Photographers often call the last hour of the day “the golden hour.” The angle of the sun is low, and the light is often rich, soft, and saturated. Scenes that are flat and dull often spring to life when the light is right, and both Chelsea and Kyle knew it. That and why Chelsea wanted to make the most of the short period, often less than an hour.

Even with their short experience of working together they had learned to work quickly. Since Chelsea had arrived before him, she’d taken the opportunity to change swimsuits again, this time into a black job that had a zipper running down to near her crotch. Zipped up it would be pretty conservative, but she had it unzipped down to the vicinity of her navel, not that Kyle could actually see anything interesting.

She wore the swimsuit as they shot several scenes. Perhaps the best shots came as the sun was setting, with the flash on the camera providing fill lighting against the colorful sky. “Well, I think that’s that for today,” she said as they finished the final setup. “I’m sure glad you came along; I was able to get at least twice as much done as I’d expected. That’ll allow me to be a little more selective when the time comes to use these.”

“Glad I could help,” he replied. “I had fun doing it, too. Feel free to call me sometime if you need help.”

“I think I’ll do that,” she laughed. “I know I haven’t told you a lot about my website, but at least you’re taking me seriously about it. It’s been nice to work with someone who knows something about photography and appreciates a creative vision.”

“That goes the other way around, too. Look, I’d offer to take you someplace for a drink or a snack or something, but I’m on a bicycle and it’s a good six miles back to my pickup.”

“I’d like that. Maybe we can do it some other time. Besides, I have to work tomorrow. I need to get back and look at what we’ve done on a bigger screen. But yes, let’s do it some other time. I don’t do these photos every night, just when I think the light is going to be right. I’ll give you a call when I want to do it again. Look, if you want, you could stash your bike in the weeds, and I could take you back to your car.”

“No, I’d love to take you up on it but I don’t know for sure if I could find the bike after dark.”

Thus Kyle found himself riding the bike down the road in the gathering darkness. He knew it wasn’t the safest thing in the world to be doing, but traffic along these dirt roads was pretty sparse, and he could hear a vehicle coming for a long ways. Besides, it gave him a little time to think.

Chelsea seemed to be interesting woman. It was rare to find a woman who appreciated and was knowledgeable about the art of photography – and to him it was as much an art as it was a science. While they hadn’t talked much about other things, they seemed to have a lot in common, and she certainly had a different view of how she wanted to present herself to the world. In short, he knew he wanted to know more about this rather unusual woman. It was much too soon to speculate if he could get anywhere with her, and he suspected that she had some ideas that would be out of the ordinary compared to other women he had met. It would be fun to get to know her better, and he hoped he would have the chance to do it.

It took him most of an hour to get back to his pickup, but he was taking his time and being careful in the low-light conditions. It was near total darkness before he reached it, but fortunately packing up only consisted of picking up the bike and putting it in the truck bed. In only seconds he was on the road, satisfied with how the evening had gone. He hadn’t gotten much in the way of photos, but perhaps he had done better in other respects.

It still took him half an hour to get back to his apartment on the edge of the southern Michigan town of Wychbold. He’d lived there a little over two years, since he’d been hired at Mercer-Howe. The job really wasn’t what he wanted to do with his life but the money was adequate – there was no denying that. He might be there this time next year, or in twenty years, or he might not be. He knew he’d rather be doing artistic photography, but at the same time he knew that it was a good way to starve unless he kept it a hobby.

He pulled the pickup into the garage that came with the apartment. About all he had to do was lift the bike from the truck bed and hang it on the hooks on the wall. He was hungry now, so searched around the kitchen for possibilities; a can of stew sounded good, but he wasn’t sure he wanted to eat that much, so settled for a can of soup and a sandwich for dinner. He knew it wasn’t the best of all possible dinners, but at this hour it would serve.

Still, he was curious about the girl he’d met earlier. As soon as he was done eating, he went to his computer, turned it on, and once it was up and running launched a search for “Chastity White swimsuit.” It didn’t take the search engine any longer than it would take for him to hiccup to turn up the site, and he was on it in the click of the mouse.

There was a picture of Chelsea – well, in this case, Chastity – wearing what appeared to be a neoprene wetsuit. It was cut high on her legs, almost up to her waist, and zipped up the front to what appeared to be a snug collar. While he thought it looked very good on her – or she looked good in it, whatever the difference was – the photo was taken in what looked like the springtime against a backdrop of a road running alongside a small lake. The lake looked pretty cold to him, and he somehow doubted that her “wetsuit” would give much thermal protection, no matter how good it looked on her. There was a little bit of text that talked about the swimsuit, and some very oblique comments about the shoot. It couldn’t have come to a total of fifty words.

The main photo was cropped pretty tight, and obviously not at a high resolution. There were a couple of other versions of the same shot in smaller images on the page. In a column along the right, there were tiny versions of the same shots, cropped differently with Chelsea in the center of the photo, and on the left and right, all in the same pose. At the top of the column, there were the words, “Buy wallpapers $1.99.” Out of curiosity, Kyle clicked on one of them, and the photo came up in a relatively low resolution, 400×250 at a guess, too small to actually be used as a backdrop. There was a little bit of advertising verbiage, and a button marked, “Buy Now.”

Interesting, he thought as he backed away from the picture. I wonder how many of those she sells? Obviously a few. Selling very many of them would add up to a nice chunk of change after a while.

Looking to find out a little more, he went back to the main page, which had a couple of ads on it. That could add up to some money too, he thought. He clicked on “gallery” and a row of thumbnails of that wetsuit scene was in a row across the top of the page, with last Sunday’s date on it. Below that was a second row, with the previous Sunday identifying it; the photos were of Chelsea/Chastity standing alongside a road sign, wearing a one-piece blue and white print swimsuit, cut conservatively at the neckline but high on the sides.

He clicked on down the page. After only a few rows of photos, he got the impression that the image format of was fairly rigid, almost always of her standing and not covering more than a third of the width of the photo, sometimes only a quarter of it. That seemed strange, until he realized that if a person had one of those wallpaper photos with her standing on the right side of the photo, she would still be visible along the right if he ran his browser or whatever other program in a reduced frame offset from her image. A wallpaper changer might change those photos every few minutes, or maybe every day. The relatively odd – and as far as Kyle was concerned, artistically incorrect – composition of those photos made sense when looked at from that viewpoint.

Kyle paged on down through the thumbnails, occasionally stopping to inspect one a little more thoroughly. There was nothing sultry about her appearance – in all he checked she seemed like a “girl next door” in the photos, although an attractive one. Almost always her hair was up in the bun, and at least part of the time she had a pencil in her hair. She usually wore glasses, though occasionally she had them in her hand, and a couple times had one of the bows in her mouth, looking somehow both hot and innocent at the same time. If he had to give an impression of the look she was aiming for, “naughty librarian” would fill the bill nicely. She had more than a hint of innocence portrayed in her pictures, but she seemed confident in what she was doing and left the impression that she could be hotter than magma if she wanted to be.

To be honest, that wasn’t the impression he’d formed of Chelsea just a couple hours ago. Very businesslike and focused, yes, and comfortable wearing a rather hot swimsuit for a photo, like that nearly backless red and white job. But hot? No – that didn’t seem to be what Chelsea was aiming for.

And she did have a lot of swimsuits. There were some repeats in the long page of thumbnails, but not very many that he noticed, although probably only the hotter ones stood out to him. Many were pretty conservative, but there were a few that were hot indeed, either mesh see-through, or wet fabric, although when he got right down to it most of those seemed to be intentionally teasing. It was obvious there was more sizzle there than there was steak. She’d mentioned that she’d done some bikini shots early on, but a quick looked revealed no sign of them – perhaps she’d taken them down. Everything was a one-piece swimsuit of one sort or another, though some of them were only barely one-piece, like that monokini she’d been wearing today when he’d met her at the bridge.

Kyle knew – or at least thought he knew – that attractive women who wore one-piece swimsuits usually did it out of body modesty. Chelsea didn’t seem to have any, and apparently tried to project the image that Chastity didn’t, either – some of the less-modest one-pieces on the website would run the risk of arrest if worn in public, even in these liberal times.

Clearly there was more to this Chelsea than met the eye.

He sat there in front of the computer paging through the thumbnails, occasionally stopping and looking at one until it grew later than it should have. Kyle knew he had to get to work in the morning, and knew he was obsessing over the girl more than a little, so reluctantly he shut down the computer, took off his clothes, took a shower and went to bed. Tomorrow would be a long day.

Work was predictably dull for Kyle the next day. Oh, he was busy enough, but there was a large dose of “same shit, different day” involved. Once again, it was not what he wanted to do with his life, but couldn’t see a way to make a living out of what he really wanted to do. He felt that this was at best a job, rather than a career.

He was busy enough that he didn’t think about Chelsea very often. When he did, he rather hoped he would hear from her, because she had seemed like a nice woman and one he would like to get to know better. But, the way things worked out, he didn’t have her number, so the burden of contact would have to lie on her.

His office in the plant was windowless, but when he got to look outside around noon, he realized it was clouding up – a high, thin overcast was washing out the light and off in the west a more serious cloud bank was moving in. While it might still be possible to take photos, the light would be gray and relatively lifeless, not the brightness that would lead to good contrast and highly saturated color. One look at those clouds and it seemed darned unlikely that he would be hearing from Chelsea that evening, and so it proved. The sky the next day was little better, though the weatherman on TV seemed to imply that the stuff would be moving out in another day.

The next day was nice but hardly perfect, at least to his photographer’s eye; the sky was murky, the light was neutral, and it just didn’t ring his bell. Somehow he wasn’t expecting to get a call from Chelsea, and he didn’t. Although the weather was hardly cooperating, he was getting a little disappointed that he hadn’t heard from her, though there was a part of him that didn’t expect to hear from her again.

He certainly wasn’t thinking about her when the phone on his desk rang in the middle of Friday afternoon. It was Chelsea, and his hopes rebounded. “I hope it’s all right for me to call you at work,” she said.

“It’s all right if it doesn’t take too long and doesn’t happen too often.”

“That’s understandable, it’s kind of like that where I work, too. Look, the light tonight probably isn’t going to be perfect, but I think I might be able to work with it. Would you like to ride along? Maybe if the light is at least OK we can speed up the picture taking again and get more done like last time.”

“Sure, I’d love to.”

It took a couple minutes to work out the details, mostly that she would pick him up after he got off work. It was only a short drive for her to come to his place; she said she was off work now and it would waste less time that way. “I’ll throw in some sandwiches and chips. That way if we do get some good light we don’t have to break off to get something to eat.”

That perked his afternoon up right there. It wasn’t exactly a date – well, a working date, maybe – but she was taking the lead on things, and there was always the hope that eventually it might go someplace interesting.

Needless to say, he was out of the office like a shot once quitting time arrived. He hustled over to his apartment – which was actually one half of a duplex – got on some casual clothes and grabbed his own camera bag, not just the little pocket camera he carried when he was on his bike. He was just finishing when he heard the doorbell ring. As expected, Chelsea was the caller. She was wearing what was obviously another one-piece swimsuit, a black one that showed a little skin at her sides, but was also wearing a wrap-around skirt, presumably for propriety or something. “Are you ready to go?” she asked.

“Sure thing, let’s go. Are we riding in your car?”

“That’ll make it simpler than having you follow along on your bike,” she smiled. “I thought maybe we could head out north of town. I have a couple places in mind for possible locations, and after that we can just drive around until something strikes our fancy.”

“Sounds like a plan to me,” he agreed. “You might know this neck of the woods better than I do, so I’m not going to be gentlemanly and offer to drive.”

“I thought you must be new in the area,” she said as they headed out to her car. “I haven’t seen you around before.”

“I’ve been here a couple of years, but I usually don’t get very far out of town. It seems pretty countrified to me, and it’s more peaceful than living in a city.”

“I tried that once and didn’t like it very much,” she said as she got into the driver’s seat while he got in the passenger side. “I guess I’m just a small-town girl at heart, although there are parts of it that seem pretty shallow to me. In a way it would be nice to have a little more anonymity like there would be in a big city. Let’s face it, my website gives me something of a reputation, and it’s one I’d sometimes rather not have.”

“I hunted up your website the other night,” he admitted. “You’ve got some nice photos on it, and I think I understand what you’re trying to accomplish with the odd composition of the photos.”

“That wasn’t my idea. It came from one of my readers, back when I had the site as a blog before I went commercial with it. It actually works out pretty well at least well enough that I make quite a bit in sales each Sunday night. Handling the sales is automatic, and I don’t have to do much with them. All I have to do is check sales figures and transfer cash to my bank account. The whole idea is a little goofy and kind of strange when I think about it. It’s one of those things I got into bit by bit, and all of a sudden I looked up and said, ‘Hey, what the heck happened?’ But the money is nice and I can’t complain about that.”

“I think you get points for ingenuity for coming up with the idea in the first place. You’ve carved out a nice little niche for yourself.”

“It probably won’t last forever. These things have a life of their own. From what I can see, they grow, and then they start to die, mostly because the creator starts to lose interest. I have seen it happen in photo websites, web cartoons, and a lot of other things. I suspect in another few years I won’t be doing it, but it’s been a nice ride so far. There are times it’s a real pain in the neck, though.”

“Still, it has to be interesting. I’ll bet you run across some pretty different people.”

“Oh, the e-mails and comments I get can be interesting, but they get old after a while, too. As far as meeting different people, it just doesn’t happen. Everything is online. You are actually the first person I’ve met face to face and had more than the most casual conversation with about the website. That’s kind of refreshing, you know. I’ll tell you what, I’m friendly online with some people who are strange, maybe even interesting, but I sure don’t think I’d want to meet any of them personally, at least not without an armed guard. Some of them are really batso, if you know what I mean. I get – well, at least Chastity gets at least two or three marriage proposals a week on the average, and a lot of other propositions that don’t involve a wedding ring.”

“I can see how that would happen. In fact, it strikes me as one of the real downsides to the whole deal.”

“It’s why I go out of my way to keep my real identity secret, and it’s also why most of my photo locations are pretty generic. I mean, how many tumbledown barns are there around the country, or how many cornfields? Don’t ever suggest a location that shows a street sign. I want photos that could have been taken anywhere from Minnesota to Georgia. Sometimes if a nice weekend comes along I’ll drive several hundred miles away just to get some different landforms.”

“At least it gets you out to where you can see some different countryside.”

“There is that,” she conceded. “Look, if you don’t mind we’re going to go a ways north. There’s a hilly patch that’s a state game area, and there are a couple spots that look like we’re really down in hill country. One of my regulars swears he knows the spot in Kentucky where one of the setups for a pic was done. We’re hundreds of miles away. There are some spots there I haven’t used in the past, so we might get some good shots.”

“Fine with me. You’re the one driving, after all. Look, I was thinking about it. I think I understand what you’re trying to do, photographically, at least. Would you mind if I try a few shots? If you like them, you’re welcome to use them without attribution or acknowledgement.”

“I’m willing to do it if you are. As you saw the other night, doing all these photos as selfies is a time-consuming pain in the tail. Let’s do it both ways tonight and see how it works.”

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