Chapter 11

Patient Narrative - Christina Melendez - entry eleven: A new year and a photo-shoot with Suzanne Johnson

I spent a typical stressful Christmas with Mom’s side of my family. That meant a trip to West Virginia. We had to fly to Dulles Airport and then drive west, for three hours. Yes, three hours, in a rental car, with my parents. And things were never that great at my grandparents’ place. They never liked the fact that Dad’s parents were from Mexico and that she had taken Melendez as her last name. However, Mom sort of got the last laugh on them, when Dad got all that money from his investments. We now had more money than the rest of them combined, and while the others toiled in crappy minimum-wage jobs, Mom spent most of her life traveling and doing fun vacation-type stuff.

It was that year, the final Christmas I’d spend with my family as a teenager, that I realized what was going on with my parents and all those cruises, why they were showing off, and to whom. I knew that my grandparents were pretty nasty to Dad when they first met him. But, what could they say now? There was no question that Mom, at least from a material point-of-view, had a much better life than anyone else in her family. She also felt that all that travel and partying and cruises made her “sophisticated”. She loved to return home as and present herself as “the world traveler”. My grandparents had been very wrong about Dad, and she loved to rub that in their faces whenever she had the chance.

As I watched Mom bore everyone with her travel stories and Dad sitting next to her, silently looking at investment statistics on his cell phone, I thought to myself: I don’t know what I want from my life yet. But I do know what I don’t want. I don’t want to be like any of them: not like my grandparents, not like Dad, and certainly not like Mom.

I was constantly thinking about Yvonne. I couldn’t help it because we were texting and sending selfies to each other continuously. I knew that she was spending Christmas with that friend who had gotten her the job at Gi-Gi’s. I was glad about that, because if her family was as bad as she made them out to be, I could imagine being with them over a holiday would be pure hell.

My parents left on yet another cruise a few days after we got back from West Virginia. I was so happy to see them get out of the house and to have Yvonne come back over. I hadn’t seen her for nearly a month.

The next two weeks were the best of our relationship. As always, I took off my clothes the moment my parents left the house and was appropriately naked when she came over. She had gone back to her normal bossy behavior, so she took control of me as soon as I was in her arms. Her hands were all over my body and I passively allowed her to seduce me. If felt so good, being like that with her.

I served dinner, and as we were cleaning up, we noticed it was snowing outside. Snow storms weren’t common in our area, so we watched the snow come down in my back yard for a few minutes before going to the hot tub room. We exchanged massages and sat in the hot tub with the lights turned off and watched the snow as it continued to accumulate outside. It went without saying school would be canceled the next day.

The snowstorm was the most severe the region had experienced since a record-breaking storm in the 1930s, so we were snowed-in for the entire week. Even Gi-Gi’s was closed, so neither of us had any reason to leave my house. There was plenty to do, so we didn’t get bored: Yvonne got me to improve giving massages and I got her doing more advanced yoga moves. We spent hours in the pool and hot tub, and more time in bed. We had naked dares, chased each other around the house, and took lots of pictures. We cooked together and I taught her several recipes so she wouldn’t be so hopeless in the kitchen.

When I lost one of our dares, she gave me the only spanking that I got from her the entire time we were together. The spanking was different from the ones I was giving her: it was more playful and seductive than punishment. I went over her lap and placed my bottom at her mercy. She was totally fascinated with that part of me, so she massaged and rubbed my ass more than she slapped it. Feeling the caresses and the warm slaps on my exposed bottom, and knowing that she was taking in every detail of my bare backside while I was submissively lying over her lap completely turned me on. She knew that, and slipped her fingers between my thighs to give me a really great orgasm.

The weather warmed up and the streets cleared over the following weekend, so after a week of non-stop sexual adventures in my house, Yvonne and I returned to school and resumed our normal routines, which included pretending not to acknowledge each other whenever anyone else was around. My parents came back in the middle of the week, Yvonne went back to her job at Gi-Gi’s, and I went back to studying. It was frustrating that I couldn’t see her. However, I realize something now. I think that one of the reasons we were so passionate with each other when we were together was because of the other times we were forced to be apart and couldn’t see each other.

Over the months we were together, Yvonne and I took hundreds of pictures of each other, as well as plenty of us together that were taken with the timer on her phone. Every single picture we ever took of ourselves had to be without any clothes. The rule with our cameras and cell phones was the same as it was when we were alone in my house, we could not use a camera unless we both were fully undressed. The same rule applied to selfies: no clothing could be in the picture. So, we sent each other a lot of nude pictures.

However, Yvonne was not satisfied with the growing collection of amateur images we had of each other. She wanted something special and more professionally done. In the middle of January I realized how determined she was about that when she told me that we were going to have a three-hour session with the famous erotic and glamour photographer Suzanne Johnson. I was stunned. Suzanne Johnson? How on earth did Yvonne manage to get a session with Suzanne Johnson? How did she even know her?

Suzanne normally worked out of Chicago, where her husband and son lived, but she spent part of her time traveling around the US and had a system for setting up temporary studios in the cities she was visiting. The place where we were going was one of those temporary studios. When we showed up at the door, we were greeted by a young woman who was wearing a skimpy chemise that was completely open on the sides. She was not wearing anything underneath. The only other items she had on were a cloth belt to hold her garment in place and a pair of deck shoes. She told us to got into a changing room and remove all of our clothing, to include the necklaces and bracelets we were wearing. I nervously undressed and did as I was told. I put my necklace and two bracelets in a pocket of my coat. Then, as naked as we could possibly be, Yvonne took my hand and led me to the main part of the studio.

Suzanne was wearing the same style of chemise that her assistant was wearing. She was naked underneath that one garment, and like her assistant, wore nothing else except a light belt and deck shoes. That was her normal work outfit in the studio. She kept the temperature warm for her models and did not want to be uncomfortable while moving equipment, setting up cameras, and giving instructions to her subjects. I later learned that style of chemise was popular in a European country called Danubia and that Danubian women typically wore chemises when the weather was hot. Suzanne liked the style, which was perfectly suited for moving about in warm temperatures, so that garment became something of a trademark for her. She bought several, in different colors, and rarely wore anything else when she was working.

Suzanne was tall and voluptuous, and pretty in a Victorian sort of way. She was soft-spoken, but at the same time very direct with what she wanted. Whenever she had a camera in her hands, her personality became very intense and she was somewhat intimidating. If you were her subject, you did what she wanted and that was the end of it. It was her profession to convert you into high-quality art, and it was something she was very good at.

The photographer had two ways of charging her customers. She was more than happy to photograph subjects who didn’t have any money, as long as they agreed to grant her ownership of the photos she took and allowed her to publish or use them however she wanted. I knew that was the arrangement Yvonne must have made with her.

As I stood naked in the studio with Yvonne holding my hand, I realized that what we were doing with Suzanne was a just a variant of the streaking we had been doing outside a few weeks before. Yvonne loved to see herself naked and wanted to see her body posted around the internet. She wanted people to look at her. What better way to do that than to have someone as well-known as Suzanne Johnson take a bunch of high-quality figure and fetish portraits, show them in art galleries, and distribute them online?