Keep This Secret Pt. 04

What could please a young scientist more than daydreaming about winning the Nobel Prize? In David's case, it could be much more than a daydream. Chapter Four gives us good news about Victoria, and it shows David treating Mary with more respect and consideration. And it shows their sexual relationship taking a particularly wonderful turn. As you read this chapter, keep asking what you'd do if you were David.

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I spent most of the next week compiling my data and thinking about how I'd write up results of my research. It pained me to publicly admit that I'd been careless enough to expose a student assistant to an experimental therapy, but I couldn't think of another way to explain how the sonic stimulator worked. Maybe I could publish my work in two parts. My first publication could detail the effect on dogs. That, by itself, was significant enough to justify publication in a major journal. Any competent neuroscientist would realize that the natural next step would be to measure the effect on humans. Then, after letting this news spread across the scientific community, I could publish a second paper that revealed the magnitude of what I'd discovered.

I enjoyed imagining that this second paper would be cited when I won the Nobel Prize.

Can you tell how happy I was feeling? Work was going great. I was deep into a passionate love affair with a spectacular woman. My dogs loved me.

As a bonus, Victoria was doing very well. My decision to pay her expenses for the last semester of her MBA program had transformed her life. It was gratifying to see how much I'd managed to help her at a critical time in her life. It had taken so little to help her. I realized that there must be a lot of people like Victoria, trying to overcome the difficulty of being a woman living in a man's world. Her parents would not have treated a son the way they treated her.

It was obvious that she was eating better and getting enough sleep. She finally had time to devote to her studies and show her professors just how capable she was. Moving out of her family home had been good for her and her relationship with her parents. She told me that she was even socializing with the girls in her dorm, going out to clubs, dancing, and doing all kinds of fun things that normal students do.

She had so much spare time that she was spending part of it in the lab taking care of my dogs. I was a little uncomfortable with the idea that a paid student assistant was working unpaid overtime, but the dogs liked it, and I enjoyed her company. She was a nice young woman, and I was glad to have her around.

Much of my spare time focused on Mary. I'd finally recognized that I'd done too much to punish her for the way she'd treated me. Instead of looking for ways to degrade and exploit her, I started looking for ways to make her happy. I surprised her by taking her to a trendy luxury resort on the west coast of Mexico. She was so happy when I gave her the news that she reminded me of a kid on Christmas morning.

We only went for a four-day weekend, but Mary packed so much luggage I had to pay a surcharge to the airline. Clothes. Shoes. Swimsuits. Lingerie. Cosmetics. More lingerie. It went on, and on, and on, and despite it all, I could tell she was afraid she'd forgotten something important. When I told her I would buy her anything she forgot to pack, she got such a loving expression on her face that it melted my heart.

We liked a lot of things about the resort. It had a wonderful nightclub, and I discovered that Mary was a great dancer. She never ran out of energy, dancing until we could walk on the beach as the sun came up. There were great restaurants. Nice boutiques. Many, many opportunities for her to doll herself up and display her beauty to an appreciative audience.

But her favorite part, by far, was the resort's nude beach. Being able to parade around naked in front of a crowd thrilled her. She'd never been to a nude beach before, and she liked it so much I decided that I'd take her to more of them in the future.

I enjoyed taking pictures of her, especially on the beach. Mary loved posing for photographs. She liked imagining she was a famous model or actress, and she'd spent so much time studying pictures in celebrity magazines that she knew exactly how to pose in ways that displayed her face and body to maximum advantage.

It was just as nice as you can imagine. I hadn't had a vacation for a long time because I was reluctant to leave my dogs untended, but Victoria offered to come around often enough to make sure they got enough food, water, exercise, and loving attention. This was the time she realized I was involved with a woman, and it seemed to make her happy for me.

Something interesting happened when we got back.

I downloaded the vacation photos onto my laptop, and I was particularly impressed with the quality of the pictures from the nude beach. The photos looked nice on my cell phone, but they looked amazing on the screen of my laptop. Most of the time Mary used elegant clothing and makeup to look good, but she looked even better naked. She looked so good I wondered if my reaction was colored by the fact that I had feelings for Mary - feelings that were growing stronger. I finally concluded I wasn't looking at her through rose colored glasses. She really was that hot.

I refuse to be ashamed of the fact that I sometimes sample the porn available on the internet. I'm a healthy young male. It's what we do. You probably won't be surprised to discover that I'm not a big fan of all the out-there kinky content. When it comes to porn, I prefer stuff that celebrates the beauty of the female body, especially in a romantic context.

For that reason, I patronize websites that feature amateur nude photography of ordinary women. I love looking at pictures of cute girls who pose nude to indulge the whims of their husbands, boyfriends, or girlfriends. Most of these pictures are of low quality because they are taken by ordinary guys using amateur equipment. But the very best photos are obviously the work of professional photographers working with women who are either models or cute enough to be models.

I enjoy voting for the women I like best, and I enjoy seeing how often I end up voting for women who win the monthly contests that award nice cash prizes. It's intended to motivate women to send in more pictures. In some cases, these pictures are good enough to be considered erotic art. In other cases, there are pictures of rough looking women shoving cucumbers up their asses.

I prefer the first kind.

You can see where this is going. I immediately realized that Mary was beautiful enough to win top prizes in these contests. If I just sent in copies of her at the nude beach, she'd be sure to get compliments and votes from men (and women) from all over the world. It might be enough to win. But then I had a better idea.

I wasn't quite sure how to broach the subject. Obviously, I could use the sonic stimulator to force Mary to go along with my idea. But I didn't want to do that. Since Mary loved putting herself on display, I figured it was something she would want to do if I presented the idea properly. But the choice would be hers alone.

"Mary, come and look at these pictures," I said, showing her the nude photos from Mexico. As I expected, she liked the pictures. A lot. It made her feel like a centerfold.

"You know what I'd like to do?" I asked. "I'd like to put some serious effort into creating some beautiful photographs of you posing nude. Use a real camera, not a cellphone. Get some good, professional lighting. Have you pose like a real model. Maybe we could create something artistic enough to have a big enlargement framed so we could hang it in the bedroom."

"That sounds great," she said.

At first, I thought I'd be the one to buy the equipment and take the pictures. When I was a kid I used to imagine how great it would be to take nude pictures for men's magazines, and I was looking forward to acting out that childhood fantasy. Mary didn't think much of my idea. She had a lot more artistic ability, and she knew it. She was more qualified to be in charge of this particular project, so I let her take the lead.

She bought the camera and a special filter; I have no idea why she needed the filter. She insisted it would make the pictures better. She bought two professional lights; she got one of those circular ring lights and a separate light on a tripod. Mary went all through my apartment looking for a place to pose, and she didn't find one. I suggested that she just pose on my bed, but she wrinkled up her nose at that suggestion. She finally decided that the best place was at her apartment.

I came home early from work one afternoon and drove over there. Mary had removed all the paintings from the wall behind her sofa, creating a place to sit with a nice uncluttered background. She shoved her end tables and coffee table out of the frame. She set up the lights, then closed the shades on a window off to the side.

"Why are you doing that?" I asked. "Isn't more light better?"

"No," she said. "That window is letting in harsh direct sunlight, and it's coming from the wrong angle."

Whatever. The next step was for Mary to take off her clothes and pose on her sofa. I thought this would take no time at all. Man, was I wrong. It took hours. She had to fix her hair and makeup, then try on some elegant lingerie. I'd thought we were just taking nude pictures, but Mary argued that it would be better to start with lingerie shots, then take more pictures as she slowly stripped down to her skin.

When I saw her come back into the room, I realized that her way was best. She looked like a lingerie model. Her makeup was a little heavier than usual. She said the makeup would make the photos look more professional. My only responsibility was to press the shutter when ordered.

Mary stood in front of the couch, turned to the side, looked directly into the lens, and smiled.

"Now," she said.

This went on as Mary slowly worked the lingerie off her shoulders and down her body. We took a couple of pictures of her topless, with the lingerie covering her from the waist down.

"Now." I pressed the shutter.

It wasn't long before we were taking picture after picture of Mary wearing nothing but a classy pair of black stilettos. I found it to be very stimulating. She posed with differing facial expressions, sometimes looking happy, sometimes looking sultry, sometimes looking aroused. After we'd taken dozens of pictures, Mary got out a book she'd found at the library. It was a manual on figure drawing, and it featured picture after picture of models posing. She'd bookmarked postures she wanted to duplicate. I just kept pressing the shutter everytime she said "Now."

The whole process was more time-consuming and detailed than I expected. But Mary had figured out a much better approach than I could have come up with on my own. It's times like this that remind me that I wish I had more artistic aptitude.

Finally, she announced that we were finished. "Is there anything else you'd like?" she said.

"I'm glad you asked," I said. I crossed the room and knelt in front of her as she sat on the couch. I put my hands on the inside of each knee and gently spread her legs wide, exposing her pussy to the camera.

She smiled slyly. "So. You want some pictures of your slutty little whore, right?"

"Maybe."

"I thought you wanted something erotic, but you actually want something pornographic."

"Both! I want both! Why can't I have both?"

"You can have whatever you want, Sir."

She proceeded to pose in the raunchiest ways imaginable. Beaver shots. Squeezing her boobs together. She even did a series of shots from behind, with the camera revealing her little brown butthole in sharp focus. It was breathtaking. We'd started with shots that made her look like a Playboy Playmate. We concluded with images that were too explicit for Hustler. Mary did her very best. By the time she was done, we'd taken 187 pictures, which was a lot more than I expected to take. I looked at some of them on the camera and they all looked great to me. I wanted to get prints of all of them. Mary had a different opinion.

"I've got to select the best ones. Then I've got to crop and process each image. We don't want the same scale of background in each frame; we'll need to zoom in and zoom out to get a little variety," Mary said.

"Whatever you say."

A couple of days later Mary said she was finished. "I made up the two dozen shots I like best. Tell me which ones you prefer. I'd like to get prints of 10 or 12 of them."

They were perfect. All of them. I don't know where Mary learned to edit photos, but she'd worked magic. She'd done something that made her skin even creamier and more luminous than it was in real life. In a few pictures she'd done something that threw the backgrounds slightly out of focus, forcing the viewers' attention to her in the foreground. They were nothing less than exquisite.

"I want prints of all of these," I said.

"All of them? Really? Two dozen custom prints will cost a lot of money, Sir."

"I do not care about the cost. I can not express the enormity of the damn I do not give. I want prints of every single one of these pictures. And I want to get one blown up to poster size so we can get it framed and hang it in the bedroom."

Mary shook her head and laughed, but I could tell she was thrilled that I liked her pictures so much. "Fine. I'll have a bunch of 8 by 10 prints made."

"I think 8 by 10 is a little small. What's the next size larger?"

"Uh . . . you can get 11 by 14 inches, but that's pretty big. We'd need to get a very large album to hold two dozen prints that size."

"Perfect! Just perfect! That's what I want to do!" I said.

She came up to me and planted a sweet little kiss on my cheek. "If I was allowed to call you Master, I'd say that you are the very best Master that any slutty little slave ever had."

The final item of business involved selecting the photo we'd enlarge to the size of a poster. I suggested an R-rated image of Mary wearing lingerie. It was very sexy, but didn't feature any real nudity. I thought Mary would want us to display something that wasn't too explicit in case some visitor accidentally got a look at it.

She looked puzzled. "I'm proud of the way I look. I want people to see me. I want people to think you're a lucky man to have such a sexy little bitch taking care of your every need." Mary selected a full-frontal view of her from the knees up, with an expression sultry enough to wake a man in a coma.

It didn't take long at all for the prints to be finished. We framed the big one and hung it on the wall; we put the rest in an album I just loved. The custom enlargements showed Mary in much more detail than the computer screen. The richness of the colors were awesome. The images of Mary seemed able to claw their way off the print and onto my lap. We spent a long time flipping through the album together. I could not bear to put it down.

"This looks as good as something you'd expect from a professional fashion photographer working with a supermodel. I'm very proud of you, Mary."

"I'm proud of myself too," she said.

I was beginning to look at Mary's self image as being something other than vanity. It was more like pride. She'd put a tremendous amount of work into diet, exercise, make-up and all kinds of other things intended to improve her appearance, and those pictures showed that she'd achieved something impressive. If beauty was an Olympic event, she'd win the gold. I let her bask in the pleasure of looking at her pictures for about a week before I did what I'd intended to do all along.

"Mary, come here and look at something with me." I handed her my laptop, which was opened to the front page of my favorite website devoted to amateur nude photography. "This site has pictures of thousands of amateur women posing nude. A few of the women submit very high quality images, but most submit average-looking photos of average-looking women. The photo quality is pretty uneven because most of these pictures are taken by husbands and boyfriends who don't know much about photography."

Mary was very curious, and she paged through the website, looking at one woman after another. I was sure that she realized she was cuter than anyone on the site, and her pictures were very high quality.

"People who visit the site vote for the best pictures, and they give prizes to the women who get the most votes," I said.

"Prizes?"

"Yeah. Cash. A couple thousand for each woman who cracks the top ten. But it's also an objective recognition of a woman's beauty. If you entered this contest, people all over the world would vote for you. I'm sure you could win."

I could tell Mary was intrigued. "Women who don't want to be identified do something like pixelating their faces," I said. "Women who just want to pose topless only submit pictures of them in their panties. If you're uncomfortable, you could do that."

"Why would I be uncomfortable? If I want to pose nude, I want to pose nude. The whole point is to be proud enough to show yourself to the world."

At some point Mary began looking at the pictures of women who'd won first place. As you would expect, these women were all young and very beautiful, and they submitted high quality photographs. Some of their photographers were obviously professional.

Mary noticed that if a woman wanted to win, she needed to show her face. Each entry consisted of 10 photos, and the most competitive women submitted pictures that showed every part of their body, from their perky tits and firm abs to their tight little butts. Often, the entries included at least one very explicit shot of a woman's pussy, anus, or (preferably) both.

At this point I should explain that I didn't care if Mary entered the contest. It would be nice to show her off to the world, but posing naked for a pornographic website isn't for everyone. I made the suggestion because I knew Mary loved putting herself on display. I only wanted her to do this if it would give her pleasure. For the first time, I had no intention of forcing her to do something against her values.

"I want to do this," Mary said.

She made the final selection of the 10 pictures she submitted to the contest. Her photos were posted on the website a few days later, and the reception was immediate and enthusiastic. Readers were able to post comments, and they were generous in their praise. "Wow. What a woman!" one reader wrote. "Where has this girl been hiding?" Another wrote, "Mary, be sure to post more in the future!" One guy wrote, "If she was my girlfriend, I would spend all my time kissing her feet and asking what I could do to keep her happy!"

Naturally, there were a lot of comments that were a lot more graphic. "Honey, I'd like to fuck every hole you've got," wrote one guy. "When I saw you today, I came all over your pictures," wrote another guy. It went downhill from there.

But the votes were so positive that Mary shot to the top of the ratings in less than 24 hours. The website ranks entries, so that meant that her pictures were displayed on the top of the page showing the hottest women in order. Mary was thrilled. She made me check her place in the rankings several times a day.

She never fell from the top of the chart. At one point an extremely cute model posted a set of very hot pictures that were obviously the work of an extremely talented photographer. It scared Mary, who felt certain she was going to be knocked off her throne.

"She's blonde. Everybody prefers blondes," Mary said.

"I prefer redheads - like you," I said. "Everybody knows redheads are hot."

"I doubt it," she said glumly.