The Family Album

The night before Jack came for dinner we had had families around for a barbecue.

After the meal, the photo albums had come out for the usual laughs, memories and so on. We have about 20 of them, albums that is, not families, neatly maintained by me. I am not a bad semi-amateur photographer and looking after the family snapshots has fallen to me. My wife, Erica, though also has her own album in which she has her "special" photos.

These include baby shots, family photos, graduation days and so on. And unknown to me until she brought it out on our family night, she had included the tame-ish first photo of one of our own "private shoots".

Now these I should tell you a bit about. Over the years, as my interests in photography developed (great pun eh?) I've picked up a bit of equipment and helped out at mate's weddings and so on, or done local sports teams. I've done a few portraits, landscapes and the odd artistic shot, flowers through raindrops, that sort of thing.

And there's another string to my bow hitherto known only to my wife, and me or as Royalty might say, my wife and I. Hitherto? Well we'll get to that eventually.

When the wine has flowed some nights, Erica and I would set up the lights and my backdrops, get out the cameras and have a bit of fun. She would put on some of her more elegant clothes or dress to a theme and then slowly, frame by frame, get naked. It was always tasteful and glamorous but even so, before digital I would sheepishly take the film to the late night chemist in the centre of town.

The girls there would always give me a knowing smile when I came back an hour later, but what the heck, you're only embarrassed for 30 seconds and you've got the rest of your life to look at the pictures.

Anyway, the next night, when Jack arrived for dinner, most of the albums had been put away, but not Erica's.

For some reason it had been left on the sideboard in the dining room.

Dinner, cooked by Erica and washed down with expensive wines bought by both Jack and I, came and went and we started chatting and carrying on as we always did.

Jack was an old mate of mine from school. He was best man at our wedding and I was best man at his, but his marriage had busted up under the duress of his travel.

He was a charmer and found female company where ever he went in the world on business. The rest was inevitable. Jan, his wife, our friend, too, put up with it for longer than she needed to, then quietly left one day.

They're still friends, go out to dinner together, occasionally bonk each other if both are a bit short of companionship at the same time, but all now without the hang-ups of marriage. There were no children, so the pain was lesser than it might have been, though we know they both felt lost and bewildered for a while, particularly as Erica and I were rock solid. Still we stayed friends with both of them.

Unknown to them, we too could have our moments, but never anything irreparable. I got a bit too close to a female colleague at work and almost ended up in strife. I told Erica the full story - there was a bit of kissing and cuddling in the storeroom over a couple of weeks - she didn't speak to me for two days, and then it was forgotten about until she had to make a small confession to me.

Tiddly, very in fact, at a work party, she had danced on the boardroom table and done a striptease.

"It kind of just happened," she said. "It was a great party. Then someone said the only thing missing was the entertainment and I thought I would be it. I can't sing, I can't do stand up comedy, so what else was there?"

I said so they saw your tits, big deal.

There was a silence, then came: "Ummm, there was a little bit more!"

Did I really want to know?

The choice was not mine: "I was really in some weird place in my mind, I liked being undressed and I liked the power it gave me. I had them all, women and men, watching me. Once my top came off, I didn't want the moment to stop, so I took off my skirt and then climbed down and did a couple of lap dances.

"I think my tits were grabbed at least a couple of times. At least by the two directors who gave me $100 notes tucked into my g-string. Then I withdrew to the toilet, pulled myself together and went back into the room like nothing had happened.

"It was agreed we were all adults, it was a party, and let's get on with work the next day.

"I hope you can feel the same."

I thought if that's the worst that happens in a long marriage, you aren't doing so badly. No body is perfect, well expect maybe for Erica's body, which is in my humble estimation, very close to perfect.

Which is why I enjoy photographing her getting naked. What the heck I thought if someone else had the same thrill for a few minutes ... and paid her.

"Forgiven, but not forgotten," I said. I was proud that my wife had been the centre of such attention. For that reason, I'd often wondered about showing our photos to others, but had thought better of it.

Back to Jack and our night with him. We were about to switch from white wine to red and he went to the sideboard for fresh glasses while I decantered.

He saw the photo album, Erica's special one, and opened it up.

"Ahhhhhh who was a pretty baby then," he laughed, flicking through the pages?

Then, "and who's still a pretty babe, eh?"

Obviously, he had come to the last photo, the start of our private shoot.

"They call this a glamour photo in the trade, don't they," he said, with a big wink.

"Who did you get to do this shot for you?'

"I did them, it," I said, my pride muddling up the answer.

"Them?"

Oh dear!

"There are more," said Jack?

"A few," I murmured.

"Don't be so shy," said Erica slapping me gently on the wrist. "There are heaps and you know there are and they're great!"

Turning to Jack, she continued: "He's a very good photographer and I get a real buzz out of posing for him."

"I never said he wasn't a good photographer," said Jack, "or that you wouldn't make a good subject either. I don't suppose there any chance of a bloke seeing a few more of them?"

I looked at Erica.

"Can't see any problems," she said, "nothing Jack hasn't seen before after we spent that day with Jan at the beach all those years ago."

Oh yes, the nude beach in the national park, bollocky naked the four of us, playing tag in the water. Some interesting bits got tagged, too, from memory, or mammary.

"If you insist," I said, keen to show off some of my work if not my wife's naked body.

I disappeared into where I kept the photos and came back to a conspiracy of smiles and silence.

"What's up," I said.

"Nothing," came the replies in telling unison.

I pulled the photos from the envelope and spread them out.

"Very nice," said Jack, looking at the ones in which Erica had dressed as a librarian, hair in a bun, glasses on, then slowly undressed, letting her hair down, the whole sexy, schoolboy cliché.

We'd also done a gangster series with a toy machine gun. Jack was mightily impressed.

"We've had a few good nights over the years," said Erica. "I usually come up with the themes, you know from something I saw on the telly or in a magazine.

"There's one though I've never, well never really mentioned ... "

Jack and I looked at each other quizzically.

"Yes," I said? "What are you on about?"

Erica smirked. "All right," she said. "You know that album cover Janet Jackson did, the one where she's topless but her breasts are covered by someone else's hands, I, well, I once saw it in the record store and thought that would be kind of fun to do. I thought you could do it with a time delay on the camera and sneak around behind me and get the shot."

"That wouldn't work," I said. "You'd need to be at the camera to make sure all the angles were right."

"Well, I could offer a spare set of hands," said Jack, mostly as a joke, I think.

"Very funny," I said.

"Very good suggestion," said Erica. "Wanna do it, I'm up for it if anyone else is?"

Now you think a lot of things at moments like these. Like no way am I letting him grab my wife's tits for starters. But there was also the thought of how good the shot would be, setting it up, getting the light right. I was way ahead of myself before I knew it. I think it had as much to do with the wine as anything else. So while a huge part of me strained to say no, and all this happening in a nanosecond, I felt a lot of other forces at play, such that I said nothing.

My silence was taken by Erica as affirmation.

"Okay, I guess it's on with the show if Jack's okay with it," she said.

"Well if Evan is, I guess it's okay," he said.

To say no now would have been to wimp out wouldn't it, Gentle Reader?

"Jack, can you help me with the gear," I said, still with my head swimming with too many permutations to think about, his hands, my wife's breasts, get the lighting right, it will be on digital so nobody at the Chemists will see it ... his hands on Erica's breasts ... around and around it all went.

As well as grabbing the gear, I asked Jack to check out the original shot with me on the Internet.

I think it dawned on us both then really what we were doing.

"You sure you're okay with this," he asked?

"Too late now, if I said no now we'd have bloody world war three on us," I said.

"Once you say yes to Erica, there's no going back."

I thought I saw a smile on Jack's face when I said that, a glint in his eye that said he understand better than I knew, but maybe no. And there wasn't much room in my spinning brain for another weird thought about what that might be all about.

As we set up, I refilled wine glasses. I needed a shot of courage; I thought the others might have, too.

Erica had disappeared to change into a pair of jeans like those worn by Janet Jackson. I hadn't thought about how she would re-appear. When she came back she had on jeans and a T-shirt rather than being topless.

Was she having second thoughts?

"Okay, how we going to do this to keep Jack out of the shot," she said, answering my question with her own.

I had already thought of that.

"It doesn't matter a lot, I can Photoshop him out," I said. "In fact, I could do the whole thing in Photoshop just by photographing you and his hands.

An escape clause!

"I don't think it would look the same," Erica said. "Those pictures where you put someone else's head on another person's body, they never look quite real. Where should I stand?"

I stood Erica in front of the big blue feature wall at the end of our lounge room. It was always a good backdrop.

"Jack you stand behind her and ... umm put your arms round," I said. "Let's do a mock up."

Erica still had a T-shirt on as Jack got into position, put his arms through and ... now think about it, have you ever been in a position of telling another man how to put his hands on your wife's breasts?

Thank god for the alcohol that, I noticed, I was the only one apparently in need of. Erica stood still and waited, a happy look on her face. Maybe, unlike me, she hadn't given the sexual side of this any thought at all; she was just focussed on the photo.

I decided I should be too and grabbed Jacks handed and put them in the same place as those in the Janet Jacket photo, the thumbs wide apart from the other fingers.

I then walked back to the camera to look through the lense.

"How does it look," said Erica.

"If we can hold that pose, we'll be right," I said.

"Okay, well let's do it."

With that, she removed Jack's hands, then without hesitation, off came the T-shirt.

She then grabbed Jack's hands and put them back on her breasts. But they weren't quite in the place where I had arranged them, so I left the camera and walked over to them.

Again, I took Jack's hands and re-adjusted them. It was inevitable that there would some sort of rubbing movement of Erica's nipples and I thought I saw a flicker of arousal in her eyes as I moved Jack's hands around.

I went back to the camera and was about to shoot the first pictures when Erica said, "stop".

"Doesn't Janet Jackson have the button of her jeans undone and the fly partly down," she asked?

"Not sure," I replied.

"I seem to recall she does," said the muffled voice from behind Erica, the owner of which still had his hands firmly in place on her breasts.

"Can you check," said Erica? " I want it to be right."

I dutifully went back to the computer in the study and found the picture.

They were right. When I returned Jack's hand were still on Erica's breasts. He must have kept them there the whole time I was away.

"You're right," I said.

Erica undid the top button of the jeans and half pulled down the zip, She then pulled the jeans partly open before putting her hands behind her head, a la Miss Jackson

I took a close look at Jack's arms and hands to make sure they were still in the right place. I might just have seen a gentle squeeze as I looked through the camera, but it might have been my imagination.

I fired the first shot, then another.

"Looking good, people," I said. "How about a big smile Erica?"

But the look on her face was much dreamier and I realised the movement of Jack's hands wasn't my imagination.

Lightly, Jack was squeezing her breasts and then had two nipples in between his fingers and thumb, not the same shot at all, but still a good one.

So I clicked the camera.

"Nice," I said, thinking more of the shot than the people I was shooting, my wife and my best mate.

Erica dropped her arms from behind her head and grabbed Jack's hands, squeezing both them and her breasts in the one movement.

Jack's head emerged from behind hers and he looked at me for guidance.

I just pressed the button on the camera.

"Still looking good, people," I said, feeling so many thrills running through me I thought my knees would bend.

At the same time, other bits of me were stiffening.

I was getting these great shots, and I was discovering how much I enjoyed watching my wife getting it on with another bloke. Where did that come from?

What sort of deviate was I?

As a clicked on, Jack took it as a sign to keep going. As for Erica, there was no stopping her. She pulled one of Jack's hands from her breasts and ran it down her soft, flat belly.

I watched it run down the "v" of the open jeans, photographing away even as it disappeared into the soft darkness beyond.

I saw Erica stiffen then relax to let it find the target, and then she turned her head and kissed Jack.

I still kept shooting. Shot after shot of my wife on the verge of sex with another man and right before me, with my consent, with me photographing it.

I was like watching a porno, only I knew the actors. I was removed from it, but yet I wasn't.

I should have been stopping it from going where it was going, but I couldn't. We were all in a moment, one of our own making, one from which there was apparently no escape.

I kept shooting as Erica slowly slipped from Jack's grasp and on to her knees in front of him. Looking up at him, she slowly unbuckled his belt and pulled down his jeans.

His erection was obvious through his jocks. Erica took hold of it through the fabric, and then eased it out.

I keep shooting away as she first stroked it, then kissed it slowly before – I can't believe it's happening – taking it in her mouth.

Jack put his hands gently on her head as she worked the magic I thought only I would ever know.

I knew he couldn't last long. Erica is the best.

But before the big moment, she stopped and eased back from Jack and beckoned him to lie down.

Then she straddled him, grabbing his hands and putting them on her breasts again.

"Get this shot," she said to me, "make sure you get this shot."

Her wish, my command, I kept clicking, hardly stopping to think about the reality of what I saw in the camera.

She rode him hard. He held on to her breasts as if his life depended on it. He shuddered, exploded; she writhed into her own orgasm.

I expected, through the weird haze, that that would be it. But no.

"Does the camera man want some action," Erica said, her voice soft, low and sexy as I'd never heard it before.

"Yes, please," I said, the words escaping before I had a chance to consider them.

We climbed all over each other, rolling on the carpet.

"Did I look sexy in the lens," she asked as he rolled me on to my back?

"Did it look fantastic as Jack played with my tits as I rode him?'

"Did it look terrific as he came and then I came?"

All the time I was answering, yes, yes, yes.

"And you didn't mind watching your wife being fucked by another man, behaving like a slut, having his cum inside her, while you photographed it all, you were happy with that?"

I had to admit, through the pleasure of my own growing orgasm; I didn't care the slightest bit.

"Well good," she said, half moaning, "because tomorrow night I'm going to be doing the wardrobe malfunction, I've got a piece of jewellery just like Janet's from the Internet.

"And Jack's keen on that shot, too!"

Then the penny dropped. He'd known about all this before tonight. They'd planned it together. The album had been left out on purpose.

So was it betrayal? The dark clouds disappeared in the shining white light of orgasm, an orgasm like I had never had before. I looked at Jack, spent but smiling across the room. I looked up at Erica, her face now contorted by her own pleasure.

"Yes, let's do it again!"