The contact sheet

Elias came home with me from a different bar, thirty-one, careful hands, a yes that did not wobble. My room in the shared flat had a table, a camera, and a stack of blank photo paper with nothing printed on it. I sat there first in the black coat and turtleneck, bob neat, and I told him the rule before I raised the camera. Photos only with his consent, and sex is not the fee. If he wants the fuck, he can want the fuck. If he wants to stop the pictures, the pictures stop and the fuck can still happen, or not. He said he wanted both, and he wanted his face out of any shot I kept.

I posed him by the window in his shirt, then without it, then seated, and I made ten frames while he watched the lens like a man who liked being seen. The paper on the table stayed blank. Nothing on it could be read because there was nothing there yet. When I had the portraits I set the camera down, cap on, and the bargain ended. What came next was not payment. I stood, kissed him, and said I want your cock. He said take it.

I pushed him onto the bed and stripped the coat and the turtleneck. I stroked his cock until it curved up against his stomach, then I climbed on and sank my cunt down onto it. The stretch made me hold the headboard. I rode him, slow, then mean, hands on his chest, his cock deep. He asked if he could hold my hips. I said yes. I fucked myself on him until the angle lit me up, and I came with my cunt clutching his cock, bob stuck to my cheek, a laugh because I had been the one behind the camera an hour ago and now I was the whole picture.

I told him to cum on my stomach. He pulled out. I stroked that cock and aimed him. He came in thick pulses across my skin, hot, a mess I liked. Then I asked, clearly, if I could make one photograph of the cum and not of his face. He said yes, crop it. I wiped my hands, picked up the camera, and shot downward, frame full of my stomach and the mess, his jaw and eyes out of it because he had asked for that crop. I showed him the back of the camera. He nodded. I put the file in a locked folder before I even cleaned up.

He dressed. I did not offer a key. The blank paper stayed blank on the table, a stack with no readable print, the camera beside it. I kissed him at the door and said the portraits of his face would be deleted in the morning unless he wrote and asked. He said delete them. I did, after he left, and I kept only the crop. I slept with the fuck still in my cunt and the folder locked. Looking had been the start. Using him had been the point.