But this.
Sitting here. Open. Unarmed in every way that mattered.
I slid off the bed and reached for my camera.
The sound of the strap shifting caught his attention. His head lifted slightly, eyes tracking me—not wary, but searching. Curious.
“I want to do something,” I said gently.
His brow furrowed. “Okay.”
I didn’t explain yet. I stepped closer, close enough that my bare thigh brushed his knee. The contact sent a subtle charge through both of us—I felt it instantly, that familiar heat, the echo of the way our bodies already knew each other.
His breath changed. Mine did, too.
The desire was still there. Thrumming. Alive. But it wasn’t demanding anything right now. It was simply … present. Like a low note held beneath everything else.
“I’m not asking you to pose,” I said. “And I’m not trying to capture anything dramatic.”
He nodded once. Trusted me enough not to ask more.
I lifted the camera, but I didn’t point it at his face.
Instead, I framed his hands.
They rested loosely now on his thighs, long fingers relaxed but powerful, the veins along the backs faintly raised. Hands that had been trained, weaponized, forced into violence long before they were ready. Hands that had learned restraint, anyway. That had held me with devastating gentleness. That had shaken, just slightly, when he talked about being twelve years old and alone.
I adjusted the focus.
Click.
Connor exhaled softly, the sound barely audible.
I shifted, circling him slowly, barefoot on the rug. I photographed the line of his forearm where muscle met scar. The faint white slash near his wrist I hadn’t asked about yet. The way his thumb rubbed once, absently, against his palm—an unconscious grounding gesture.
Click.
I moved behind him and captured the slope of his shoulders, broad and unyielding, yet curved inward just enough to suggestthe weight they carried. I didn’t ask him to straighten. I didn’t ask him to be strong.
I wanted the truth of how he sat when no one was watching.
Click.
The room felt intimate in a new way now—not just because we were undressed, not because of the bed or the heat or the memory of skin on skin. But because this was another kind of nakedness entirely.
When I finally lowered the camera, he turned his head to look at me fully.
“What are you doing?” he asked quietly.
The camera had always been my constant—weight against my hip, strap worn smooth by years of use. It wasn’t just a tool. It was the way I made sense of things when the world felt too loud or too fast. When emotions crowded in without names, when people contradicted themselves, when truth hid behind performance, I lifted the lens and let it quiet everything else.
Through it, I learned how to look.
How to notice what lingered at the edges instead of what demanded attention. The tension in a shoulder. The pause before a smile. The story told by hands when mouths stayed careful. The spaces between moments—the almosts most people rushed past because they were uncomfortable with stillness.
For a long time, that way of seeing kept me slightly apart. Observing instead of participating. Framing instead of reaching. It was safer to stand just outside the moment, to capture it rather than risk being consumed by it. But even then, it was never distance for distance’s sake. It was devotion. An attempt to understand the world honestly, without forcing it to be simpler or kinder than it was.
The camera taught me that truth rarely announces itself head-on. It reveals itself sideways. In shadow. In restraint.
