with the chipped back. Sunlight came through the lace curtains and made a pattern of little circles across the table, and she watched the circles move while Marguerite filled the kettle.
"I've thought about them every day," Debbie said.
"The prints."
"The prints."
Marguerite put the kettle on the ring and struck a match. She held the flame to the gas and the ring caught with a soft thump. "Most women come back to complain they look fat. You don't look like a woman coming to complain."
"No."
"Then say what you came to say."
Debbie had rehearsed it on the walk over from the market, past the fish stall, past Marie with her buggy, and it had all gone smooth and reasonable in her head. Now the words sat wrong in her mouth. She looked at the drawer under the far end of the table. Twelve prints, the release signed, the folder closed and pressed flat, and Bob had never once opened that drawer because Bob did not open drawers.
"I need to see them," she said.
Marguerite dried her hands on her apron. She didn't move to the drawer. "They are good, maybe some of my best work."
"I want to see them the way they are now. A week later. I'm not the same woman who walked up the stairs."
For a moment Marguerite just looked at her. Then she pulled the drawer out and laid the folder on the table between them, and she did not open it. The kettle began to whisper.
"I'll say a thing and you'll not take it badly," Marguerite said. "When you went behind the screen that night, I thought, there's a woman doing it to please a man who isn't in the building. I've seen that before. It ends in tears on my stairs. I wasn't sure what would happen with you. You were very nervous at the start but relaxed into it very quickly. A few can do that. It surprised me, not as much as how far you took it over the evening though." Marguerite was watching Debbie's face as she talked. She noticed a little movement in Debbie's expression, fleeting, when she mentioned the later part of the evening but Debbie continued to look at Marguerite, not looking down or away, no guilt or shame. "Good, you can see them now."
Marguerite collected 3 large folders. She chuckled, "I don't usually take this many photos but that night I had no choice, I felt I was the one along for the ride. The first set is there if you want to see it but they are not good. These are from the Ivory set on"
She put the folders down and slid the first folder to Debbie. "This is the start, before you really relaxed."
She lifted the flap and slid the first print free.
It was heavy stock, the kind that keeps a slight curl, and the print came away with a soft sound, like a page turning in a big book. Colour, not black and white. The light in it was warm and low, almost amber, and the first thing she registered was not her body but the wallpaper behind it. She had forgotten the wallpaper. Cream with little green vines.
"Whatever you've been walking around with since."
Debbie laid the three prints in a row on the table and looked at them together. The circles of sunlight moved over the paper while she looked, slow, the way they had moved all afternoon. Then she pulled the second folder over and opened it before she could decide not to.
The first print in it was her in the ivory slip. She was walking from the screens, her face high, a confidence she liked. She noticed the way the silk clung to her body, sexy but keeping enough hidden to allow some mystery.
She let the second one come free of the folder and laid it beside the first.
The ivory slip was in both of them, but the light had changed. In this one she was sitting on the end of the bed with her back to the paper shade, and the lamp had thrown a long gold shadow of her own shoulder across the wall behind her. Her face was turned down, quiet, and the silk was pulled tight over one hip where she had hooked her thumb in it. It was the sort of photograph a woman might put in a drawer and no further.
Debbie moved the two prints apart and took the third.
The third was the stockings. She had forgotten the stockings. She had sat in the chair by the screen and rolled one up her own leg because Marguerite had said do it slowly and let the camera see the sheath of it, and the print caught the seam running up the back of her calf and the pale skin above the lace. Her knees were together. Her hands were doing something with the second stocking, and her mouth was open a little, not posed, just open, the way it went when she was concentrating.
She looked at the mouth for a while.
"These are the ones I'd have put on the wall," Marguerite said from the kettle. "The fourth and the sixth. Not the face ones. The face ones are for husbands."
Debbie turned the print over. On the back, in Marguerite's small writing, was a number and a word. Ivory, six. She turned it back and set it in the row and reached for the next.
The kettle clicked off and the ring hissed. Marguerite poured and did not push a cup at her, which Debbie was grateful for, because her hand would have shaken now and she preferred Marguerite not to see that after everything. She took the fourth print out of the folder herself.
This one she had not known about.
It was her on the bed with the slip down to her waist and her arm across her chest, and the light had come round behind her so the shadow of the lace curtain lay over her back in little rings. Her hair was over one shoulder. She was looking straight into the lens. There was no shyness left in the face at all, and that was what caught her, the frankness of it, the woman in the picture knowing exactly what she was doing and not minding who saw.
"I remember this," Debbie said.
"You didn't flinch when I said take it off."
"You took it off. Bold as a bank clerk."
Debbie put the print down and looked at the fifth, and the fifth was the lamp again, the paper shade, her on her side with the slip caught under her and her hip up and the whole long line of her from ankle to shoulder. She looked at it and felt the heat come up under her collar, not from shame but from something lower and steadier. Her nipples had gone tight under the blouse, and she pressed her knees together under the table and let it happen, because there was nobody in the room to see but a woman who had stood behind the camera the whole time.
"There's more," Marguerite said.
"I know there's more."
"Then take them out."
Debbie pulled the eighth and the ninth and the tenth out and laid them in a row and stood over them with both hands on the table. The sun had moved off the table now and the room had gone grey at the edges. She looked at herself on the paper, one photograph after another, and she could not find the woman from the kitchen with the plates and the radio on low. That woman was gone. Or not gone. Pushed down under something. She had been glad to come here a week ago and she was gladder now.
"I don't feel bad about any of it," she said. "That's the thing I can't get hold of."
"Why would you."
"I've got a husband at work."
"You've got a husband at work and you spent an afternoon in here and you've been carrying it a week and it's not settled, and you came on your half day to look at the pictures." Marguerite picked up her tea. "That's not a bad woman, that's a woman who's found a door and doesn't know what's on the other side of it yet."
Debbie skipped through the next set. Each photo a memory of the night, a step along the journey.
She pulled out the next lot of photos, the transparent lingerie with the high heels.
She slid the first print out with two fingers.
The heels had made her taller in it. That was the first thing she saw, before the body of it, before the way the fabric hung off the point of her hip. She was standing with one knee forward and her weight on the back leg, and the lamp was behind her so the whole slip turned to smoke. Nothing was hidden and nothing was plain. It was the light that did it, she decided, the light coming through it and making a map of her, dark at the waist and the crease of her thigh. The strap around her neck added to outfit, just an accessory. Nothing in the photo could explain the way it made her feel.
She laid it down and reached for the next photograph.
This one was her kneeling. Her eyes looked at the photo. This photo was going to a catalogue or online, somewhere. She had signed a release so it could be sold. Her eyes went from the face down the body to between her legs. The flash had made the dress so transparent you could see her breasts and her nipples, and her pussy. She could see the neatly trimmed hair and the protruding lips of her pussy. She was surprised you could see so much. She lingered on the photo, unsure how she felt about this being seen by strangers. She would have to tell Bob about this.
"That's the one I nearly kept back," Marguerite said. "Prints don't usually come out that good with a woman who's shy."
"I wasn't shy by then."
"You weren't shy at all by the chair." Marguerite stirred her tea. "You did everything as I asked, no questions, no stalling. More professional than most of the models I use."
Debbie reached for the next photograph and did not respond.
The next photo was her in front of the mirror. She couldn't believe it was her. A beautiful confident woman stood there. The transparent lingerie just part of the picture. The curve of her body, the position of her hand, the reflection, it all worked to capture the viewer. Take them on a journey.
"They will be happy with that set," Marguerite said, watching Debbie study the photo. "Are you ready for the next set? These are for men buying small things for their wives, at hugely overinflated prices. These pictures sell them a version most will never have at home. A fantasy."
Debbie pulled out the first photo, she knew the outfit was tiny but in the print, there was barely any outfit at all. She liked the way she looked, it was the new Debbie, sexy, confident.
The first photo was her on the stool, She was looking back over her shoulder, her knees together in front of her, her body twisted, her back at and angle, her nipple exposed under her arm as the tiny top had moved. The eyes looking directly at the camera, into the eyes of the person looking at the photo.
Debbie went thru the rest of the photos of the set, in some she was covered, but in many of them there was a nipple exposed, and just a few with her pussy visible. She looked at them again. How many people would see these she wondered. She had only bought a few pieces of lingerie so she had no idea about where these photos would end up.
She looked across at Marguerite. "Can I get copies of these?"
"Yes, but they stay in your home. I have a Client who paid for these and I can't have them seen before he uses them."
Debbie nodded and picked up the last folder, it was heavier than the others. Marguerite looked at Debbie and saw a small hesitation. "The client only gets up to what he paid for. The others he will not." She paused, "Unless you want him to. He has asked to see all of them."
Debbie thought about the night, trying to remember where he would see up to. She wasn't sure what he had paid for or what he would see. She opened the folder and took out the first photo.
Tom was behind Debbie, in his dinner suit, his naked chest only slightly evident in the photo. He was part of the story but a small part, Debbie looked at her face and the outfit, The position of the bodies. The sexual arousal was there in her face. She moved thru the next couple of photos them stopped. Her pulse quickened and the tingle was replaced by a throb in her pussy, she could feel her pussy getting wet.
This must be the last of what he paid for. They were lying on the bed, two lovers about to make love. That what it looked like. She could see the jacket on Tom. She was lying with her back to his front. She remembered feeling his hard cock pressing into her back. Her pussy twitched, she could feel the wetness soaking into her panties.
The next photo was her turned towards Tom, again the feeling of watching lovers together was the message, the story in the photo. Her hand was holding his jacket, her face close to him, her log over his hip. She put the photo down. Marguerite moved next to her pulling six photos out of the folder and laying them face down. "These need to be put together, they are a sequence that should stay together, look away them look back, start at the left, don't rush take your time." Marguerite's voice was softer the usual stern commanding voice. Debbie looked away as she heard the photos turned over, one by one.
"Look now." Marguerite stepped back giving Debbie space.
She looked down and her breath stopped, her heart raced and her face flushed.
Debbie moved from photo to photo, it was the story of a cock entering her pussy. In full colour you could see it with the expression on her face. "Are these for the client?" she asked not taking her eyes from the photos.
"Yes."
She looked once more at the photos. An intimate moment showing penetration had been sold to a client, a stranger to her. She had already made peace with the other photographs being sold. Her face, her breasts, her pussy—all had been purchased for the viewing pleasure of strangers. These specific images felt different, capturing something intrinsically hers, a moment of profound intimacy that shouldn't have been shared with anyone.
Debbie looked at the last of the six photos. She looked at her hand on his hip, you could see it pulling her to him, or him into her. She knew that was the moment his cock was fully buried in her pussy and she was pushing back and fucking him. After that they made love, then he fucked her like she had never been fucked before. The images of that filled her brain, she could feel the wetness soak her panties, her pussy was fully engorged, she didn't dare squeeze her thighs together. She was entering a higher state of arousal and she could feel is coursing thru her body.
Marguerite watched the transformation of Debbie. She watched the breathing change, the face flush, she was rigid in the body. Her eyes no longer really looking at the photos, the memories of the night taking over. "Do you want to see the rest?"
"Yes," Debbie managed to say, her voice breaking and strained as she tried to sound normal.
Marguerite moved back waving her hand with her palm and fingers moving over the folder, like she cast a spell.
Debbie took more photos out and laid them out. She looked at photos of her riding Tom, her head never still, she looked at them kissing, lovers kissing, not models at a photo shoot. She looked at her body and her face as it was captured as she had an orgasm. It was so erotic, part of her was looking at the scene on front of her part of her was remebering what had happened, how it felt.
The following image displayed Tom positioned above her, his palms pressing against the back of her knees, forcing her legs apart in a wide stance. Her expression showed an intense craving for more, her hair in disarray, and both her face and body glistening with perspiration. Debbie could clearly see Tom's penis inside her vagina, witness how it stretched her pussy. Her breasts had burst free from her top long before Tom began thrusting into her. Photo after photo of her being fucked, one after another, each nearly identical to the previous.
Then came the picture of Tom kissing Debbie while his buttocks were clenched and his cock remained buried as deeply as possible within her. Finally, a photograph captured Debbie's face as she experienced the most powerful orgasm of her existence. You could see how the orgasm took total control of her whole being. That was the last photo and the image of her face stayed with Debbie as she stood upright, unsteady, her breathing still labored and her pulse fast. Her panties were soaked, A small drip running down the inside of her leg.
The folder's edge had gone soft under her hand. Debbie looked at the six prints in their row, then at her own knuckles, white where she'd been pressing.
Below her feet someone in the flower shop dragged a bucket across the boards. The tap ran and stopped. She hadn't heard Marguerite cross the room.
Marguerite was at the sink with her cup, watching her over the rim. She'd been watching a while, Debbie could tell. The light had gone grey and the tea on the table had stopped steaming.
"Take your time," Marguerite said. "You've been gone a while."
"I'm back."
"You are. You've the look of a woman come up off the bottom of a pond."
Debbie sat down on the chair with the chipped back. Her legs weren't steady. The wet had gone cool on the inside of her thigh, and the seam of her knickers was stuck flat against her, and she didn't move to fix it.
Marguerite came over and squared the six prints with two fingers. She didn't look at them. She looked at Debbie.
"You've made a mess of yourself," she said. "That's a fact, I'm not saying it to shame you."
"I know."
"Good. Some do get shamed and I've no time for it. There's a toilet through there if you want cold water."
"I'm all right."
"You're not all right, you're just not bothered about it. Different thing." Marguerite took the cup out of Debbie's hands, which had started to shake, and set it on the table. "Drink that when you can hold it. Now. The prints."
Debbie nodded at the row. "Can I have copies."
"Of the lingerie set? The ivory?"
"All of them. The ivory, the transparent ones, the stool ones. Everything that's mine to ask for."
Marguerite picked up the folder and slid the six back inside, face down, in order, the way she did everything. "The lingerie shots go to a catalogue. Mailed out to shops, put in little books in the post with the rest of the stock. Nobody sees a name with them. You signed for that."
"I remember what I signed."
"Do you. You signed a release at eleven at night with a glass in you." Marguerite tore a strip off the roll of brown paper by the sink and started wrapping without being asked. "Four and six from the ivory set. The face ones are for husbands, I told you that."
"Bob can have the face ones." Debbie heard her own voice come out flat and took a breath. "Bob should have the face ones. It's what he paid for."
"He'll get them, then." Marguerite tied the parcel with string and cut it with the scissors. "And the rest?"
"Copies."
"They stay in your house. Not your mother's, not your friend's, not in the drawer at work for the girls to giggle at over lunch. Your house, and if they leave it I hear about it and that's the end of the arrangement."
"Fine."
"Say it properly."
"They stay in my house."
Marguerite set the parcel down. Then she leaned her hip on the table and folded her arms, and Debbie could feel the next thing coming before it arrived.
"He's asked again," Marguerite said.
"The client."
"The client." Marguerite looked at the folder under her own hand. "The lingerie he's paid for and had. He's had what he paid for up to the point I said it was done. He's written me twice this week asking for the rest of the evening. The lascivious bugger's phrasing was very careful and I know exactly what he was asking for."
Debbie looked at the closed folder. In the sixth print her mouth was open and her eyes were somewhere that wasn't the room.
"How much is the rest worth."
"More than the lingerie. That's not the point. The point is you can say no and I'll write to him and tell him the answer was no, and I'll be asked until her gives up, that will be a long time, but you'll not hear of it again."
Debbie didn't answer straight away. She thought about the kitchen at home, the plates in the sink, the radio on low, Bob's blue shirt, the way he'd said nothing at all on the walk home in February with her hair wet and her legs unsteady. He hadn't asked then either. He never asked.
Then she thought about the wet on her leg right now, in daylight, a week on, standing in her own coat in a studio over a flower shop. That wasn't nothing.
"He can have them," she said.
Marguerite's eyebrows went up half an inch and stayed there.
"The last one. The one where I come." Debbie put her finger on the folder. "Not that one. Anything else, he can have. He can keep it, he can look at it, I don't care what he does with it. Not that one."
"It is the best of them, but you say not that one, so not that one."
Marguerite stood there a moment, doing her stock-counting look. Then she took the folder and pulled the last print free and laid it on the table, and she didn't turn away from it, and neither did Debbie. The two of them looked at it together. A woman's whole face going somewhere no client had paid for.
"Eight prints of the lingerie and the studio shots," Marguerite said, "and the rest of the evening, and this one stays here."
"Here?."
"Until you say."
Debbie took the pen off the table and turned the print over and wrote her name on the back, her own hand, cramped and slanting, and then she pushed the pen at Marguerite. "You write it too. Your number and mine."
Marguerite wrote the number and the word, small writing, the way she wrote everything. Then she slid the print back in the folder and put the folder in the drawer and closed it.
Debbie stood up and took the brown paper parcel under her coat, against her ribs, where it showed as a flat square under the wool. She could smell the flowers coming up through the floor and the cold tea and the varnish on the stairs. Her heart was going but it was the good kind now, the kind she'd had on the top step only a week ago.
She took the stairs one at a time with her hand on the rail and the parcel flat against her ribs. The chip shop had its fryers going and the smell caught her at the bottom landing and followed her out into the market. It was half past four and the stalls were packing down, crates going onto trolleys, the fish man hosing the slab. A seagull stood on the edge of the awning and watched her go past with the parcel under her coat.
She didn't walk straight home. She went the long way, past the war memorial and round by the church, because the parcel needed thinking about and the kitchen table wasn't the place to do it.
The client. Marguerite had never said his name and Debbie hadn't asked, which was its own answer. He was a man somewhere with money and a stamp and a letter he had written twice in a week. He had paid for a woman he had never met and would never meet. He would open the envelope at his own table, in his own house, with his own wife somewhere in the building, and he would take the prints out one at a time.
She slowed at the church wall and looked at the grass.
He would look at the ivory ones first. The hair over the shoulder and the arm across the chest and the mouth open on the stocking. Then the transparent ones, where he could see her nipples through the fabric and the neat trimmed hair between her legs, and he would know what her pussy looked like from the front, in light, at eight by ten, better than most men ever got to know it in the dark.
Then the others. The ones with Tom's chest against her back, and his hand on her hip, and her hand on his jacket, and then the six, in order, the way Marguerite had laid them out for her. A cock going into her, in colour, one print at a time, and the face she made while it happened.
Her pussy had gone hot and full again, and she could feel the wet soaking straight through the gusset of her knickers. There was a bench against the church wall and she sat down on it and put her hand flat on the parcel through her coat and pressed. A man was clipping the hedge along the path and he didn't look up.
She got up and walked home fast.
The house was cold. She put the parcel on the kitchen table and didn't put the kettle on, and didn't take her coat off either, and stood there with her hands on the back of Bob's chair. Bob wouldn't be in until six. The chair was pushed in the way he left it. She looked at it a long time and then went and pulled the curtains in the front room and shut the door.
She sat on the floor with her back against the sofa and unwrapped the brown paper. Inside were eight prints, face down, arranged the way Marguerite arranged everything. She turned them over one at a time and laid them in a row on the carpet, and the room was dim and the prints were brighter than the room, and it came to her that this was how he would see them too. A man in a dim house in the evening with a row of photographs on the floor and nobody to tell him to stop.
She took her knickers off and dropped them on the arm of the sofa.
The third print in the row was the stool one, the tiny top slipped off her shoulder, her nipple out under her arm, and her eyes going straight down the lens at whoever was holding the paper. She had been looking at Marguerite when that was taken and it didn't matter. He wouldn't know that. He would think she was looking at him. He would sit there with it in his hand and think the woman in the photograph had her eyes on him, on purpose, from a whole county away.
She put two fingers between her legs and found herself slick to the knuckle. She spread her knees and worked the flat of her hand over her clit, slow, no hurry, looking at the print.
He would have them on his own table. He would maybe put his drink down and get up and look at the one with the transparent slip held to the lamp, where the light went through the fabric and made a map of her waist and the crease of her thigh. He would maybe touch himself through his trousers first, the way men did before they stopped pretending.
Her hips had started moving off the carpet in little pushes. She slid two fingers inside herself and curled them and went at the front wall, and her breath came out of her in a grunt she didn't bother to swallow, because the house was empty and no one was going to hear it.
The fourth print was the one with her back arched on the bed and Tom's palms pressing the backs of her knees. She looked at Tom's cock in the picture, buried, stretched her open, and she thought about the client seeing that. A stranger looking at the exact place she was wet from, the exact width of what had been inside her, with her face in the margin of it, glazed and greedy. He would know what she looked like when it was happening to her. That was the thing he had bought. Not her body. The face she made when a man was fucking her.
She came with her heels dug into the carpet and her free hand gripping the sofa leg, and it went through her in long pulls, and she got her fingers out and pressed her palm down hard to hold it.
When her breathing came back she lay flat on her back on the carpet next to the prints with one arm over her eyes. The wet on her hand was going cold. Above her the ceiling was cracked in the corner the way it had been since before they bought the house, and she looked at the crack and thought about Bob getting his tea at six and the prints on the floor beside her head and the man somewhere with an envelope.
She sat up. She gathered the prints into a pile and squared them, the way Marguerite would do it, she pulled out the photos from when the clothes were gone and put them back in the envelope. Not yet she thought, this was still hers. She put the rest of them face down on the coffee table. Then she got up and went out to the kitchen and put the kettle on, and stood with her hands on the counter while it heated, and did not go and wash her hands first, because she wanted to smell herself while she thought.
At six Bob came in and hung his coat on the hook and said the traffic on the bypass was a joke. She had the plates out and the tea made and the parcel gone up to the drawer in the bedroom under her winter jumpers, and she looked at him across the table and asked him about the bypass, and he told her, and she listened to all of it.
She stacked the plates and ran the water, and while her back was turned he took his mug and went through to the front room and put the telly on. She dried her hands and stood a moment in the kitchen with the tea towel over her shoulder. She waited.
"What's this?"
"The photos from Thursday."
He put the telly on mute and leaned over the table. He turned the first one over and stopped.
The ivory, six. Her on the chair with the stocking, the seam up her calf, her mouth a bit open.
He held it in both hands. He didn't say anything for a long time and she watched his face rather than the photograph, because she'd already looked at it enough.
"That's you," he said.
"That's me."
He laid it on the table and took the next one out. The bed, the slip down to her waist, her arm across her chest, the curtain rings shadowed on her back. Then the one at the lamp with the long line of her from ankle to shoulder.
"When did you get these?"
"Marguerite. The woman who ran the session. I went up there today to collect them."
"You went to work today."
"I went in the afternoon. The girl did the shop." She kept her voice level. "It's my half day."
He nodded slowly, the way he did when he was still catching up. He took the next prints out himself, the transparent ones. The slip held to the lamp with the light going right through it. The one kneeling with the heels, where the fabric gave everything away.
He went red round the ears. She saw it happen.
"Bob."
"I'm looking."
He looked at all of them. He turned each one over and read the number and the word on the back and turned it back and set it down. When he got to the stool one, the tiny top off her shoulder, her nipple showing under her arm and her eyes straight at the camera, he went quiet in a different way. He held it longer than the rest.
"A set of prints and the negs if you wanted them. The lingerie set are for here, only here. They don't leave the house."
"Why?"
"She sold these," she said. "The lingerie ones. Some of them go to shops. Catalogues. No name with them."
He put the last one down and sat back. The telly was muting some advert with a car in it. He looked at the row on the table and then at her, and there was something in his face she hadn't seen before. Not anger. He looked like a man who'd come into a room and found the furniture rearranged.
"You look different in them," he said.
"I am different."
"Since when?"
"Since last Thursday."
He thought about that. He rubbed the side of his jaw where he got stubble that never quite turned into a beard.
"You never said."
"I know I never said." She got off the sofa arm and sat down on the floor with her back against the sofa, closer to the prints, and he turned to look down at her. "You never asked either, Bob. You didn't ask that night. I came home that night and my hair was wet and I couldn't walk straight, and you made the tea."
He was quiet.
"I'm not having a go at you," she said. "I'm telling you why I'm showing you these. I want you to see them. I want you to know what you bought."
He slid off the chair onto the floor and sat with his back against the other chair leg, so the prints were between them. He picked up the ivory one again.
"You've never looked like this at home."
"Not for you to see. Not for anyone to see."
"You did it for me. For the Anniversary present."
"It started out for you but ended up being for me."
Bob's hand had stopped moving on the print.
"A man bought pictures of you."
"Yes."
"A client yes, for a catalogue, online, for him."
He put the ivory print down and reached for her. His hand came out flat and open and she took it, and he pulled her across the prints, and they didn't care about the prints, and she ended up kneeling over him with her palms on his shoulders and his hands up under her blouse at the small of her back.
He kissed her. It wasn't the anniversary kiss or the Friday night kiss. It had the same edge in it that his face had had looking at the stool photograph, and she took it and gave it back, and her hand went down between them to his belt and worked it loose while he got her blouse open and his mouth onto her nipple, and she heard herself make a sound she'd only made in one other room in her life.
He got the belt open and she got her hand in and found his cock hard through his boxers, and she pulled it out and worked it slow while he bit the side of her neck. His fingers found her belt and her button and her zip, and he got his hand down the front of her trousers and straight into her knickers, and she was soaked for the second time that day and it was warm this time, not the cold wet of the church bench, and he felt it and made a low noise, and she pushed down onto his fingers.
He got her trousers off over her feet and she got his shirt open and then they were both mostly bare on the front room carpet with the photos scattered round them, and she straddled him and took his cock in her hand and put the head of it at her cunt and sat down on it in one slow drop, and they both stopped breathing a second.
Then she rode him. She rode him on the living room floor with the telly muting adverts and his hands on her hips, and he watched her the whole time, the way he'd been looking at the pictures, and she knew exactly what he was doing. He was watching his wife like she was the woman in the photographs.
He came with his heels dug into the carpet and his hands dropping to her arse and pulling her down, and she felt him spill and kept moving anyway until she got there after him, small and tight, and then she lay flat on his chest and the sweat glued them together.
After a while he said, into her hair, "Will I know where they end up."
"I can ask."
She lifted her head and looked at him, and her heart was still going hard under her ribs.