My girlfriend, Alexis, is a photographer.

Not full time. She shoots weddings some weekends for a friend of hers, and she’ll do your headshots if you ask nice. She’s the kind who spends more on it than she ever makes back.

But it wasn’t her skills behind a camera that first caught my attention.

I met her at a buddy’s wedding. She was the photographer. I spotted her hauling a light stand across the reception in a black dress and heels, dark hair coming loose from where she’d tied it back, trim waist, toned arms, big heavy tits straining the front of the dress. I probably looked like a doofus staring at her slack-jawed, but she looked incredible. She caught me trying to pretend I wasn’t staring, and she told me if I was going to stand there I could carry the other stand, so I helped her with her gear the rest of the night, and by the time the DJ shut it down she’d put her number in my phone herself.

I didn’t usually send dick pics to girls, but she asked me to send her some a few weeks into dating. The first one I sent, she texted back, mmm, baby I love it. the lighting? not so much. Then she gave me notes for twenty minutes while I stood in my bathroom with my pants around my ankles, trying to understand why my girlfriend was talking about white balance.

That sorta became our sexy little couple thing, which was fun, but she always had to art direct. I’d send them, she’d rate them, give me critiques. “Too dark,” or “the angle makes it look sad,” or “mmm, nice and stiff, just how i like it,” or once, in a text I still have saved, “that one’s a keeper, I wanna frame it!” Some nights we shot them together, which always ended in us fucking, or at least a blowjob if time was tight. I actually got pretty good at it because she made me good. Two years in and she still texted back within a minute, every time, and I’d still catch myself grinning at my phone like an idiot because my girlfriend got that excited about a photo of my cock.

But, for someone with such strong opinions about dick pics, she was pretty inexperienced before we started dating. Alexis had two real boyfriends before me, and there was one guy in college, but it apparently didn’t last long, and they barely even kissed. She told me how sexy it felt to get a picture of her boyfriend’s cock, but the other guys either wouldn’t send them, or wouldn’t take direction to make them good. “It’s a genre,” she said once. “Nobody respects the craft.”

We joked that she was an expert, but it was about light and framing and what makes a photo work. I hadn’t considered that she hadn’t actually seen many dicks in real life.

So when Dylan brought it up, I honestly thought it was funny.

We were in the living room on a Tuesday night. Dylan, my roommate, was on the couch with his phone held close to his face, thumbing at it, groaning every few seconds.

“What,” I said.

“Nothing. This girl.”

“What girl?”

“Off the app. Sasha.” He turned the phone around and then thought better of it and turned it back. “She’s, like. She’s out of my league, man. But she’s into me, I think. Maybe. I can’t tell.”

Alexis came out of the kitchen with a glass of wine and curled up on the other end of the couch, immediately interested. She loved this stuff. Other people’s love lives were her favorite show.

“Show me,” she said.

He showed her the picture of Sasha.

“Okay, yeah, she’s hot. What’s the problem?”

“The problem,” Dylan said, and rubbed the back of his neck, “is she’s kind of. Direct. About what she’s looking for.”

“Which is?”

He hesitated. I watched my roommate, a grown man, blush.

“She only dates guys who are, um. Big.”

Alexis laughed, delighted. “She said that?”

“It’s right in her bio. Self-admitted size queen, if you’re not packing nine inches or more, don’t waste my time.” He put the phone face down on his knee. “And she seems interested, but she wants a pic. To confirm.”

Alexis laughed again, and then the laugh trailed off and she looked at him over her wine.

“Wait. You’re serious. And you’re...” She waved a hand vaguely toward him. “I mean. Not to pry, but...”

“Heh.” Dylan looked at the floor, but he was grinning at it. “Uh. Let’s just say I meet her requirements. And then some.”

She glanced at his lap before she could stop herself.

“Wow. Okay. Good on you ... I respect her directness, though. Girl knows what she wants.”

“It’s embarrassing.”

“It’s not that difficult,” Alexis said. “So send her one. What’s the issue.”

Dylan looked over at me, and then at her.

“I don’t know how to take a good one. Every time I try it looks terrible. It doesn’t look like...” He tipped his head at his own lap. “It doesn’t look that impressive. And I only get one shot at this. If I send her a bad one she’s gonna unmatch me and that’s it.”

“So practice,” I said.

“I’ve been practicing. They all suck. It’s like when you record your own voice and it sounds wrong.” He looked pained, and then he turned to Alexis. “And you’re an actual photographer. Like you do weddings. And Spencer says he sends you a lot of dick pics, and you coach him.”

“I never said coach,” I said.

“You said she rates them.”

“That’s between us.”

“I just want some pointers, or something,” Dylan said to Alexis, and Alexis sat up a little straighter, because this was exactly the kind of thing she couldn’t resist. “You’re like, an expert on this, right?”

She tried not to look too proud of herself. “Well, I care about the craft, yes.”

“Could you ... I mean. Would it be weird if you helped me? Like, coached me? You don’t have to, like, take pictures of my cock or anything. Just tell me how to make them not suck.” He said it fast, getting it all out before he lost the nerve. “Please? I would owe you so huge. I’m desperate here.”

He looked at me. “You’re cool with it, right?”

I laughed. My roommate was asking my girlfriend for dick pic lessons like she was a tennis coach.

“Babe,” Alexis said to me, grinning, already half sold. “Should I? I mean, he looks pretty desperate.”

“I mean, I wouldn’t be much of a wingman if I said no, Sasha’s pretty hot,” I said.

“Hey!” Alexis punched my arm.

“What? You said so too!”

She punched my arm again, with a big grin.

“I guess poor Sasha doesn’t deserve whatever sorry excuse for a photo you were gonna send her.”

“That’s what I’m sayin! Please?” He clasped his hands together and looked at both of us desperately.

Alexis made a big show of thinking it over, tapping one finger against her wine glass while Dylan sat there waiting. Then she grinned. “Okay. Fine. Tomorrow. Afternoon, when the light’s good. I’m not doing this half-assed at ten at night. If we’re doing it, we’re doing it right. And you do exactly what I say. I’m not helping if you’re going to tense up every time I point the phone at you.”

“Deal,” Dylan said, so relieved he practically sagged. “Thank you. Seriously. Both of you.”

I sat there feeling generous, like a good sport, and laughing about it with Alexis. It hadn’t occurred to me that this could be a terrible idea, but it sounds pretty obvious in retrospect.

Later that night she took his phone for ten minutes, scrolling through photos, studying them carefully. “Twelve attempts,” she said, “and not one usable shot.”

The next day I ran errands in the morning and came back a little after one. The bathroom door was open and I could hear her in there moving stuff around. Dylan was standing in the hall in a T-shirt and boxers, holding his phone in both hands like he was waiting outside a principal’s office.

She took it seriously. It was a shoot now, and Alexis didn’t mess around when it came to her art form.

She wanted to start in the bathroom.

“Bathroom selfies are a classic,” she said, standing in the doorway, Dylan’s phone in her hand, looking the room over. She’d wiped down the mirror. She’d cleared the counter, all our stuff lined up in a basket by the tub, and draped a gray towel over the rack because the striped one was “loud.” “The overheads are soft and there’s the big mirror. We’ll get your baseline here and then move if we need to.”

“Baseline?”

“Where you’re at now, so we can see what we’re working with.” She was all business. I loved this about her, watching her get competent about something. She’d rolled her sleeves up. She had a little crease between her eyebrows, the one she got behind a camera. “Classic move is the mirror selfie. Everyone thinks it’s easy. It’s not. Most of yours are you pointing it at the mirror with the flash washing you out.”

“That’s bad?”

“Dylan. One of them was just you laying it across the bathroom counter.”

I leaned in the hallway doorway and watched her go into professional photographer mode over my roommate’s dick.

“Okay,” Alexis said. “Take your shirt off first.”

“My shirt? I thought it was just my dick.”

“You’re wearing a SpongeBob shirt, is that the vibe you want to send Sasha?”

Dylan pulled his T-shirt over his head and dropped it on the counter. She stood him square to the mirror and walked him through it the way she walked wedding parties through group photos. “Chin up, shoulders down, stop holding your breath.”

She shot him in his boxers from three angles and stopped between each one to show him the screen. “This is what slouching does, see, this is what the flash was doing to your skin tone.”

“Okay,” she said, scrolling. “Better already. Now the real thing.”

Dylan laughed once, nervously.

“Boxers off,” she said.

Dylan looked at me.

Alexis snapped in his face several times. “Don’t look at him, he’s not going to help you. This is the whole point of the picture, Dylan. She’s not shopping for boxers. Drop ‘em.”

He stood there another second, then hooked his thumbs in the waistband and pushed the boxers down. He stepped out of them, straightened up, and kept his eyes on the mirror.

He was soft. Even soft it hung halfway down his thigh.

“Okay, stand with your feet...” Alexis said, and stopped. The phone drifted down. Her eyes dropped to his cock. “Just...”

Dylan shifted on the tile. “My feet?”

“Yeah.” She blinked and looked back up at him. “Yeah, umm, that’s fine.”

I knew the look. It was the look she gave the keepers, the ones she saved. She’d just never held it this long.

Her hand came up to her collarbone and stayed there, and she took the kind of slow careful breaths she took behind a camera when she was trying to hold steady for a long exposure.

“Okay.” Her voice came out low. She cleared her throat. “Yeah. The, umm. The subject...” She gestured to his crotch. “Isn’t the problem, Dylan.”

She stepped back and got to work.

“Chin up. Shoulders back. Hands off your hips, they’re in the frame.” She crouched a little and shot from lower. “Turn toward me. No, just your hips. There.”

She raised the phone, framed him, then glanced over the top of it at his cock. The phone dipped. She brought it back up and took the shot.

She took three or four more and then stopped and frowned. “Hold on. You’re angled wrong. It points off to the side in the frame.”

She stepped in close and reached down with her free hand and took hold of his cock. Her fingers gave it a gentle squeeze, and she took one deep, heavy breath before turning it an inch until it sat straight in the frame. She kept her hand around it while she checked the screen.

“Just tell him to move it,” I said.

“He can’t see what I see.”

“Alexis!”

“What? I’m aiming it.” She took the shot and let go quickly, like proving a point. She looked at the screen, shook her head, then leaned back in and moved it again, lifting it this time, holding it up out of the way to get the underside. “There. That reads better. See?”

“You’re still holding it.”

She rolled her eyes. “For like a second.” She let go and stood back. “It’s a photoshoot. I position people all the time.”

She scrolled back through what she had and made a face.

“Honestly? His dick’s actually too big.” She said it to the screen, like she was calling out a light reading. “A picture of this thing with nothing next to it, you can’t really get a sense of the scale.” She thought for a second. “Put your hand on it.”

Dylan wrapped his hand around it. She took the shot.

“Umm, point it at me more.”

She took another shot and shook her head.

She sighed. “No, it just doesn’t come across on the screen, I think your hands are too big. Here.” She wrapped her own hand around it instead, curling her fingers around the shaft. She took the picture one-handed while she held him there. “See, look how different that is, my hand’s way smaller, so it just ... it looks enormous in my hands.”

She stood there holding it a moment longer than any picture needed.

“So, umm, that’s a good shot, really good.”

“Okay,” Dylan said, and shifted his weight.

“A few more from this angle.” She slid her hand down the shaft and tried to wrap it all the way around the base. Her thumb and middle finger stopped short of each other. “Wow. I can’t even close my hand around it. It’s so ... I mean, this thing is really gonna impress Sasha.” She wiggled it a little as she said it, then took the picture.

Her hand stayed wrapped around his cock like she’d forgotten she was supposed to let go. Then she stood back and looked at that last photo while her knees pressed together.

She stopped scrolling. “I don’t know, something’s still off. It looks washed out.” She turned the phone around to show us both.

“Yeah,” Dylan said, leaning in. “Yeah, I see what you mean.”

“Looks fine to me,” I said.

She was looking at the screen again. “It’s the light in here,” she said. “The bedroom window’s better this time of day. Come on.”

Dylan gathered his clothes into a bundle in front of himself and followed her down the hall. I stood there, half hard in my jeans with the picture of her hand around his dick replaying in my head. “What the fuck?” I whispered to myself. Then I followed them.

In the bedroom she had him stand by the window where the afternoon sun shone in, and she was right, it did look better.

“See how much nicer this lighting is? There was never anything wrong with the product, you just have no eye for photography. It’s hard to beat natural lighting.” She moved around him in a slow half circle, shooting from different heights. She had him put a hand behind his head. She had him turn a quarter to the side and look back at her. She pulled the curtain half across to cut the glare, checked, pulled it back. She took a lot of them and stopped every few shots to walk over and show him the screen, and he’d nod, and she’d go back to her spot and shoot more. This went on a while.