"The Lens as Mirror"
by Adhara Law

(c) 1998 Adhara Law. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced
without express written permission by the author.




I stood in his studio, where white satin dripped in silky clouds from the 
walls, umbrellas of light cascaded off the ceiling. It was a place where the 
thin, veiled shadows of young and naked models moved in a different dimension 
made of negative images. I stood where they stood, posed where they posed.

Bare arms, legs, chest, he moved my limbs like a doll and snapped quick 
flashes.

"Stare at the camera. Don't smile." 

I obeyed silently. 

It had started as an effort to take a nice picture of me for the company 
newsletter -- a simple, graceful headshot. Being a professional, it was only 
natural for my husband to take the picture. I wore a fawn-colored cashmere 
sweater and a conservative lipstick, my hair tastefully held back in a 
tortoiseshell clip. I smiled, the camera clicked. 

He took five shots of me like that, my body turned slightly to the side, 
angled so that I looked at the camera askance. But then his expression 
changed. Somewhere in the space between images, he'd had a flash of artistic 
epiphany and began posing me, tilting my head, removing my clothes, sliding 
the clip from my hair and letting it fall in pools around my shoulders. I sat 
on the white satin of his studio, bare skin tingling at the rushes of cool 
air from the high windows, while he fluffed my hair and added more eyeshadow. 
Somewhere in the medicine cabinet, he'd found a darker shade of lipstick -- 
a brazen red that screamed seduction. It had been so long since I'd bought it 
that I had forgotten it was in there.
 
"You're so beautiful," he breathed. 

I hadn't heard that from him in over fifteen years. 

"I've never seen this part of you." His voice had the quality of an 
archeologist at the tomb of a lost pharaoh.

The next day I came home to find the photos strewn over the dining room table 
and him hovering over them in complete concentration. His hands moved them 
over and around one another, placing certain pictures together. I looked down 
at them.

Had I not been in them myself, I'd have never guessed it was me he'd taken 
the photos of. From out of each glossy image stared a beautiful woman looking 
nowhere close to the forty-three years old that I was. She looked like one of 
the women he often photographed, the women with creamy flesh and candy lips 
who pouted and draped themselves over him as he turned them into works of 
art. The women I hated. In most of the photos, this siren staring out from a 
black and white world seduced the viewer with begging eyes, arms crossed 
seductively in front of her, hiding just enough flesh to entice the camera to 
want to see more. 

She was me.

"I want to exhibit these," he said, looking up at me from the pile of photos. 

I didn't know what to say in reply except, "Okay."

A few months later I found myself dressing nervously for his photography 
opening. My dress politely covered me without leaving enough to the 
imagination. We entered the gallery amidst the bubbles of champagne and talk, 
light laughter floating through the air on currents of artistic chatter.

People milled, women in black stopping in front of photos with hands on hips 
and a criticizing eye. I noticed a large group gathered around one display in 
particular. My husband took my arm in his and, with a professional smile, led 
me to the crowd.

I stared where they stared, my breath stopping in my throat as I took in the 
sight before me. A picture I'd remembered him taking, but not one that I'd 
seen before this night. There I was on the wall, in black and white, sitting 
and leaning back against my arms on the white satin, my head thrown back and 
my knees raised slightly. Shadows from the walls licked at my barely hidden 
nipples. And though the image was obviously of a woman well into her mature 
years, the slight spread in the hips and thickness of the thighs seemed 
merely to add to the breathtaking image. I was seeing myself, as I was meant 
to be.

I was beautiful.

Through the night, admirers remarked at the beauty of the images, the 
freshness of the subject. They congratulated me on such a fine display of my 
gracefulness. I could only blush. Thank God it eventually ended.

We drove, my husband and I, in the stark silence of the car, the mottled 
darkness of the tree-lined highway guiding us home. As I stared out the 
window, I felt his hand caress the inside of my thigh, eliciting a twinge 
from the depths of me. I looked over to his shadowed face. He smiled. I let 
him continue, blushing at the sensation of something I hadn't felt in 
uncountable years. Marriage, I reflected, had a way of dimming the spark of 
lust. 

At home, I stood before the dresser, carefully removing my earrings. He moved 
behind me, his fingers on the zipper of the dress as he slowly began pulling 
it down. I let my arms go to my sides as I watched him through the mirror, 
his lips slightly parted to let his breathe escape is tiny gasps. I stood 
silent while he pulled the dress down over my hips and let it ripple to the 
floor in a puddle of blue silk. I watched the reflection of his hands running 
over my stomach and up to my breasts, where he let them pause, as if to renew 
his acquaintance with something he'd once cherished but had long forgotten.
 
I turned. As I found his mouth with mine, I reached behind me and removed the 
rest of my underclothes. He stepped back to watch. The feel of his starved 
eyes as they crawled along my body brought shivers to my cool skin, and I 
found myself stripping slowly, delicately, as he watched hungrily. When I'd 
let my silk panties fall to the floor, he hit the light switch and we both 
moved to the bed, the nervousness and unsurety of ourselves, so much like the 
first time, moving the adrenaline a little faster through our veins.

He pulled me to him to lay side by side on the bed. His mouth tasted my ears, 
my neck and my shoulders as it sought the hidden crevice behind my 
collarbone. I arched my back as he moved down, his tongue gently savoring the 
flesh he'd been away from for so long. 

My body seethed at the rediscovered sensations, the forgotten flow of 
feelings, and so I pushed him onto his back and covered his hips with mine, 
sliding him into me with ease. We both moaned as I ground into him with an 
urgency that comes from abstinence. And as his hands ran hungrily over my 
hips, I wondered, did he feel the flesh of the nineteen-year-old nymphs I'd 
grown to hate, with bones that jutted and stabbed? Was I, at that moment, one 
of the models who so shamelessly displayed herself for him like wares in a 
store in the hopes that he would buy? Did he feel the tight pussy and the 
juices of a girl twenty years his junior, now, fucking him as they ran down 
his hips and onto the sheets?

When he ran his hands eagerly over the full and ample flesh of my hips, the 
soft spread of my thighs as they pressed against him in rhythmic thrusts, and 
pulled me down against him in a soft moan, I knew that it was me that he 
felt. 

"Your body..." He moaned, too deep in the rising tide that was washing 
through him. I pushed harder, faster, reveling in the freeness of my self, my 
own beauty as I came, loud and alive, his own orgasm trailing behind mine. 
And then we settled in amongst the sheets, hands and legs intertwined.

That night, I dreamt of youth, but did not miss it.     



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thought of this story.