Slip of the Tongue (Slip of the Tongue 1)

“What else?” I ask.

“What about this one?” He shows me another. My head is twisted over one shoulder, my expression playful, my hair plastered to my cheeks. I don’t remember biting my lip, but the evidence is there on the screen. I’m not looking at the camera, though. I’m looking above it. At Finn. My insides tighten.

Finn touches something, and the screen goes black. He holds the viewfinder over his eye. Snap.

“Finn . . .”

He brushes his knuckles softly down my cheek and clears some hair off my neck. He takes another, but the graze of his touch remains.

“I took my makeup off.” My attempt to thwart him sounds as lame as it is.

“Hmm.” He adjusts a dial before taking the next photo. “I noticed. Funny how I . . . I mean, the camera . . . likes you anyway.”

This time, when I say his name, it’s a warning. “Finn.”

“I can’t help myself.”

“You can’t?” I ask. “Or you don’t want to?”

I see the edges of his smile from behind the camera. He lowers it. I’m likely wearing the same expression I was in that last photo. I’m not a model, and I’m no actress. That lusty look in my eyes was the real thing, and it’s not going away.

Finn reaches out and traces my neckline. Just the feel of his hand through the fabric sends my heartbeat racing. Lights up my skin with goose bumps. He pushes a fingertip into my dress, against my skin. It’s not enough. That simple, barely-there touch puts me more on edge than if he’d just gone and grabbed me. He tugs until I sit forward.

“Can’t help myself,” he answers my last question. “Don’t want to. Won’t.” Slowly, deliberately, with ample time for me to protest, he lifts my hair off my neck and slides my zipper down the length of my spine. He peels the dress over one shoulder, exposing the curve of it.

And he takes my picture.

He angles my jaw a little to the side. The room is darkening from the storm. The only sounds are raindrops against glass, my body-swaying breath, the slice and click of the camera.

“Fix your hair,” he says quietly.

“How?”

“However feels right.”

I rake a hand through my roots. I gather it in a loose, damp ponytail.

“Pull it.”

The little I’ve already given in makes my restraint slippery. He’s not asking, so I don’t have to decide for myself. I curl my hair around my hand and make my scalp tingle. I wait for his next command, my ass melding to the couch cushions. My dress is stiff. He pushes it down by the neckline, over my bra, to my waist.

“You’re made for the camera. For this lighting.” His voice scrapes like a dull knife on my skin. “For me.”

Despite the heat, a series of tremors run through me. I try to keep them inside, try not to move, as if my participation is ambiguous. There are things I want to feel—Finn’s tongue in my mouth. His hands on my breasts. The rock hardness of him pressed to my thigh. I don’t know if all that means I want to do this, though.

“It’s okay to move,” he says.

I hug myself to stave off any more trembling and run my hands over my biceps. I drink more coffee and Kahlúa. The heat coats my throat and chest like a syrupy waterfall.

“You asked what I like to take pictures of,” he says from behind the safety of his black box.

I look at him. His one exposed eye is squeezed shut. “Strangers,” I say.

“The opposite. I prefer someone I know. I get to see a new side of them.”

“What are you seeing now?”

“You have a lot of levels, Sadie. You don’t show them easily. Maybe you don’t even realize they’re there.” He can see all of me, yet I’m missing most of his face. I’m not sure if that’s making this descent into moral gray area easier or harder. His words are physical, hands on me, several of them all at once.

I suppose Finn is right—people are just layers upon layers, some permeable, some impenetrable. I’m no exception.

“You wear nude, lacy bras,” he adds. “I didn’t know that.”

My laugh dies before it ever leaves my mouth. Instead, I exhale softly. My panties match my bra, and he must be wondering about them. I shouldn’t encourage him, but his attentiveness feels like a warm lamp in a cold room. “What else?” I ask.

“You take direction well.”

“There’s one I haven’t heard before . . .”

“Lie back. Feet on the couch.” His voice has taken on a new tone, one not to be argued with. I move lengthwise on the couch and rest my shoulder blades against the arm.

“Let me see you. All of you.”

The pulsing swell of arousal between my legs is the only thing driving me now. I’ve barely slid my dress over my hips when Finn comes around the table and grabs the hem. He yanks it down, down, down, over my thighs, calves, ankles, to the floor. When was I last undressed in front of someone other than Nathan? I cross my ankles and cover my bra.

“How can I see when you do that?” he asks.

“You can’t,” I say. “That’s the point.”

“You don’t want me to?”

I hesitate. I’m not worried he won’t like what he sees—I’m worried he will. That he’ll want to do more than look. That I won’t stop him, even though I should. Shouldn’t I? It’s not as if Nathan has made any effort to stop me. He watched me walk away this morning. He ignored my requests for him to participate in the shoot, to come home, to let me come to him. He’s turned down sex, intimacy, conversation. After a quick glance over the past few months, I’d be stupid to think he wants me to chase after him anymore.

I unfold my arms first.

“I’ve never seen anything like you,” Finn says, capturing my every move. “Now your legs.”

I uncross them, bending one knee, scraping the velvet over the ball of my foot. It’s more coarse than comfortable. “Have you done this before? Photographed someone like this, I mean.”

“Haven’t taken things this far, no.” He pauses. “I guess I never had the right subject.”

“Not even—”

“No. She doesn’t inspire me.”

I keep my eyes on the lens. To him, I’m the right subject. The only subject. How can so much have blossomed in so little time? Yet, I understand it. I’m wrapped up in him enough that I want the camera gone, but not enough that I’m bold enough to do something about it. I want to pause time. For this not to count. In the steely gray early evening, in a warm place that seems as if it could only be my imagination, I think, maybe for tonight, this could be a private space between realities. Somewhere only we exist.

A bolt of lightning reminds us how dark it’s gotten. Finn switches on the lamp at the foot of the couch. I look down the white-dune hills and curves of my body at him.

He takes my ankle and lengthens one leg. His touch on such a private part of me is foreign at first, and then it liquefies, melding with my skin. My silence is a form of trust. I’m not stopping him.

Keeping a firm grip on me, he puts a knee between my feet. “Are you shaking because you’re scared?”

Since I first saw Finn in the hallway, we’ve been engaged in this drawn-out, fucked-up dance of innuendo and lingering glances. Foreplay with him is the space between us: the things we haven’t said; the admissions we haven’t made. If I’m scared, I can’t feel it, and if I’m shaking, it’s surpassed by my anticipation. “I’m not scared.”

“Good.” He leans forward so the camera looks directly down on me. “Show me.”

“What do you want to see?”

“Whatever you want me to see.”

His attention is heady, addicting. I won’t know how far I’m willing to go until I get there. When I do, I’ll stop. It won’t ever be too late to walk away. And if I don’t walk away at all? I’ll have my answer—I can’t stop.

My hands are unsteady as I reach under myself, arching my back. I unclasp the single hook-and-eye of my bra and remove it with the delicacy it demands. My nipples pebb

le with their freedom, with Finn’s eyes on them.

Finn watches my every movement, unwrapping his present with captivated eyes. His gaze devours this private part of me. “What fucking tits,” he says, and my body trills. It’s crass and unlike him, as if he just had to say it. I’m getting wetter, too swollen for my panties.

“Finn,” I say like a prod in the arm, because he’s not taking pictures.