Smile for the Camera (incest)

The robe is a mistake. Cherie knows it the second her son's eyes drop from her face to her collar and then — too fast, too guilty — back up again.

"Thanks for agreeing to help me with this project, Mom." Brad's voice has that teenage crack in it that never quite went away, even at twenty-one, even with a camera worth more than her first car hanging from his neck. "My original model backed out at the last minute and I don't have time to find anyone else." He turns the camera over in his hands, thumb rubbing the shutter like a worry stone. "Are you... uh... wearing the... uh... lingerie?"

The studio is his bedroom with the furniture pushed against the wall. A folding massage table sits in the middle under a white towel, red vinyl glowing at the edges. There's a softbox on a stand, a green strobe head, a sad potted grass plant in the corner that's supposed to look like decor. The curtains are open because he said he needed daylight, and Cherie is suddenly, acutely aware of how much daylight there is.

"Yes, I'm wearing it," she says, and hears herself get prim before she can stop it. She tightens the belt of the robe with both hands. Black silk, lace at the shoulders, hem at mid-thigh — she'd bought it for an anniversary trip that got cancelled and never worn it since. "But I definitely don't feel comfortable letting you take pictures of me in it. The robe stays on, I'm afraid."

Brad lifts the camera and looks through the viewfinder, and something in his shoulders settles. "Well, I don't have much choice, so I'll take whatever I can get. Smile for the camera, Mom."

FLASH.

The flash is small and bright and fast, and Cherie's smile goes stiff and polite, the smile she uses for other people's weddings. He shoots again. She puts her hands on her hips because she doesn't know what else to do with them, and the robe pulls across her chest, and she can feel the silk sliding against her thighs.

FLASH.

He shoots four, five, six frames, and each one throws that little white pop into her eyes, and by the sixth she's noticed something. Not unpleasant. Just — noticed. A softness at the back of her skull, like the moment before a nap. She blinks it away.

"That's great, Mom." Brad lowers the camera. "How about opening the front of the robe a little bit?"

Her mouth opens before her brain catches up. "Now wait a second! I said the robe was staying on!"

"You want me to pass, don't you?"

And there it is. The sentence lands right where he aimed it, under her ribs, in the place where she keeps every school play and every scraped knee and every 2 a.m. drive to the pharmacy. Of course she wants him to pass. Of course. She's his mother. That's the whole reason she's standing here in a silk robe with her stomach in knots.

"Yes..." she says, and the word comes out slower than she means it to.

"And I'm not asking you to take it off. Just open the front a little."

FLASH.

The flash hits and she keeps talking, and it's like the words keep going after her thought has stopped. "Okay... but just a little!"

Her fingers find the belt. Untie. The silk falls open maybe four inches, and cool air moves against her sternum, and she folds the lapels back and holds them there like she's guarding something.

FLASH.

Bigger than before. Brad has found the strobe, and this one is a white room with edges, a blink of nothing, and when her eyes come back the world has a haze in it. Her smile feels loose on her face.

"Look at the camera," Brad says. Not a question.

She looks. FLASH. Her jaw softens. Somewhere behind her eyes, a little switch goes tick.

"You're gorgeous, Mom. Much prettier than my original model." FLASH. "Go ahead and open the front of the robe."

"But I said—"

"It's okay, Mom. I see you in a bikini all the time, and this covers more than that does."

FLASH.

That's... actually true. She turns it over. Is it true? There was Cancun, two summers ago, the blue two-piece with the little tie at the hip, and Brad had been there, and he'd seen her whole back and most of her stomach and the tops of her thighs, and nobody had died. This robe is more clothing than that. A lot more. It's practically modest.

"That's true, I suppose." The lapels slide out from under her fingers, and she watches her own hands work the knot at her waist like they belong to someone else. "And I do want you to get a good grade..."

FLASH.

The robe comes open. Not a little — open, black silk peeling back to the elbows, and Cherie's brain does a hard reset in the white afterimage.

She's in the blue lace. Strappy blue panties, a low, scooped bra that isn't quite doing its job, the garter straps framing her bare hips, black stockings, black heels she'd had to dig out of the closet. The air is doing everything it can to the lace.

"Oh," she says quietly. She hadn't looked in the mirror before coming out. She hadn't wanted to.

FLASH. FLASH.

Brad's thumb works the shutter dial. "You're enjoying this, aren't you? It makes you feel hot and sexy. And the camera loves you!"

"It does not." But she's grinning, she's preening, one hand sliding up the open robe to frame her collarbone like she's seen models do, and the flush moving up her chest isn't from the heat of the lamps.

FLASH. Her eyes go white and empty for a heartbeat and she feels it happen, that blankness, that slack moment where there's nothing in her head at all. Then the picture snaps back in and her smile is wider.

"Now let the robe slide off," Brad says. "It's okay, you're covered."

The silk goes. Just down her arms, just to her wrists, and she lets it drop off her fingers entirely onto the table. She's standing in her underwear in front of her son and she's laughing a little, that nervous huff she does when a thing is already past saving.

"Oh alright."

"Thank you." FLASH. "You're beautiful, Mom."

"You're sweet." FLASH. "This is so weird."

"You're enjoying this, aren't you?"

"I actually am," she hears herself say, and the honesty of it startles her. Her hands are on her hips again, one hip cocked. She's arching. FLASH. "God. I actually am."

FLASH. FLASH. The strobes are coming faster now, or maybe she's just losing track, and each white burst takes a little more with it when it goes — a word, a worry, the shape of a thought she'd been halfway through. There's a warm, dumb, happy blankness spreading through her like a swallowed drink.

"Why don't you climb up on the table and give me some sexy poses."

FLASH.

"Yes," she says, because there isn't any reason not to. "Okay."

The vinyl is cold on her knees through the stockings. The table creaks. She gets up on all fours with her weight on her forearms and there's a moment of arranging herself, the towel sliding, her hair falling forward over her face, and then she realizes her back is to him and the whole length of her — spine to tailbone to the seat of her panties pulled taut — is the only thing in the frame.

FLASH.

The white takes longer to clear this time.

"Did you just take a picture of my a—"

"Focus, Mom. Sexy poses."

FLASH.

She blinks. Focus. Right. She drops her chest down and arches her spine and turns her face back over her shoulder so he can see her grinning, and the flash comes again, and her eyes flash white in the picture she'll never see.

FLASH. She swings her legs off the end of the table and drops to her knees on the sheet, chin tipped down, looking up at the lens through her lashes, one hand trailing on her thigh. FLASH. The table is the only stage she has and she's working it like she's done it a thousand times, and she has never in her life done anything like this.

FLASH.

She turns onto her side. Heels on, knees bent, one leg stacked over the other, the whole front of her from the lace at her breasts down the strapped hollow of her belly to the long line of her legs presented to the camera. Her cheek rests on her folded arm and the sheet is soft and she is warm and the room has gone very quiet and very far away.

FLASH.

Click, click, click — no strobe now, just the little one, and it doesn't matter, she's not waiting for it anymore, she's just holding still and smiling with her eyes half shut while the white pulses against her face.

Brad steps back to check the screen. Cherie stays where she is. It doesn't occur to her to move.

"Good," he says. "Those are really good." He glances up. "You can relax for a second."

She doesn't relax. She lies on the table with her legs crossed at the ankle and the sheet bunched under her hip, and she listens to the strobe's capacitor whine and thinks — dimly, happily, from very far away — that she has absolutely no idea how much of this lingerie she's still technically wearing in one piece, and even less idea how much longer that's going to last.

FLASH.

Her eyes go white.

She smiles at the ceiling.