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From: "Eros' Dreams" <eros_dreams@hotmail.com>
Subject: {Adhara} "The Lens as Mirror" {M/F}
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THE LENS AS MIRROR
by Adhara Rawcalyn
(c) 1998 Adhara Rawcalyn. All rights reserved. May not be distributed or 
reproduced with the exception of USENET archiving 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. I hadn't remembered buying it. 

"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 hips 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 back seduced the viewer with begging eyes and 
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 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. 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. 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. His 
hands ran 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 hit the light switch as 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 seeming to 
gently savor 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 juices of a girl twenty years his junior, 
now, 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.     

------------------------------------------
Adhara Rawcalyn: eros_dreams@hotmail.com




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