Pictures of Her

What was I thinking? Even if I had gotten away with it, my cum was right there, just feet from where we were doing the photos.

"I guess we should call it a day," I suggested.

"Why? I've got more pictures I'd like to get."

"OK," I said numbly, too humiliated to object to anything. I wondered how I was going to get through the rest of this without dying from embarrassment. Suddenly, the promised lunch sounded more like an agonizing ordeal.

It didn't take much longer, and except for wardrobe changes, she was clothed for all of it. Once we'd finished with her body and her sexual year in review, once she'd gotten it out of her system, she wanted to move on to more innocent memories.

She wanted pictures in her graduation cap and gown. Then she put on slacks and a blouse, her typical everyday outfit, the kind of thing I saw her wearing in class. She wanted to mark her life that way, to get a snapshot in time of how she is at this moment, of all the ways she is.

I photographed it all mechanically, professionally, but I found myself seeing things in her face, in her expressions, that I thought needed to be captured. Little things, subtle things, a look here, a smile or a frown there. A certain movement or posture as she considered her next prop.

I snapped many pictures in between the pictures she knew she was posing for.

------

"Thank you so much," Tina said when we were back at the car and my equipment was stashed in the hatchback and I'd wiped the sweat off my face.

She'd wanted a couple more pictures standing by her car, fully dressed -- or at least as much as a sundress with no undergarments whatsoever and the sun shining through it could be considered fully dressed. She'd just bought it six months ago; it was her first car.

"You're welcome," I said. I wanted to add something polite like how I had really enjoyed it, but the implications stayed my tongue. I'd enjoyed it too much and the shameful image of the weeds at the foot of the stone wall flashed through my head.

I handed her a manila envelope. "The memory cards. There are no other copies, so I suggest you back them up as soon as you get home."

She nodded. "I will. Thank you again. So, you hungry?"

Oh, right, I forgot about lunch. I was thinking this was goodbye, probably forever. I had no obvious excuse to contact her over the summer, and after that, it would be college. I had no idea where she was going, but I was going to State, right here in town. She was probably headed for some Ivy League school or one of the newer institutions that had for years been supplanting them for top-dog status.

I started to say I was starving, but the implications of that in the context of the last two hours again gave me pause.

There was no way to confirm that I was hungry without risking a double entendre, so I just came out with it. "Very," I said. She smiled and gave me the name of the place to put into my GPS. I knew the place, if only by reputation. I was impressed.

"Thank you again," she said once we were seated and had ordered our appetizers. It was in fact a very nice place to have lunch. It would have been a very nice place to have dinner, the kind of nice dinner you choose for a first date or to celebrate an anniversary.

I've done four-hour gigs for less money than my part of the bill alone would likely run. It reinforced my guess that Tina was headed off to college somewhere not only hard to get into, but hard to pay for.

"You're welcome, and thank you," I said, looking around. "When you said it would be a nice lunch, I didn't expect this."

She smiled. "Don't worry about going easy on me. It's worth every penny."

"I appreciate that." I paused. "Look, what you saw-"

She interrupted me with a hand. "We're even on that count. I did the same thing. It's already forgotten."

I couldn't help feeling a stab of disappointment at the idea that she could forget seeing my dick so easily, but I chose to interpret it generously. Either way, I knew I would not forget what I had seen that morning for a very long time, if ever.

It's not like I hadn't seen a naked girl before. Even touched a couple. But not many, and none in quite so much detail. The things I had imagined doing to her during my moment of weakness were still limited to artifacts of my imagination, but I had almost gotten close more than once.

The reasons why it had only been close could make for a novel in themselves, but this morning had counted as something of a milestone for me, even if it didn't mean anything, even if I was only there as a witness, a medium for messages from her to her future self.

"OK," I said. "It's forgotten." I made a show of plucking the thought out of my brain and tossing it flippantly aside. "I hope you like the pictures. I took a lot of them."

"I'll go through them tonight, but I'm sure they'll be great. I've seen your work before."

I'd had a few exhibits at school, and one at a charity auction I'd donated to. But none of those photographs were taken with my hand shaking so much. "If they're great, it's more you than me," I said.

She smiled, not shyly, but humbly. "I hope you enjoyed it as much as I did."

Was that an opening? If so, I decided not to take it. As much as I would have liked for this to lead to something, I knew it wouldn't, and besides, I had a date tonight. I'd been going out with Cathy for a few weeks and considered myself unavailable. I wasn't about to risk that to go futilely chasing after an unreachable ideal.

"I doubt anyone on earth, of either sex, could do anything but enjoy a day of seeing you as you were today." I let myself express a little of what it had meant to me.

"That's very nice," she said, looking at me with a soft expression. I thought I saw her hand start to reach across the table when the waitress broke the spell to serve our appetizers.

"I was really nervous," she said once we'd settled into the excellent food.

"I wondered about that," I said. "When you first asked me about this, you seemed way more nervous than it seemed like you had any reason to be. I chalked it up to worrying about whether I would do it."

"Now you know," she said, taking a bite. "But I didn't need to be nervous. You made me feel so comfortable."

"I'm glad. I'd hate for your year in review memories to be marred by embarrassment."

"If I make a good model, that's as much about you as it is about me. I imagined it being awkward, forced. But half the time, I forgot I was naked."

I looked at her, my expression probably telling her that I hadn't been able to forget it for an instant. "That's one reason I came to you first," she said. "I had a good feeling about you, that you were the kind of guy to not react the way most guys would."

"I'm just better at hiding it," I admitted.

Tina laughed. "You weren't a hundred percent successful." Her cute smirk could have been a reference to my obvious discomfort, or it could have been meant to evoke the memory we had both just agreed would be forgotten. "But you didn't act on it. You were entirely professional. More than that, you were sensitive, you seemed to care about how I felt about it."

"Good. I was pretty surprised when I realized what exactly I would be taking pictures of."

"I guess I should have told you sooner. I was afraid it would make it awkward, maybe scare you off."

"Any awkwardness was unavoidable, at some point. But I'll know for next time."

She raised an eyebrow at that. I'd let my presumptuousness show. She'd told me she did this every year, and for some reason, I had let it get into my head that naturally she would come to me again. It was a dumb assumption.

She let it pass. "A lot has happened this year," she said.

"Senior year of high school, not surprising. Graduation, new car, college plans, dances. Lots of stuff. You're dating Henry Berkman, aren't you?" I didn't follow school gossip, but some gossip, about some people, was hard to avoid. Tina was not the most popular girl in school, but she was one nobody could take their eyes off.

"I was," she said. "It never quite got serious. But there were some firsts."

I could imagine. Any guy dating Tina would be looking to notch as many firsts as possible, as quickly as possible. Especially once he got a look under her modest clothes. But her tone seemed to imply that the big first was still in her future. It wasn't as usual in our school as it might be elsewhere, but it was still not unusual for students to break the ice before or shortly after graduation.

She could apparently read my thoughts. "I don't date much, and I take things pretty slowly."

I was sure it was her standards rather than any lack of opportunity that had limited her dating life. I wondered why she was telling me this kind of personal detail. This was a business arrangement, not a date, and dating was certainly not in our future.

She chose to explain, after some obvious mulling it over. "There were some things to commemorate in my pictures this year. Symbolically at least. That's why... what I wanted you to do, there at the end."

"I understand," I said. "I'd be lying if I said I wasn't more than happy to help."

She got a knowing smile. "Those things are now part of who I am. I wanted to remember them."

I didn't imagine that the first she was speaking of was limited to getting felt up, but it didn't diminish my appreciation of it.

"So what about you?" she changed the subject. "Any special girl in your life?"

The only first I could recall this year was a hand job, and a bit of getting my fingers damp. Not wet, just damp. Not that I couldn't have had more opportunities, but things hadn't developed with prior girlfriends and Cathy was taking things as slow as Tina said she did. I didn't mind. I wasn't in a big hurry, being one of those sad, pathetic saps more interested in relationships than hooking up. "I'm dating Cathy Richardson. You know her?"

Her face lit up. If there was any hint of disappointment in her look, it went right over my head. "Oh, yeah. We have some classes together. We aren't really friends, but we've made small talk a few times. Cute girl. Getting serious?"

"Too soon to tell."

"Oh, well, I hope it goes well."

"Thanks. So do I. I'm seeing her tonight."

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It didn't go well. A month later, we were quits. Amicably, and at least on the surface, by mutual agreement. By then, Tina and I had been out of touch again. She'd texted me once, a week after the photo shoot, to tell me that the pictures were fantastic, and to thank me profusely, again, for helping her out. I made a more or less rote response, which I came to regret given how things later turned out with Cathy.

I only saw her once that summer. I was coming out of a movie with some friends as she was going in with a date, a guy I vaguely recognized from school. We were both happy to see each other, we spent a few minutes catching up, and we pointedly avoided mentioning the photos given the looming presence of her new boyfriend, if that was what he was.

We didn't see each other again till school started. She went to state after all. Surprising, but it wasn't a bad school. We'd gone our separate ways academically, but since so many first-year classes are general curriculum, we crossed paths quite often that school year and became the kinds of friends we never had been in high school.

But it was just friends. Maybe it just wasn't meant to be. Our dating lives were entirely out of sync, though now we were good enough friends to loosely keep track of each other. When she was single, I was dating someone. When I was single, she was attached.

We consoled each other over breakups, we congratulated each other over new relationships. We double-dated once. Rarely, but not never, we hung out either with friends or just the two of us. We never shared details of our love lives, but we kept each other posted on the who, if not the what.

Just before the end of the year, she popped the question again. This time, I was single, again. She had started dating a guy just weeks prior.

We met the day after her nineteenth birthday at the same park that nobody else in the county seemed to know existed. I could swear that the only tire tracks in the dusty parking patch were the ones we'd left there the year prior. She was wearing that same sundress. The freshman fifteen had passed her by completely and it still fit as perfectly as it did a year ago.

This time she chose the afternoon instead of the morning. The setting would be the same, but the lighting would be completely different. If that was intentional, it was a pretty savvy decision. If it was just a matter of her schedule, it was a lucky thing that would add some variety to the growing photo album of her life.

We were friends now, and we had one photo shoot behind us, so when she let the sundress fall to the ground, there was none of the awkwardness of the previous year. My awe at the sight had not diminished one little bit.

She stood as my eyes roamed her body top to bottom, accepting my frank assessment. F-stops and shutter speeds, that's all I was thinking about. Right.

Her bush was neater this year. Still full, but trimmed and subtly thinned out. Very deliberate work, intended for a revelation to be just so, still covered, but more... accessible? She'd intended it to be seen, expected it to be seen, by somebody. That somebody was probably not me.

I'd been thinking about this for a while. A few times through the year, I considered asking her out, but the time was never right, our dating lives were never enough in sync to open a window of opportunity. If it was wrong to treat a friend as an annual voyeuristic opportunity, then, well, I confess. But I still intended to put my best professional demeanor front and center, and to keep any other thoughts simmering in the background.

And I planned on avoiding what had happened last time. I spent a good half hour in the morning making sure I would be as numb to what I expected to see - and maybe touch - as I could possibly be.

I compared her to my memory of the previous year. She looked different. Nothing I could put my finger on, she just looked a little fuller, more put together, a little firmer. The hair on her head was loose and long now, the little girl's braids gone. Her tits were slightly bigger, if my memory served. I had been honest about keeping no copies of the pictures, so I had no way to verify that.

Her easy smile came less readily now, less spontaneously. That I had seen over the year, but only consciously realized it now, thinking back on how I'd seen her in this same spot, this same state of undress.

College was harder than high school, both academically and socially, though she hadn't exactly had it rough. Still, the additional effort, the reduced opportunities for easy status and achievement, it showed on her face. She'd had to work harder at both.

She didn't look beat down or anything like that, just more thoughtful about her expression, her joyous smiles less quick to erupt. She seemed more calculating, more likely to think before she acted. Or reacted. The little-girl innocence was gone along with her braids.

But the confidence, the perceptive intelligence she had in her eyes when I first met her had, if anything, only grown. It was as intense as ever, even more so, and it drew my eyes to hers as much as it ever did. She'd risen to the challenges in both realms, and the accomplishment showed on her face as well.

"Spectacular," I said.

"Hey, what happened to that professionalism and non-judgment?" There was no real pique in her voice, just a smile.

I looked at my bags on the ground. "I haven't gotten set up yet, so I'm still off the clock."

She grinned. "Think you can keep your hands out of your pants this time?"

"Can you?"

"Of course I can." That bright smile made an appearance. She looked over at the bag she'd brought. "My pants are all the way over there."

I started setting up my equipment. I looked at the sky. "Does it ever rain on your birthday?" It was full sun, beating hot on the dry weeds.

"Mother Nature loves me too much," she said.

"She has certainly blessed you," I said, letting the double meaning hang in the air.

We took the same documentation pictures as before, north, east, south, west, like a series of police mugshots or a medical record. I moved closer, but she stopped me. "Let's save the close-ups for later." She went to the towel where she'd laid out her props, moving easily, unconcerned with what view she might present to me.

I snapped a few shots. As before, the candid view of her, not posing, not trying to show herself, just acting normally aside from being nude, seemed to say something about who she was. She looked and moved so confidently, so unselfconsciously that it felt utterly real. I wanted her to have that as well as the things she would deliberately try to show her future self.

She picked up a thick sweatshirt and long sweatpants emblazoned with the college initials and logo. She walked the few steps over to the wall and carefully laid the folded sweatshirt down on what looked like a clean patch of weeds. She pulled the sweatpants on.

If there's anything sexier than a beautiful woman wearing nothing, it's a beautiful woman wearing nothing but long pants. There is something about it, something so tantalizingly sexy in a woman who looks like she ought to be dressed, had just been clothed, but isn't.

Even more than wearing only shorts, or panties or a bikini bottom, the long pants suggest modesty. The juxtaposition with exposed breasts seems to emphasize what is hidden and make a man all the more desirous of seeing it unhidden.

She played for my lens without appearing to be playing. On the front hip was a small logo of the school we went to. Across the ass were the initials, in big, bold, impossible to not look at letters. Above, nothing but skin.

She put the shirt on, and we took some safe-for-work pictures. She became again merely the prettiest girl in school. The most wholesome, the most modest, the girl with the most inviting smile and most penetrating eyes. The girl who knew who she was, knew what she wanted, and knew why she was there. The girl who lived on her own plane of existence and made you grateful when it intersected with yours.

Then she took the pants off. If there is anything sexier than a beautiful woman wearing nothing, it is a beautiful woman wearing nothing but a long-sleeved shirt...

In our last photo session, she said she had let us get carried away with what she opened to my camera. And it had seemed like that. Like she was not quite deciding each step of the way, like her body was getting ahead of herself.

But now, she knew. She knew the effect every move would have, knew exactly what could be seen and what couldn't, and the anticipation it created. And yet it looked completely natural, like she had no idea she was naked, or partially naked. Like she had no idea why anybody would care either way.

It was all her, all who she was. It was who she always had been, adapted to a new idea. Last year, it seemed like she was celebrating new knowledge of what her body could do for her. Now, she'd discovered the power her body had over others, and how to use it to her advantage - and to the benevolent advantage of everyone lucky enough to witness it.

She took the shirt off and sat cross-legged on the towel. I snapped photos of her carefully folding her sweats and setting them carefully on the clean towel. That was her too, the fastidious, neat girl who took care in even the smallest things.

If there's anything sexier than a nude woman, it's a nude woman doing mundane simple tasks that don't normally require nudity.

She stood and dressed. No slow build-up and tear-down of her outfit this time, just a straightforward dressing. Of course, I snapped pictures as she went. Panties, bra, slacks, blouse, sensible shoes. She was dressed as she dressed for school, modest and sexy at the same time, well put together, comfortable. This year's practical outfit did a better job of showing her off, not by being more revealing, but by being more subtle.