Luc photographs Yvette (Part 1)

“You must be Luc?” The woman extended her hand as Luc stood in the afternoon sun outside the museum’s side entrance. A camera bag hung heavily from his shoulder and his skin was flushed from the brisk bike ride over.

“Lovely to meet you, Yvette.” He shook the woman’s hand and followed her into the building, taking a measured breath to calm his nerves. It was his first proper gig as a photographer.

“I take it Asami prepared you a bit?” Yvette stood somewhat awkwardly beside her desk, fingering the bottom button of her jacket. She was dressed, as usual, in tight jeans and a wool blazer over an expensive-looking turtleneck, periwinkle blue today. Her nails were painted glossy aubergine. To Luc, the confidence of the outfit mingled provocatively with the woman’s apparent nervousness.

“She didn’t tell me much. Just that you have a performance piece in the works, and you want some photos?”

The curator laughed, smoothing her hand over a denim-clad thigh. “And did she mention nudity?” She motioned vaguely at her torso. “The part about me getting nude?”

Luc felt a swell of excitement. The heavy bag felt lighter on his shoulder. Near the end of his session in Asami’s studio, she had encouraged him to give portraits a try. Those circumstances had cast the conversation in distinctly erotic terms, but he had no idea the woman would actually orchestrate a nude photoshoot for him.

“I’m completely comfortable with that,” he said, attempting to channel Asami’s forthright energy.

A few minutes later, Luc sat alone in the museum’s airy lobby. Sun filtered down from the round skylights set in the high, white ceiling. Straddling a stone bench, he loaded a fresh roll of black and white film into his trusty Nikon F2 and advanced it with a satisfying click that echoed in the quiet space. Though the museum had closed for the day and the last visitors had departed, the lobby still held a charge of publicness. He found it exciting.

A door shut quietly in an adjoining gallery and footsteps approached. Luc turned to see Yvette appear at the top of two stone steps. Her blazer and turtleneck were unchanged, and she still wore the same suede ankle boots, but in between she was completely nude. No sign of the tight jeans or underwear she was presumably wearing beneath. He instinctively raised the camera to his left eye and brought the hem of the blue turtleneck, bunched slightly at Yvette’s bare hips, into crisp focus. The snap of the shutter ricocheted around the lobby.

“Let’s begin over there,” she said, motioning toward a small gallery across the polished stone floor. “I have something prepared.”

Luc followed a few paces behind, eyes on the curator’s smooth calves. He paused midway and brought her ample bottom into focus, snapping a few frames of the curator crossing her empty lobby.

“You’re probably wondering what this performance even is.” She turned and flashed the boy a smile as she tucked a strand of russet hair behind her ear, stumbling slightly over the threshold to the gallery. “Oop, almost tripped!”

Luc’s gaze settled immediately on the single object displayed in the austere, otherwise-empty space: a glazed ceramic sculpture, unmistakably the deft handiwork of Asami. Equally unmistakeable, to Luc at least, was the fact that it was a casting of his own erection — a sage green wand flecked with silver, glittering in the light from a high window. He nearly tripped himself.

“The thrust of the piece is to bring curator and curated into uncomfortable proximity,” Yvette said, gesticulating formally. “And ultimately seeing them take one another’s place.”

Luc hardly registered the woman’s explanation. His mind raced. Did she know? The wand was mounted atop a marble pedestal at thigh level, suggestively angled upward, as if part of the museum’s collection. There was even a placard:

Wand #36
Private Collection,
Fern River

“The real piece will be performed live of course. But your photographs will let me pitch it to the board.” Yvette followed the boy’s gaze to the wand. “You must be wondering about that.”

Luc regained his composure and nodded.

“It’s a piece by our mutual friend Asami.” Yvette placed her hands on her bare hips, showing no sign of knowing the phallic object’s secret. “I brought it from home for our shoot.”

The boy’s mind raced anew. From home? His actual, non-ceramic length swelled slightly at the thought of this beautiful, amorously clumsy woman pleasuring herself with the beautiful object. He raised the camera to his eye again and focused on her crimson lips poised in an ironic smile. Snap.

“I’ll take some of you posing with it.”

Yvette responded to his suggestion immediately, tipping her hips toward the pedestal and stepping her feet a few inches apart. The fair curve of her left thigh caught the diffuse light coming from the high window. As she leaned further, the smooth tip of the ceramic wand brushed against the curve of her bottom. Luc released the shutter and advanced the film.

He walked back to the gallery’s threshold and crouched, motioning for Yvette to stand between him and the pedestal. “Spread your legs,” he said as gently as he could. The curator obliged. Her thick thighs rose to frame a triangle of sunlit white wall, its vertex meeting the inverted triangle of neatly-trimmed pubic hair below her exposed navel. Beneath, her smooth labia caught a bit of afternoon light.

Through the viewfinder, Luc adjusted so the tip of the glittering wand beyond appeared to reach upward between the woman’s legs. “Absolutely lovely,” he murmured between snaps of the shutter.

After a few more poses in the gallery, Yvette moved back to the lobby where Luc shot her crossing the large, airy space from a distance. He watched her hips cant from side to side, each ample cheek jiggling along in time. To his eyes, the bottomless curator cut a lovely form, charged excitingly by a subtle edge of vulgarity in this public space. It seemed to be the energy she was after.

“There are a few shots I’d like to get at my apartment, if you’re open to it,” she said, standing somewhat awkwardly at the center of the polished stone expanse.

“Sure, I’m up for anything.” His mind returned to the ceramic wand perched alone in the adjoining gallery.

As if thinking the same thing, Yvette crossed the lobby half naked once more to retrieve the object. She slipped it into the pocket of her wool blazer and returned to her office to get dressed.

Luc sat on the stone bench and packed away the camera. His calm, practiced movements gave almost no hint at the thoughts whirling around his mind. Yvette owned — and presumably used — the wand Asami had cast from his very own erection, which had throbbed in the potter’s firm grip and had, incidentally, been pressing tentatively against his thigh for the last hour as he photographed the beautifully bottomless museum curator. Surely she didn’t know, did she? Now they would go to her apartment.

Yvette reemerged from her office, once again fully dressed, with a canvas bag slung from her shoulder. “Shall we?”

(Continued in Part 2)