The photographer told me he was going to capture some different smiles. That made me grin. “Perfect,” he said. That made me grin, too.

“Were those two smiles same?” I asked him.

He grinned.

“Let me try a little story for you,” he said. “Something that happened yesterday that I thought was funny. We ordered cous-cous from Amazon. Lou makes it really good. Do you know what cous-cous is?”

I said I did.

“This stuff is from Israel,” he said. “Or anyway it’s Israeli style. I have no idea what that is.”

“Me, neither.”

“It’s a little softer than the cous-cous we were used to. Pearls. Little pearls of cous-cous.”

I don’t know why, but when he said “pearls” I though of clits.

“So it came yesterday, and after my wife opened the package, she told me she’d stored the packets in the cous-cous place. I had to laugh at that. Like that’s going to tell everyone exactly where the cous-cous is—in case they come over wanting to locate it. ‘Oh, it’s in the cous-cous place.’”

I made a hm sound.

The photograph said, “So you didn’t find that funny? Amusing?”

That made me smile again. I’m not sure if it was the same smile or a different one.

We tried out some other poses, more than headshots, and then we got to the sexy ones. For one of them I was sitting on the floor, and he kind of frowned at me. I asked him if something was wrong.

“No,” he said. “It’s just that—”

“You can tell me,” I encouraged him.

“You have a very pretty pussy,” he began. “But I wonder if there’s a way it could show more. If it could be a little open.”

“I suppose I could open it,” I said. “But I’m not sure if it would stay open.”

He nodded.

“Maybe if you thought of something sexual,” he suggested.

Clit came to mind. From when he’d said pearl in talking about cous-cous. Then I thought about my first boyfriend. This was back in high school. We were sitting in his car, his dad’s car. We’d just kissed for the first time. It was a nice kiss. We kissed for most of an hour, I guess. I got pretty turned on. Then we kind of just sat next to each other, like taking a breather from the kissing. I wasn’t sure what was going to happen next. We were both wearing jeans. I could see where his erection had pressed up the front. And there was this little brass nodule, I’m not sure what it’s call, at the edge of the inner pocket. The light hit that brass nodule and it gleamed.

Kind of like a clitoris, I thought—the shape of it. And I touched it with my forefinger. I touched it and I touched the denim just around it, comparing the feel of the metal and the feel of the fabric, and I wondered how it would feel if he touched my clit with his finger. With his tongue. I kept touching that little brass nodule, and then I moved my finger into the pocket, deeper into the pocket, and I could feel his bulge, and then it lurched. It lurched again and again, maybe six or seven more times, and I knew he was coming. He made sort of an oh sound and he shifted away from me. I shifted with him and pressed my hand, now outside the pocket, right on the bulge. I pressed hard, and we kissed again, and I started coming. It was my first time with a real boy.

“Perfect,” the photographer said. I smiled.