Page 50 of Most Likely to Match
It’s only a moment before I stop myself and face her, though a sticky, shameful fear in me can’t let the sheet go. She catches it all from behind the viewfinder. She lowers the camera, her expression turning guarded.
“What’s wrong?” she asks after a moment of heavy silence.
I shrug. “Just wasn’t expecting it,” I lie.
She glances down at the camera, back at me. She sucks her lower lip into her mouth. Thinking pose, one that hasn’t changed in fifteen years. “You don’t trust me.” It’s not a question.
To buy myself time, I take a drink from my mug. Then another. “If it makes you feel any better, I don’t think I’d trust anyone to take a photo of me while I was naked.”
Her frown deepens. So it probably doesn’t make her feel better.
A flicker of resentment, or something that looks a lot like it, crosses her face, but it’s gone so quickly I probably imagined it. Chloe’s shoulders expand on a deep sigh, then she crosses back to my side of the bed. She sits at the edge of the mattress, the robe slipping off her shoulder to reveal more of her breast, her nipple, rosy pink and pebbled. She holds the camera out to me, viewfinder first. “Take my picture?”
I take the camera from her, almost instinctually. The weight of it, the cold of the plastic base, all of it, is as familiar to me as my own body. I think I could recognize my cameras if I were blindfolded, based on touch alone. “You want new headshots already?” I ask, checking the exposure and shutter settings absently.
She reaches for me again, directing the camera lens more firmly at her and the viewfinder at my face.
“Take my picture,” she says again. “I trust you.” Her voice is soft, tender, questioning. Whatever her level of trust is, her tone belies the statement. I want her to trust me, though. And more, I want to trust her.
My finger hovers over the shutter button, then the click seems to echo through my bedroom as I take the first photo. Her eyes flutter open, her back straightening, like she’s surprised but also, maybe, a little pleased. I don’t bother looking at the display to see the photo before I set up for the next one. I sight her through the viewfinder this time, backlit by the sun, bracketed by shadow. I sit up straighter, flip through settings with my thumb until I find monochrome mode.
Light like this deserves to be prioritized.
“Can you turn…” I reach for her, guiding her chin to the left, the right, tip her face up an inch, looking for the right placement. “Like that,” I murmur.
Click.
“Do you wanna see it?” I ask, still staring at the camera version ofChloe, somehow captured on LCD. This old tech doesn’t seem capable of holding all of her in, even if I can see the reality of her in front of me.
“No,” she says, her voice barely a whisper. “Does it look…nice?”
I smirk at her, turn the screen for her to see.
“Oh,” she says, surprised.
Nice isn’t the word I’d use. Nice is for annual family photographs, where everyone is dressed in a different version of the same outfit. Nice is mass-produced photography prints from discount home furnishing stores.
Chloe is art.
“Can I take another?” I ask.
“You can take as many as you need,” she says simply. As if fifteen years of distrust and ill-processed trauma can be solved in one photo shoot.
I must believe it can be, though, because I lift the camera again.
“Can you…” I gesture to my shoulder, and after a moment of hesitation, she hooks her fingers in the fabric of the robe, pulling it down.
“Like this?” she asks.
I nod and she lets the robe drop from her shoulders, flannel pooling around her naked waist. I extricate myself from the sheets, doing my best not to disturb the fabric around her, crawling to the other side of the bed, her back to me.
“What are you—” she asks, turning to face me.
“Go back,” I say, a polite command— the kind I use with clients. She listens, facing the other direction. “Wait. Turn back, right…there.” I stop her in profile. “Look there?” I point at the wall above the bed. I gather her hair in my hand, place it over one shoulder, then the other, let it hang down her back before setting it back over her shoulder. “Like that,” I say. “Perfect.”
She is. A perfect model. The lines of her face, her body, the way her skin soaks up light, the mysteries in the shadows cast across her. I could spend hours doing this, capturing whole photographs and small pieces of her.
Click.
