All Comments on 'The Photographer's Assignment'

Excellent - your best yet.

Thank you for such a well written piece

Added to my favourites and five stars

It was very engaging. Will you continue it? I am left wondering if she did tame him or she will end up cast off like the rest.

I really liked the way you described Claire's reevaluation of Brad's character and of her feelings for him. Very romantic. Thanks for sharing it.

Well done, as both matured and ended with love. Future developments?

Thank you to everyone for your comments.

I'm going to try to write a couple more short, stand-alone stories before the end of the year (pandemic permitting). It's certainly a very different type of writing to 'Tybalt and Juliet', when I had much more time to explore a wider range of characters and to let them develop over many months.

I'd be particularly interested to hear feedback from any reader who didn't feel that they were able to award five stars. What were the weak points in the story for you? Were there characters that you didn't like? Could the plot have been more engaging.

All constructive criticism is welcomed, so I can write better stories for you!

Very well-written and interesting how she took charge of getting rid of the louts who broke in, and then found herself seeing Brad, and his behavior at school, in a new light once she learns the backstory.

We really need to know whether she made a mistake trusting this guy. It's not clear. Also not insisting on a condom is crazy. Hasn't she heard of STDs? The guy has been sleeping around.

Response to Anonymous on 08/16/20

Thanks for your comments. I appreciate that this is an open-ended story and that this is relatively unusual here on Literotica. In a way, the fact that you are eager to know what happened next, suggests that I might have succeeded in what I was trying to do.

Perhaps I should explain that this story is loosely based on two ‘Claires’, two ‘Brads’ and one ‘Peter’.

The first ‘Claire’ was desperate to go out with ‘Peter’, but while she felt she was making her intentions clear, he thought he was stringing him along. She interpreted his hesitation as disinterest and drowned her sorrows one night, ending up in bed with ‘Brad’ for her first time. Needless to say, their ‘relationship’ lasted days not weeks and when she tried to go back to ‘Peter’ to cry on his shoulder, she found him coldly unsympathetic.

The second ‘Claire’ was a good friend of my ex-girlfriend. She stunned her friends by hooking up with the second ‘Brad’ (a real wrong-un) and everyone assumed that their relationship would end quickly and catastrophically. To the astonishment of all, they stayed together (and ‘Brad’ remained faithful) - they are now married with children. Much later, it came out that both had experienced similar tragedies in their early teenage years and the two of them supported each other as they learned to heal deep scars.

As you say, the relationship could go either way - but I want to leave that up to you to decide. Perhaps that is the easy way out for a cowardly author, but I suspect that if I did choose one path and not the other, I would end up disappointing half of my readers!

The ‘no condoms’ thing was intended to explore the risky choices that teenagers make in the heat of passion, (particularly under the influence of alcohol). I wanted to suggest that, deep down, Claire was more ‘in love’ with Brad than she ever wanted to admit and that her feelings for him had been suppressed for a long time. Since the story is told from her POV, I’ve left it more up to the reader to decide if those feelings are genuinely returned by Brad, or if she's simply one more notch on the bedpost.

Enjoyed this, happy to see you writing again