Nothing Too Revealing

The studio smelled like coffee and hot dust and the ghost of somebody's cigarette from 2009, the kind of smell that lived in old buildings no matter how many coats of paint you threw at the walls. Nikki stood in the doorway with Brad's hand pressed low on her back, his thumb tracing a slow circle through the cotton of her dress.

"You sure about this?" he murmured.

"Baby, you asked me that three times in the car."

"I'm asking because you keep smiling like you're about to rob a bank."

She turned her head just enough to catch his eye. "Maybe I am."

She was five nine, which she'd spent most of her twenties apologizing for, and she'd stopped straightening her hair at forty because it turned out to be wavy, and it turned out she liked it. She had good arms — she'd swum competitively until she was nineteen, and the shoulders had never quite gone away. It was the only part of herself she was vain about, and she was vain about it quietly, the way you are about a thing you didn't earn.

The photographer's name was Dominic, and he came around a corner with a camera already slung over one shoulder like he'd been born wearing it. Late forties, graying at the temples, dressed in a black T-shirt that had seen better decades. He shook Brad's hand first, then Nikki's, and held it a beat longer than he needed to.

"Your friend Marissa speaks highly of you," he said.

"Marissa says a lot of things."

"She also said you'd be good in front of a lens. I make it a rule to trust her." Dominic gestured toward a folding table covered in magazines and printed portfolios. "Sit. Let's talk before we shoot anything."

Brad pulled out a chair for her. Nikki sat, and Dominic spread the materials out in a wide fan: catalog spreads, editorial pages, a few lifestyle campaigns for a denim brand and a watch company. The women in the photos were composed, elegant, fully clothed. A hand on a hip. A shoulder turned away from the light. A smile that hinted at something without ever naming it.

"Fashion houses, mostly," Dominic said. "Some skincare. A couple of hotels who want their guests to think they might meet someone interesting in the lobby." He tapped a page. "None of it scandalous. All of it suggestive. Because everybody in this business knows sex sells, they just want it wrapped in cashmere."

"Right, right." Brad nodded along like a man being sold a car. "And the money?"

Dominic named a day rate. There was a comma in it. There was also a half-day rate, which was two-thirds of the day rate and made no sense except as a courtesy.

Brad's eyebrows went up and stayed up. He looked at Nikki. "That's — yeah. That's not nothing."

Nikki flipped through the pages slowly. Her own reflection ghosted over the glossy prints — the good arms, the wavy hair, the face she was still learning to like again. And behind it, for a second, the girl who used to walk into a bar and feel every set of eyes swing toward her like a compass needle. There was a photograph on her phone she hadn't deleted: a bad cellphone shot from 2011, her on a fire escape at two in the morning in a slip dress, laughing at whoever was holding the camera. She could call it up in three seconds. She thought about it maybe once a month.

She'd traded that girl for a wedding ring and a mortgage and quiet Friday nights on the couch. Not a bad trade. Just a different one.

"You comfortable?" Dominic asked.

"Are you asking if I'm shy?"

"I'm asking if you're comfortable. There's a difference."

Nikki set the pages down and stood. "Where do you want me?"

A kid came out of the back with an armful of reflector and sandbags. Early twenties, hollow-cheeked, a hoodie with a hole in the cuff. Dominic said, "Ruben, tether," and Ruben tethered the camera to a laptop on a stand, and then he looked up and saw Nikki and forgot to look away. Not once. He didn't do it rudely — he just kept finding reasons to be facing her.

Brad didn't notice. Brad was looking at her too.

The first few shots were nothing — standing near the window, chin tilted, hand on her hip. The shutter clicked and clicked, and Dominic circled her with the patience of a man who'd done this ten thousand times.

"You're holding your breath," he said. "Let it out. Let me see your shoulders drop."

She exhaled, and something loosened in her chest that she hadn't realized was knotted.

"Better." Click. "Your husband's watching you, you know."

"I know."

"Does that change anything?"

Nikki let her gaze drift toward Brad. He was sitting at the folding table with his arms crossed, leaning back, watching her the way he used to watch her across a crowded room before he'd worked up the nerve to say hello. That look. That specific, hungry, reverent look.

She slid one hand up the column of her throat and let her head fall back a fraction. Click.

"Oh," Dominic said quietly. "There she is."

He straightened up. "All right, come look at something. Both of you."

Nikki crossed the room. On the laptop screen was the frame he'd just taken — her, throat bared, jaw up, and the neckline of her dress doing considerably less than she remembered it doing. She made a small sound.

"Yeah," she said. "That's the problem."

"That's not a problem. That's a Tuesday." Dominic dragged a box across the screen, typed something, hit a key. The laptop thought about it for four or five seconds. Then the neckline rose, fabric filled in where there'd been skin, and the dress came up her chest in a clean, modest line. A little too clean. She could see where the light didn't match.

"That's — " Brad had stood up. "Hang on. That's the same picture."

"Same picture."

"You just — " He leaned in. "It looks real."

"It looks good," Dominic said. "Real's a lower bar than people think."

He took it back to the original and did it again, slower, and this time Nikki watched the fabric crawl up her sternum. Her stomach did something. It was such a small thing. It was also, somehow, obscene — she'd been standing there with her chest showing and now she wasn't, and nobody had touched her, and nobody ever would have to know.

Brad laughed out loud. "Do a jacket."

Dominic did a jacket.

"Do a — " Brad snapped his fingers, delighted, turning to her. "What about the necklace. The one Mom gave you. Do a necklace."

Dominic dragged a shape at her throat and the shape became a chain and the chain became a pendant, and Nikki stood very still.

"There," Brad said. "See, that's — babe, that's classy."

Dominic glanced up at her. Just a flick, two seconds, and there was something in it that hadn't been in his face a moment ago. Not warmth. Arithmetic.

"Nothing too revealing, though, right?" Brad said, sitting back down, and said it cheerfully, the way a man says a thing he's never once had cause to doubt. "I mean, within reason."

Dominic straightened. "Within reason."

The next hour was a slow undressing that never actually undressed anything. Nikki arched against a stool and let the neckline of her dress shift half an inch. She turned away from the camera and looked back over her shoulder with her lips parted. She laughed at something Dominic said and let him catch the laugh mid-frame, her whole face bright with it.

Brad shifted in his chair. She could hear the leather creak from across the room. That small, involuntary sound sent a curl of heat straight down her spine, and she had to bite the inside of her cheek to keep from grinning like a cat.

"Hold that," Dominic said. "Ruben."

Ruben stepped in to move the reflector and Nikki caught him at it — the hunger right out in the open, undefended, a kid looking at something in a shop window. He was close enough that she could see his throat move. Then he stepped back and folded his arms and put his eyes on the floor.

"You're a natural," Dominic said, checking the back of his camera. "Genuinely. Most people freeze up, or they try to perform."

She glanced at Brad again. He was watching her with his jaw set, and she knew that expression. She'd seen it on their first date, on their wedding night, in the parking lot of a grocery store two years ago when she'd bent over to grab a fallen receipt and caught him staring at the back of her thighs.

She wanted to walk over and straddle his lap right there. But she didn't. Instead, she turned back to the camera and gave it something private — a slow half-smile, her fingers curling into the fabric at her waist.

"Last one," Dominic said. "Then I'll send you home with the proofs."

Brad drove home with one hand on the wheel and the other on her knee. The folder of digital prints — a USB stick, mostly, plus a few physical proofs Dominic had printed as a courtesy — sat between them on the console like a third passenger.

"You were good," Brad said.

"I mean it. You were — " He paused, tongue between his teeth. "You looked like you used to. Before."

"Before what?"

"Before everything got so — scheduled." His thumb pressed into the dip above her kneecap. "The calendar. The budget spreadsheets. The Saturday errands."

"Being married is a lot of Saturday errands."

"I'm not complaining."

"I know you're not." Nikki put her hand over his. "I liked it, Brad. That was fun!"

"It reminded me that I married the sexiest woman alive. You look just as good as you did in the club."

They got home and didn't make it to the couch. Well — they made it to the couch eventually, but not before Brad had her pressed against the hallway wall with his mouth on her collarbone and his hands fumbling with the zipper at the back of her dress.

"You're gonna pull a seam," she breathed.

"Let it rip."

"It's a ninety-dollar dress."

"Then I'll buy you a new one. I'll buy you ten."

The zipper gave, and the dress slid off her shoulders. Brad's mouth followed it down, open and hot on her sternum, then lower, tongue dragging across the top of her ribs while his hands closed on her hips and hauled her against him.

"God," he muttered into her skin. "You looked so good in that studio. Standing there with your chin up like you owned the place."

Nikki tangled her fingers in his hair and pulled. "Maybe I did."

They stumbled into the living room. The proofs slid off the console and fanned across the floor when she dragged him down onto the rug with her, and Brad braced himself on one elbow and looked at her — really looked, the way he hadn't in months, maybe longer.

"You're still wearing way too much," he said.

"So take it off."

He did. His hands were slower than hers would have been, and that was the thing about Brad — he never rushed when she wanted him to rush. He peeled the strap of her bra down one shoulder, kissed the indent it left behind, then the other. He unbuttoned his own shirt and let her watch his chest rise and fall.

"Come here," Nikki said, and reached for his belt.

By the time they were both naked, the rug had started to feel like a bad idea against her spine, so Brad hooked an arm under her and carried her the four steps to the couch. The leather was cool against her back. It was also, she discovered, at exactly the wrong angle, and she had to shove a cushion under her hip before she could settle.

He propped himself over her and did that thing where he looked at her too long. Gaze dragging from her mouth to her chest to the damp hollow between her legs. Nikki felt herself flush from her collarbone to her scalp.

"You're blushing."

"I'm not."

"You are. It's the best thing I've ever seen."

She reached down and wrapped her fingers around him, and the sound he made — low in his throat, almost pained — was better than any photograph. She stroked slowly, thumb sweeping over the head, watching his forearms tremble.

"Wait," he said. "Wait, I want — "

He didn't finish the sentence. He just slid down her body, mouth open, and Nikki's head fell back against the arm of the couch as his tongue found her.

Time did something strange then. It stretched. The ceiling above her went soft and unfocused. Her hand found the back of his head and her hips lifted off the cushion without her telling them to, and Brad groaned against her like he was the one being touched.

"Don't stop," she whispered.

He didn't. Two fingers slid inside her while his tongue worked, curling slow and deliberate, and Nikki's thighs clamped around his ears hard enough that he laughed — a hot, humming vibration that nearly tipped her over the edge right there.

"Not yet," she managed.

Brad pulled back and wiped his mouth with the back of his wrist. "Not yet?"

"Not the couch."

He understood. He stood, pulled her up, and the two of them left a trail of clothing down the hallway that Nikki knew she'd be picking up tomorrow morning with a stupid grin on her face.

The bedroom was dark except for the lamp on her nightstand, and the sheets were cold when she slid under them. Brad climbed over her and paused, one knee on either side of her hips, looking down.

"You sure?" he asked.

Nikki answered by wrapping her legs around his waist and pulling him in.

The first push made her gasp. He was slow about it, watching her face, and she felt every inch of the stretch as he buried himself to the base and held still, breathing hard through his nose.

"Okay?" His voice was shot.

"Okay," she said, and dug her heels into the small of his back.

He moved. Not fast at first — a deep, steady rhythm that made the headboard bump the wall in a slow tick. Nikki’s hands found his shoulders, then his back, then the pillow above her head, fingers twisting into cotton as his hips snapped harder.

"You looked so good tonight," he said between breaths. "Standing there. Letting him take your picture. Letting me watch."

"You liked that."

"I loved that." His hand slid under her left knee and hooked it higher, opening her up.

The angle changed. Something bright shot up behind her ribs, and her mouth fell open around a sound she didn't recognize as her own. Brad saw it and did it again, and again, driving into that same spot until her hands went white-knuckled on the sheets.

"Stay with me," he said.

"I'm here. I'm — don't stop — "

He leaned down and kissed her, messy and off-center, and that was what finally undid her. Nikki came with her heels in his back and her nails in his shoulders, and a raw jolt of heat rolled through her so hard she stopped breathing for three full seconds.

Brad followed a beat later with his face buried in the curve of her neck. His weight settled onto her, heavy and warm, and the room went quiet except for the two of them fighting for air.

Nobody moved for a long time.

"Do the paperwork this week," he said eventually, muffled into her hair. "Call Dominic. Take the job."

Nikki smiled at the ceiling. "Yeah?"

"For the modeling. Call him."He lifted his head. "I mean it. And listen — you know I'm on call all next week. Marchetti's got me on the overnight rotation and then the Anchorage install the week after."

"I know."

"So I won't be able to come to the next one. Or the one after that." He kissed her jaw. "But you don't need me there. You didn't need me there tonight."

"Sure I did."

"Call him," Brad said again, and rolled off her.

He was asleep in four minutes. She lay still until his breathing evened out, then got up and gathered the proofs off the rug and shuffled them straight without turning on a light. She stacked them on the nightstand and got into bed.

The print on top was her over her shoulder, mid-laugh, and the pendant hung at her throat.

She set it face down. Then she lay in the dark and thought about a kid with a hole in his cuff, standing close enough that she could see his throat move.