Kyle was a while getting to sleep after he got home, mostly from the pleasant but erotic visions of the future that kept running through his mind. Unless he screwed up really badly, it seemed likely that at least some of them would come true. He hadn’t known Chelsea that long, and they’d really only had a couple of dates even if he stretched the definition of the previous night’s photo shoot – but it seemed wild that things could have gotten this far this quickly. He hadn’t really even been looking for a girlfriend; if one had happened to come along, it would have been fine with him, but this much, this soon … it was hard to believe.

Even more interesting was that much better things seemed likely to be on their way. There would be no turning back now, not that he was interested in the slightest in turning back.

When he did get to sleep, he was still full of strange sensations. Things like this had never happened to him in the past, so he was filled with wonder and anticipation for what could happen in the future.

He woke up late the next morning, still full of wonder at what had happened the day before. He was stumbling around, trying to pull himself together when his phone started sounding its ringtone, the first few bars of Toccata and Fugue in D, which jarred him a little. As he started toward his phone, he irrelevantly thought once again that it might be a little too serious and heavy piece of music for that purpose, but right now he didn’t let it bother him.

Not unexpectedly, the caller was Chelsea. “So how are you this morning?” she asked in a voice that was somehow both casual and provocative – or maybe that was just the frame of mind he was in.

“I don’t think I’m awake enough to be able to give you a straight answer,” he replied.

“I slept pretty well myself,” she replied. “Although I’ll be the first to admit that it somehow seemed a bit lonely for once.”

“Now that you mention it, I felt the same way,” he admitted. It wasn’t the sort of thing he would have said if she hadn’t left the door open for it, but it really did seem like the truth now that he put it into words.

“We never made any plans for getting together today, except that we would,” she countered. “So I figured I’d better call so we could work things out.”

“I guess that slipped by us. Have you had breakfast yet?”

“No, I was thinking maybe we could go somewhere. I don’t get to eat breakfast out very often, and somehow the thought of Cheerios or Pop-Tarts just doesn’t ring my bell today.”

“Sounds like a good idea to me,” he said. “Give me a few minutes to get dressed and get organized, and I’ll come pick you up. We can work out what we’re going to do from there.”

Fifteen minutes later he parked the Spitfire on the street in front of her apartment. He didn’t even make it to her front door before she opened it, noticing that she was wearing medium shorts and a camisole top – no swimsuit was evident, the first time he’d seen her without one, not counting some wonderful minutes the previous evening, of course. “You made it more quickly than I expected,” she smiled.

“I can move pretty quickly if there’s a reason to,” he said, and then, his curiosity overwhelming him, continued, “How come no swimsuit this morning?”

“Oh, I have several in my duffel bag, but I try to be a little conservative about wearing them around town. I’ll put one on when we work on your car, and who knows? We might wind up going somewhere to take some photos.”

“I sort of doubt it,” he replied. “Unless this overcast moves out the light is probably going to be pretty lousy all day.”

“If it does, we can find other things to do. Let me grab the bag and I’ll be ready to go.”

They didn’t do anything special for breakfast and just drove to Becky’s Café, a small breakfast-lunch diner downtown. Kyle had been there perhaps half a dozen times in the time he’d been living in town, and he felt it was adequate. “We could go somewhere else,” he said as he pulled into a parking space, “But then we’d be taking a chance on finding out if the place is decent.”

“I suppose,” she replied. “But getting out and looking for a good place for a breakfast is a perfectly good reason to go somewhere on a weekend morning, and gives us reason to look for new locations to set up for photos.”

“True, but considering the light we’re not going to want to mess with that today.”

“I was looking at the weather on the net,” she said as he stopped the car. “It might clear off later, and we could get some decent light in the afternoon and evening. If we do, fine. If we don’t, I’m sure we’ll come up with other things.”

They went inside and got a table. The place proved to be pretty full of the Sunday morning breakfast crowd, but they were in no hurry. Two or three people in the place noticed Chelsea and said hello to her; she had pleasant comments in reply, but she didn’t introduce him.

“You seem to be pretty well known around here,” he said after the waitress had brought the menus and coffee.

“I meet a lot of people at the library,” she replied. “It’s probably not that many people, but after a couple years in town I guess I do know a few of them.”

“You’ve been here since you got out of college?”

“There was a little break when I was living at home and not liking it very much, but I was lucky enough to turn up this job. I really do like it, and I get to meet a lot of people, although I don’t get to know them very well.”

“I suppose that has its downsides,” he commented, trying to talk around the Chastity White part of her life.

“Well, yes it does,” she replied, getting what he was saying. “Let’s face it, in a small town you’re not anonymous, like I more or less was at college, so sometimes it’s a little hard to keep my private life separate from my public one.”

This was getting near subjects that really shouldn’t be talked about in public, he thought, so he changed the subject. “I take it you must be some kind of bookworm.”

“I guess I am, although not as much as I once was, I don’t think. I still like to read and I do a lot of it.”

“Anything in particular?”

“Oh, I read a lot of different things. My taste changes from time to time. I went through a period last winter when I read a lot of different murder mysteries, for example. Some are mostly potboilers, but I found a few authors I like who are a little bit above that level. My interest in that finally went flat. Recently I’ve been reading a lot of contemporary fiction, some of it the kind of things you’d find on the shelves at the supermarket. Sometimes I’ll go weeks without picking up a book to read for myself. If I’m not in the mood to read, I like to get caught up on my sewing. My other hobby interests don’t take up a lot of time, and in a good piece of the year I do very little with them.” It didn’t take him much to realize she was referring to the website with that.

“I like to read a lot too,” he said, carefully drawing away from discussing her “hobby.” “Not much fiction, though. Oh, I’ll read the odd technothriller once in a while, but mostly my tastes run toward science or history. I have an interest in history, just for reading. Lately I’ve gotten interested in British history from, oh, about the end of the Crimean War up through the start of World War One. They managed to get into all sorts of interesting colonial wars, and there’s a lot of ‘England always muddles through.’ I just finished one about the Zulu War in South Africa that was pretty good.”

“That’s an unusual taste,” she frowned. “I don’t see that very often.”

“Who said you had to have a corner on unusual tastes?” he smiled without getting into detail. “I don’t know why I like the subject, and it seems very out of step with the way things are done today, but it fills some time every now and then.”

Talking about books proved to be a safe subject while they were sitting in public. It soon proved they had not read very many of the same books. That was no surprise, but it was clear they were both enthusiastic about their reading. It was just another point of contact between them, showing once again that they had a lot of common interests.

Eventually they finished their breakfasts. They got back into the Spitfire and drove back to his house. “Do you want to wash this now?” she asked.

“Let’s put it off, maybe till this afternoon,” he suggested. “I do want to get it done, but if we’re going to go driving again, maybe we ought to wait until it’s over with. How would you like to look at some of those photos I took yesterday?”

“I can’t think of much else I’d like to do,” she smiled. “But I could stand to do some driving, even if we don’t take any photos. Look, about the last few minutes. I think you understand that I’m trying to keep a pretty low profile around town about the website and my private life. I guess I’d rather people didn’t know about my secret alter ego.”

“I understand thoroughly,” he said. “But Chelsea, I think you have to realize that sooner or later it could catch up with you.”

“Yes, I know, and I’m not looking forward to it happening,” she sighed. “Look, I have a lot of fun with it and you and I both can have a lot of fun with it, but I think we need to be discreet for as long as we can.”

They were soon back in his apartment, firing up the computer. He slid the chip from his camera into the reader, and soon they were looking at the photos he’d taken the day before, and especially the night before. He paged through them rapidly, occasionally stopping when something special made its appearance, but when they got to the nude shots in the sunset they slowed down. “Those look pretty good,” she said after examining a few of them. “I get a little chill when I think about how bold I had to be to let you take those as short a time as we’ve known each other, but they’re exciting to look at. I have to say that the sky doesn’t seem as glorious as it did last night.”

“You’re photographer enough to know that when you try to do two different things at the same time, sometimes one or the other of them is going to not come out as well as you would like,” he pointed out. “But those are just raw images, and they can be processed to look a lot more spectacular. I agree that the sky seems a little washed out, but that’s something that could be fixed.”

“I know from seeing your work that you’re pretty good at tweaking photos, and I have to wonder how this one would respond to your techniques.”

“It could be made to look a lot better,” he said. “You look pretty good already, but there are a few things that could be done to improve the appearance there, too.”

“I think I told you that I don’t process my Chastity photos much,” she said. “Oh, I crop them, fiddle with the density a little sometime, and clean up some blemishes, but I’m no great artist at it. I’d like to see what you’d do to this one and how you do it.”

“If you want to sit and watch I’m willing to take a swing at one of them. But let’s find a frame that’s worth the trouble.”

In a few moments they found one of the nude shots that appealed to them both. She was sitting on the picnic table; her bare breasts were prominently displayed, but her crotch area was slyly hidden. “Let’s face it, we’re looking for art, not porn,” he said, bringing up the photo in Photoshop. It was only the work of a few seconds to increase the color saturation and the density of the sky; while the sunset had been a pretty good one before, now it gained in luster, almost overwhelming the point of the picture, which was her.

“That sky looks pretty good now,” she said. “But my skin tones are wrong, and I feel like I’m not the point of the picture.”

“Depends on what you want. Just on the face of it, here you’re enhancing the sunset, rather than the other way around. But I agree, your skin tones are wrong. However, there’s a way to fix that easily.”

It took a few minutes, but soon he had cropped everything out of the photo except her and a piece of the picnic table. He saved that as a separate file on a transparent background, and spent a little time enhancing it, remembering to retouch the mole on her leg she didn’t like to see in a photo, and making a couple of other changes. Then he went back to the original photo, and worked on brightening up and improving the saturation of the sunset until it looked quite spectacular. Then he pasted the revised version of her photo over the original image. “Presto chango,” he said.

“Wow, that’s quite a photo,” she said approvingly. “In a way it’s too bad it can’t be used on the website.”

“The techniques stay the same. I’m sure they can be done for photos that are a little more like the way Chastity wants to look.”

“You have to teach me some of that.”

“Easily done. There isn’t anything complicated, it just takes practice, a good eye and a little being a little picky and careful.”

“I’m not sure I want to over-enhance the Chastity photos that much,” she frowned. “It seems, well, almost like lying, if you know what I mean.”

“Not wanting to get philosophical, but isn’t the whole Chastity thing something of a lie? I mean, you’re purporting to be someone, something you’re not.”

“Well, yeah, but with good reason, and you saw the reason this morning. It’s just that, well, I’m more comfortable with seeing what the camera sees. I mean, photos aren’t supposed to lie, if you know what I mean.”

“Photos lie. In fact, they lie all the time, from the moment they’re taken. They’re isolating a view from what is going on around them. It’s just that in the digital age, it’s easier to lie with them.”

He spent a minute online, and came up with a distant photo of the New York skyline, taken perhaps from somewhere around the Statue of Liberty – he didn’t know and had never been to New York in the first place. In only a few seconds, he had the part of the original photo with her and the picnic table sandwiched over the top. “Now you’re a nude model working out of New York,” he smiled.

“That was too easy.”

“Yeah, it is,” he said. “That kind of thing is done a lot and it’s surprising it isn’t done more often. Now, it’s usually possible to closely examine a photo like this and tell that it’s been massaged or faked, but most people won’t go to the effort. Let’s just say that there’s all sorts of chicanery that can be done with photos, and it’s one of the downsides of the digital age. It’s harder to do with film, which is part of the reason I’m a little sorry to see it going away. But it still can be done – it just takes more skill and more work. I suppose I’m not very honest as a photographer since my art consists of enhancing photos, but I like to think it’s a valid art. I still respect that eight by ten view camera we were talking about yesterday, and although I’ll probably never use one, I’m sure I miss it.”

She was silent for a moment. “I suppose it doesn’t matter if we do some minor tweaking to the Chastity shots, but I think I want to keep them of the real thing. I mean, I don’t think I ought to do a studio shot up against a blue screen, and then paste it over some landscape. I think the shots should still be done on location, and keep at least that much of it honest.”

“Your call on that, and your vision. I still think we can make some very interesting photos, even if they’re not something Chastity would use.”

“I guess I want to think about it. I’ve got something that works and I don’t think I want to mess with it without careful consideration. Tell me what, let me go get on a swimsuit and we can wash your car, then go driving.”

“If we wash it and go driving, we’ll probably just have to wash it again.”

“So? That just gives me another opportunity to wear a swimsuit outside here in town.”

“That does make for a powerful argument,” he grinned. “Chelsea, I think you’re giving me a swimsuit fetish. At least I do like looking at you when you’re wearing a swimsuit.”

“How about when I’m not wearing one?”

“Oh, that too, but that’s something a little different and I don’t want to describe it right now. I have to say I think I like looking at you wearing a swimsuit about as much as I do when you’re nude, not that I have a lot of experience with the latter. I mean, there’s something about a swimsuit, on you or on any moderately attractive woman, that sort of teases about what’s being hidden.”

“I think I understand, and like we were talking, that tease factor can be even higher with a one-piece. Let me go get one on so I can tease you some more while we’re washing your car.”

A few minutes later as Kyle was backing the Triumph from the garage, she came out wearing a peach-colored swimsuit, one-piece, naturally, but about the most conservative he’d seen her wearing, with a high neckline and cut only moderately high in the hips. “That looks pretty good,” he commented as he shut off the car and got out. “Not quite what I’ve come to expect, but pretty good.”

“Come on, Kyle. I have to be a good little girl around town, and you know that. It goes with being a librarian. This one isn’t going to set tongues to wagging.”

Soon they had a hose going, wetting down the car, then going over it with soapy water before rinsing it off. Of course they got rather wet in the process, and it made the already snug swimsuit cling to her body provocatively. Right in the middle of things Kyle couldn’t help himself; he went inside, got his camera, and got a few photos of her washing down the car in her wet swimsuit. It was a natural sort of thing that in its way was about as sexy in a way no posed photo could match.

They used a bucket of rags to dry the car off, and went about waxing and detailing it. It already had looked good but now the car almost seemed to sparkle. “You know,” she said. “That looks so good I’m almost reluctant to go anywhere in it and mess it up, but I still want to go riding with you.”

“So long as you’ll help me wash it later.”

“Of course,” she giggled. “Remember what I said about taking the opportunity to wear a swimsuit outside around town.”

“You’re on for that, then. Now, I’ve got a really stupid question. Do you ever wear a swimsuit to go swimming?”

“Not very often,” she admitted. “Marcie, my friend in my old home town, sometimes invites me over for pool parties, but I usually don’t go to the beach by myself. It’s more fun to go with someone, and I haven’t had anyone around here to go with. Until now, that is.”

“Fine. Let’s go find a beach someplace. Do you want to wear that swimsuit, or would you prefer to get into something dry?”

“If we’re not going to be around town, I wouldn’t mind changing into something a little less demure. I brought several with me in case we went to some places we could do some Chastity photos today, but it looks like the light is still going to be on the murky side.”

“You might as well change, and I’ll have to do it too. Besides I want to spend a minute on the net to see if I can find a public beach somewhere around here, but not too close, for your sake. They aren’t easy to find.”

“No need to do that. I know a state park about forty miles from here with a beach that usually isn’t real busy. I haven’t been to the beach itself but I’ve done some photo shoots in the park. I’ll get on a good swimsuit and wear some clothes over it so maybe we can stop for some lunch or something.”

In a few minutes they were heading out of town in the Spitfire. Even though it wasn’t the nicest of days, it was a lot of fun to be together in the little car.

It turned out later that what she thought of as a “good” swimsuit was a bikini, and a rather daring one at that. Kyle thought she looked great in it, or it looked great on her, or something, even though it seemed a little strange after seeing her in a one-piece so much. The light never did brighten up to get good photography, although Kyle shot a few photos of her just for the sake of consistency. But they went swimming and had a lot of fun riding around in the Triumph, just enjoying the view on a cool summer day. Once again they stopped at a convenience store to get the makings for a picnic lunch, which they enjoyed at a township park they happened to find along the way.

Eventually Kyle turned the little car back toward home. It might have gotten a little dusty after the travels of the day, but not bad; still, before putting it away in the storage building they spent some time giving it a light washing again, more for the sake of doing something together. After that, they took the pickup back to his apartment, where they threw together something for supper – not exactly great cooking, but good to eat.

If there had been any sun on the cloudy day, it would have been getting low on the horizon when Kyle took her home. It might have been possible to stay together a little later, but they both had things to do in the morning, and she had an update to make on her website. And yes, they had a nice long kiss at her front door, but no more.

As Kyle drove the pickup back to his apartment, he reflected that it had been absolutely the best weekend he could remember. Things had changed a lot in a few days, and now it looked as if he had a girlfriend, something he hadn’t had in a long time. This really had the potential to go someplace. Granted, Chelsea wasn’t quite what he’d imagined a girlfriend to be – but she was close to it, and he had no room for complaint. So she had a couple odd quirks, so what? They were quirks that pleased him, after all.

Yes, he thought. This might work.

This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.