A Bump in the Night

Tammy swung the chair around so she could see herself in the mirror. "I... I... Tammy, you're a magician."

"I can only work with what's already there, Megan. You're a very pretty girl."

I looked at my phone, "Damn, it's almost nine; I have to open the studio." Megan helped me carry my gear so I made it just in time. My first client wasn't due until ten-thirty so I had time to shoot the final shots of Megan in the studio and not have it interfere with business. She looked so damn pretty, I took way more shots than I needed for Tammy's advertising photos. When we finished, she used our dressing room to change into her new clothes. When she walked out, I almost creamed my pants. "Damn, Megan, maybe you should try modeling."

She chuckled, "Oh, yeah, right--me a model. I just hope I get the job at that boutique. I'm so nervous I'm liable to pee my pants."

"Don't do that," I chuckled. "Just be yourself, you'll do fine."I looked at the time. "It's a little after ten, you should head over there."

"Yeah, I'm going to take the long way around; the walk will help me calm down and I can get used to walking in these shoes. I was wearing them around your condo but I'm still a little wobbly. I've never had a pair of high heels before."

"Well be careful, don't twist that ankle. Sheila knows you hurt it so if you're a little wobbly she'll think it's because of your ankle. Come on back after the interview and let me know what she says, then I'll get you an Uber home."

"Okay," she said while leaning over and kissing me on the cheek. She smiled when she saw the surprise on my face. "Thanks again, John." With that, she headed out the door; Dave walked in about five minutes ahead of our first shoot so it quickly became business as usual.

I was getting concerned when noon rolled around and Megan hadn't come back yet. I knew she didn't have much money left so I didn't think she'd be shopping. I pictured her sitting in a ladies' room, crying because she didn't get the job, and hoped I was wrong. I hung around for a little while but I was getting hungry. Dave noticed I hadn't left for lunch yet and asked when I was going.

"I was going to wait for Megan. She went on that job interview but I thought she'd be back by now and I was going to buy her lunch. I'm going to run to the food court and get something to bring back. If she comes in while I'm gone, tell her I'll be right back, would you?"

"No problem," he commented.

Dave left for lunch when I finished mine and I was really getting concerned. I was planning on going over to the boutique to ask when she left as soon as Dave came back around two o'clock.

I had just started to tell him I'd be gone for a little while when I heard the front door open. I looked up and saw Megan charging me. She threw her arms around my neck and gave me a kiss smack dab on the lips. "I got the job," she shouted as she broke her lip lock. "I start on Monday."

"I never had a doubt," I remarked through my grin. "Why are you so late, I was going to buy you lunch."

"I'm sorry, John, Sheila took me to lunch. We went to some place called Fridays something."

"TGI Friday's?"

"Yeah, that's it. I think Sheila likes me. I did just what you told me, I tried just being myself and was straight with her."

"Well, congratulations, we'll have to go out and celebrate." It was one of the few times I brought out my credit card; I just can't afford those interest rates, of course, I didn't tell Megan that.

I had already ordered some cheap frames from Amazon for Tammy's ad photos. Sunday, Megan watched over my shoulder as I imported the photos into Lightroom to select which ones I wanted and get them organized and then into Photoshop for the final touch-ups. She also helped with the framing. I had one extra that I had taken in the studio to see if Dave wanted to hang it in the showroom; if not, I'd hang it up in the condo.

Megan was so nervous Monday morning at breakfast she literally had tears in her eyes. "Why are you crying, you should be excited."

"I... I am excited; I'm just really nervous too. I want so much to be good at this, I want to make you proud of me."

"Megan, I'm already proud of you so forget about me, just do your best. That's all Sheila or I can ask." I didn't want her to know, but I was almost as nervous as she was. I also wanted to see her succeed.

When we got to the mall, I drove her around to the back door of the boutique and wished her good luck. She leaned over and gave me a peck on the lips along with another 'thank you.' When I saw she was safely inside, I drove around and parked where I normally do. It was my day off so Dave was surprised to see me until I showed him the shot of Megan. I asked if he'd like it to display in the showroom. He went apeshit over it, told me it was good work, and said he was going to get a better frame.

Next, I took as many of the ad photos as I could carry over to Tammy's salon, leaned them against the wall, then went back to my car for the rest. By the time I returned, Tammy, along with the rest of the girls, had much the same reaction as Dave.

At the end of the day, I drove back to the mall and parked behind the boutique to wait for Megan. I saw Sheila come out and had to ask, "How'd she do?"

"Pretty good; she's a little shy to start but she'll do just fine. She might be a little while; I told her to pick out some clothes and I'd take the money from her paychecks a little at a time. She can't wear that same outfit every day. One of the other girls stayed to help her pick something out."

"I can't thank you enough for what you're doing for her, Sheila."

"Well, you were so sincere when we talked, I figured she must be something special. When I talked to her, I could see it too. I know she's been stepped on her whole life, but despite the hard knocks she's taken, she's a sweet young lady. I have a feeling I'm going to be the one who benefits from this deal.

"Listen, I have to run but thanks for the new hiree."

When Megan finally came out, she couldn't stop talking. She was astonished by how nice everyone was, especially Sheila. She had her just watch the other girls for most of the day but let her wait on a customer just before closing. She made a two-hundred-dollar sale and was practically giddy over it. Later that night, she modeled the clothes she bought. Damn, she looked good, but even with her twenty percent employee discount, I figured she'd be paying for them for months.

The next day, after dropping Megan off, I went to work and was surprised to see Dave had already bought a nice frame and had Megan's portrait front and center on the wall. I didn't think he'd had time to do it during the day so he must have done it after closing.

When he walked in shortly after ten, Megan was our main topic of conversation. He couldn't understand why I hadn't made a move on her. "Dave, I want her to know there are people in this world who don't have an ulterior motive to be kind."

"Yeah, I get it," he acknowledged, "but damn..."

At the end of the day, I had just locked up and was on my way to go out the back when I heard someone tapping on the door. I turned ready to tell whoever it was that we were closed but saw it was Megan. As soon as I unlocked the door, she rushed into my arms and planted much more than a peck on my lips. "I made four sales today and sold over fifteen hundred dollars of clothes and things," she told me as she came up for air. "I've made over two hundred and fifty dollars in two days. I have no idea how I'm ever going to thank you for all this."

My first thought was damn, if she kept that up she'd make more in her first week than I made after working for four years in the studio. By the end of the week, she proved me right. Her commission tallied a little over eight hundred dollars, about thirty dollars more than my salary.

Saturday, after dinner, she asked what I thought at the time, a strange question. "John, I know you take a shower every morning but do you ever take baths?"

"Ah, once in a while, if I've had a stressful day I like to soak in a hot tube, why?"

"Just curious."

After clearing the table and putting the dishes in the dishwasher, I went down to the basement. I wanted to make a print of Megan and hang it up on my wall. After about twenty minutes, she came downstairs and took my hand, "Come with me." I really wanted to stay and finish what I was doing but didn't argue. She took me into the master bathroom where she already had a hot bath drawn, highlighted with candles flickering in the corner.

"I put some of that bath oil in the water too. It's really good for the skin. Enjoy," she said before closing the door as she left. Well, what could I do? She went through so much trouble, I wasn't going to waste her efforts. I stripped down and slipped in. The water was perfect. I leaned back and closed my eyes. It was so relaxing, I almost felt like I could fall asleep when the door suddenly opened, and in walked Megan.

I sat up in shock. "Megan, I'm naked," I almost yelled.

"How else am I going to wash your back?" She sat on the tube behind me and started gently rubbing my back with a washcloth. It felt so good, I almost forgot about our circumstances. When she was done, she rinsed my back with the bathwater.

"How's the water, still hot enough?"

"Ah... it's cooled down a little," I replied.

I was so embarrassed when she walked in front of me to add more hot water. I was so hard the tip of my cock was peeking above the water. She pretended not to notice but her small smile gave her away.

She added more hot water and tested it with her hand. "Now, don't go away, I'll be back in a minute." I wondered what else she had up her sleeve and noticed she didn't even bother closing the door as she left. A couple of minutes later she returned with one of the folding trays we sometimes used to sit and eat dinner in front of the TV, only instead of dinner, she had a bottle of wine and two glasses. She set everything up beside the tub then stripped and stepped in. She sat down facing me and stretched her long legs out on either side of mine then slid forward until my toes touched her pussy. I was still trying to process what was going on but something told me to curl my toes. "Mmmmm," she hummed through a big smile, "this is so nice."

I leaned back again and closed my eyes to enjoy the moment. "MM-HMMMM," I replied.

"John, I don't want to sleep on the couch anymore."

I would love to say I was so debonair that I came up with a really clever and romantic response, but all my muddled brain could come up with was, "Okay." Luckily, I still had some condoms left from Cassie.

I'm not sure what I expected; I guess because she told me she had traded sex when she had to, I thought she'd be an expert in the sack but it was just the opposite. I sucked her nipples, kissed my way down her torso, and licked her pussy until I couldn't feel my tongue any longer... all that and hardly any interaction from her. Then it hit me, it was most likely the first time she was having sex willingly; in the past, she had been simply used for sex.

I had worked on her for almost an hour before I could feel her joining in. She was making noises and grabbing at the sheet when I finally slipped inside of her. When I started to thrust, I saw her eyes open wide and stare into my face like she was seeing me for the first time. "Oh! Oh... O... Oh my God," she screamed. Suddenly her head flew back and her whole body tensed up as she arched her pelvis upward.

I had been holding back for a while but her orgasm was my cue and I launched into my own. We both just lay there for several minutes as we waited for our bodies to return to some form of normalcy. "I... I had no idea it could be like that," she told me. "Can we do it again?" And so we did, only that time she was more than a willing participant, she turned into a tiger.

From that night on, there was no question as to where Megan would sleep. We had sex every night and woke up in each other's arms every morning.

A couple of days after we started sleeping together, Megan's birth certificate came in the mail. When she saw it she laughed, "Evidently, my birth was such a non-event for my mother, she forgot the date. All these years, I thought my birthday was September fourth and it's actually August twenty-eighth--Jesus Mom!"

I could see the sadness in her face; clearly, she still had feelings for her mother. When I saw her eyes starting to cloud up, I walked over and put my arm around her. "Honey, alcoholism is a disease, she's sick, and I know it's hard, but you can't really hold her accountable for her actions. She must be out of prison by now, have you tried to contact her?"

"No, she'd just try to talk me into going back and I can't live like that again. I could never go back to that."

My parents were super great people and raised me with love; I couldn't imagine what kind of childhood Megan had and I certainly wasn't going to push her to get in touch with her mom if she didn't want to.

"Well, here's the good news," I said, trying to change the atmosphere. "We can now get you a driver's license; with that, you can open a bank account."

"There's one problem, Honey..."

"What's that?"

"I don't know how to drive. I've never had anyone teach me."

I never even thought of that but it made sense. "Okay, then first I'll teach you to drive... THEN, we'll open an account. How's that sound?" She didn't answer with words but rather a big kiss with a lot of tongue.

We went to the DMV for her learner's permit then headed for the lonely country roads of the farmlands. In a month, I had her driving to work, a couple of weeks later she had her license and I helped her open her first savings and checking accounts; by that time, she had paychecks totaling over eight thousand dollars. I was right about her making more than me. There was still one more thing that had to be done... get that warrant for her arrest lifted.

I was hoping that if whoever owned that gas station heard Megan's story and she paid back the money, they'd cancel any charges they had against her. I talked to Megan and she was more than willing to pay the money back plus any fines that were charged.

She told me the name of the station and it's location so I did some digging and learned it was owned by a corporation who also had fourteen more. In my research, I found a newspaper article that reported the robbery... only, according to the sleazeball manager, it was two armed guys who came in at closing time and got away with over three thousand dollars. The article said they must have cased the place because they knew enough to hide their faces from the CCTV cameras. There was no mention of Megan or her theft of the three hundred plus dollars.

"So, there's no warrant for my arrest?"

"I guess not; it seems like one hell of a coincidence though, that the place gets robbed the same night you made a break for it. It says the robbers hid their faces from the cameras; you think that manager could have set it up, maybe called a couple of buddies to do the job?"

"I wouldn't put anything past him... in fact, I'll bet I know who he called. There were to guys who used to come around with a six-pack and they'd go in the back room and drink. They probably split the money three ways."

Unfortunately, Megan couldn't remember their names, and even if she did, we had no proof. "So, it's up to you, with no warrant there's no reason to pay back the money if you don't want to."

"No, I still want to pay it back. I only took it because I hadn't been paid and I figured they owed it to me but I'm no thief." Megan went to her bank and got a cashier's check for what she stole and sent it to the corporate CFO alone with a full explanation for why she took it, the rapes she suffered at the hands of the night manager, and her suspicions concerning the robbery. I drove her to the next town over so the postmark wouldn't reveal her location and watched her drop in the mailbox.

"So, how do you feel? Do you feel good because you were able to pay it back or do you feel like a sucker because you didn't have to?"

"Oh, no, are you kidding? It felt great."

"Good, I was hoping you'd say that." I took her out for dinner to celebrate.

As time went on, I could see changes happening with Megan. She was maturing quickly. I don't think she ever had time before, she was always too busy just trying to survive. She and the girls from the boutique, including Sheila, became good friends and she was learning from them the art of being a woman. She also befriended Tammy from the salon and a few others who worked in the mall.

There were other changes too, changes between us. Our nightly sex was becoming more passionate. We were slowing things down and spending more time on foreplay. I'm not quite sure when it happened but our sexual romps turned into lovemaking.

Unbeknownst to me, Megan had looked at my license for my birthday and surprised me with a present. Even covered with the wrapping paper, it wasn't hard to see it was a book, a large, heavy book. I laid it on the table and started ripping the paper. I exposed the title first.

"Have you heard of him before?"

"Helmut Newton?" Yeah, of course; Newton, Irving Penn, and Richard Avadon revolutionized fashion photography in the fifties and sixties." I unwrapped the rest of it. "Honey, this must have cost you a fortune." I knew exactly how much it cost; I'd seen it in the bookstore at the mall, it was two hundred dollars.

"You're worth it," she said as she kissed me. "Happy Birthday."

I thanked her and started looking through the book.

"He has a few pretty graphic pictures in there, a lot of nudes."

"Yeah," I replied, "he was called the 'King of Kink.'"

"Is he still alive?"

"No, he was killed in a car crash years ago."

"Oh, wow, that's really a shame. In the back, there are thumbnails of his work with a little story behind them. He has one picture that sold at an auction for three-quarters of a million bucks, do you believe that?"

"Yeah, I believe it. He's one of a handful of photographers whose name will go down in history, Honey." Megan pulled a chair around to sit beside me while I turned each page. When we got to a page with his photo called, "Dressed and Naked," she almost yelled...

"That's it, that's the photo that sold for all that money."

"Yeah, that's one of his most famous. It ran in a French magazine and pretty much started his career as a fashion photographer."

"Figures; only the French would publish that in a magazine... Hey, why don't we do that?"

"Do what?"

"Do some nudes like that; you be the photographer and I'll be the model."

"Honey, no one's going to pay big bucks for one of my photos, not even with you as my model. You have to be a big name to get money like that. No one's ever even heard of me."

"Maybe not yet but you have to start someplace, right?"

"Megan, I wouldn't even know where to begin."

"How about if we start a website? Sheila sells more clothes on her website than she ever does in the shop. We need to make the pictures look really artistic somehow, something that a young bachelor or even a woman would be proud to display on their wall... and we need to make them big, not just eight by ten like you print. That picture of Newton's was huge--bigger than life."

"What about you? Won't you be embarrassed to have your nudes on the Internet for everyone to see?"

"Not if they're in good taste and artistic; look at those girls," she said, indicating the women in the book, "do they look embarrassed?"

"No, but they're professionals, they probably got paid big bucks for that."

"Well, if it works, we'll both make big bucks. Come on, what do you say, the worst that can happen is we don't make any money."

I knew there were other photographers selling "Fine Art Nude," photos and making money at it. I gave out a small sigh, "I guess we could give it a shot." Megan jumped from her chair and into my lap, threw her arms around my neck, and slipped her tongue in my mouth.