The Second Shot

He'd been thinking about the anniversary for three weeks straight. Seven years married to Lynne, and lately it felt like they passed each other in the hallway more than they passed each other anywhere else. He was a sales rep for a medical supply company, which meant he drove a lot and ate a lot of gas station food, and when he got home at night he mostly wanted to sit still while Lynne clicked away at her freelance design work two feet from him on the same couch.

The idea had come to him on a Tuesday, somewhere between a hospital parking lot and the interstate. A boudoir photoshoot. Professional. As a gift. He'd seen an ad for it and the thing had lodged in his brain like a splinter.

He waited until Friday takeout night to bring it up. Thai food, cartons spread across the coffee table, some old sitcom on low. Lynne was thirty-five, one year older than him, and she ate pad thai the way she did everything, efficiently, without looking up.

"So I booked you a thing," he said.

She looked at him over the carton. "What kind of thing?"

"A photoshoot. A boudoir photoshoot. For our anniversary. It's a gift, technically. You'd get the photos. Or I'd get the photos. We'd both get the photos."

Lynne put her fork down. "You booked me a sexy photoshoot without asking me."

"Well, I'm asking now!"

"You're telling me now. Booking is past tense." She picked the fork back up, which he took as a good sign. "Who even did you call? You don't know any photographers."

"A guy named Nik Blaine. He's got a studio in the arts district. I found him online. He does this all the time, Lynne, it's like a whole business. Makeup artist comes with him. It's professional."

"Let me see his website."

He handed her his phone before she could ask twice, and she scrolled in silence for a while, fork abandoned again. The pad thai steamed between them. On the TV somebody laughed at something.

"He's got a waitlist," she said finally. "There's a waitlist and you got us in."

"I called in September."

She looked up. "You've been sitting on this since September?"

"I've been sitting on this since September."

"That's four months, Alec. That's not a gift, that's a project." But she was almost smiling, which was the reaction he'd been hoping for and also the one he'd been scared of. Lynne competitive was Lynne interested. "Does he shoot men too or just women?"

"Just women, mostly. Couples sometimes, I think."

"Hm." She handed the phone back and went back to her noodles like the matter was closed. Then, without looking up: "Fine. But if I'm doing it, I'm doing it right. I'm not going to stand around in some costume looking awkward while a stranger takes pictures of my stomach. I want to look good. I want it to actually be good."

"It will be good."

"And I want you there. If some guy's going to photograph me half dressed, you're going to be sitting right there the whole time, so he knows whose wife I am."

"That was already the plan," Alec lied, because it hadn't been, but it should have been.

She pointed her fork at him. "And you're not allowed to make that face you make. The worried one. If you're going to sit there looking miserable the whole shoot then don't come at all."

"I won't make the face."

"You're making it right now!"

He wasn't, but he stopped anyway.

The studio was on the second floor of an old brick building in the arts district, up a narrow staircase with a hand-painted sign. Alec found parking two blocks away and they walked in together, Lynne in a plain gray sweater and jeans, carrying the small bag of things Tracey had told her to bring on the phone. Alec was carrying a thermos of coffee and nothing else useful, which felt about right for him lately.

The loft itself was bigger than he expected. White-washed brick, scuffed hardwood floors, big windows throwing pale winter light across everything. There was a rolling rack near the back hung with sheer lingerie in black and cream and one deep red, and a king-size bed at the center of the room draped in black velvet, already made up and squared away like it had been waiting for them all morning. The air smelled like coffee and something sharp, acetone maybe, and under it an expensive perfume that wasn't Lynne's.

Nik Blaine turned out to be a tall, quiet man of forty-two with a gray-flecked beard and a camera already hanging off his shoulder. He shook Alec's hand first, then Lynne's, longer than necessary, and said, "You two have the easy job today. Tracey does the hard part."

Tracey was the makeup artist, thirty-eight, short, loud, with a kit bag the size of a small suitcase. She steered Lynne toward a chair by the window and had her hair pinned up before Alec had even found somewhere to sit.

"There's coffee," Tracey told him, pointing at a side table. "There's nothing else for you to do, so get comfortable. This part takes forty minutes even when I'm rushing."

It took an hour. Alec sat on a wooden stool near the wall with his thermos and watched his wife get her face done, which was a thing he had literally never seen in seven years of marriage. Tracey talked the entire time, about the building, about a wedding she'd worked in October, about the coffee, and Lynne answered in short sentences while Nik drifted around setting lights and testing things and occasionally saying "hold that" to nobody in particular.

At one point Nik crouched by the window and looked at Lynne's hands and said, "Don't ever cut these nails short. I mean it."

"They're my nails, they stay," Lynne said.

"Good."

Then Tracey stepped back, clapped her hands once, and said, "Okay. Go put on the black one, the first one on the rack, and remember it's your right that's the tricky strap."

Lynne disappeared behind a folding screen with the garment bag. Alec looked at Nik, who was fiddling with a light stand and not looking at the screen at all, which Alec appreciated more than he could have said.

The screen rustled. Then Lynne came out.

Alec had known his wife for nine years total and he would have told you, up until that exact moment, that he knew what she looked like. She came around the screen in a sheer black bodysuit, her hair down and loose and somehow bigger, her face made up in a way that made her cheekbones look borrowed from a magazine, and the whole room changed temperature. The sheer fabric did that thing where it hid everything and showed everything at the same time, and his wife, his pragmatic, spreadsheet-making, argument-winning wife, walked out into the middle of that loft like she owned the floor.

His jaw actually dropped. He felt it happen and couldn't stop it.

Tracey laughed out loud. "There it is! I love that face. Best part of my job, honestly. Nik, did you see the husband?"

"I saw the husband," Nik said mildly, raising the camera. "Alec, don't move. That's not a joke, stay exactly like that."

"You're not photographing me," Alec said.

"I might photograph everybody. Hold still for two seconds."

He took three frames of Alec sitting slack-jawed on the stool, then lowered the camera and turned to Lynne. "You're warm already. That's half my job done already."

Lynne looked at Alec, and he saw something in her face he hadn't seen in a long time, some small crowning triumph, like she'd won something. "Say something, Alec."

He tried to say something. What came out was, "Okay. Wow. Yeah!"

"Smooth," she said, but she was smiling, and she walked past him toward the bed with her head up and her shoulders back, and Tracey called after her, "Honey, walk like that all day, we'll be done by dinner."

Nik positioned her at the foot of the bed and started talking her through it in a low, even voice. Chin there. Hand there. Look at me, now look away. Lynne did what he said and then did a little more than what he said, and Alec sat on his stool with the thermos going cold in his hands and watched a professional photographer see his wife the way he used to see her.

He wasn't making the face. He checked.

Nik kept moving her around for the next twenty minutes. Alec figured out pretty quick that the man talked the way a dentist works, steady and unhurried, and Lynne responded to it better than she responded to almost anything. When Nik said drop your shoulder, she dropped her shoulder. When he said think about something you want, she looked at the camera and Alec forgot his coffee existed.

Then Nik climbed up on the bed himself. He crouched beside her and took her left leg, one hand under the knee and the other at the thigh, and moved it six inches to the left. His thumb was practically touching the fabric over her hip while he did it. He leaned over her to fix a fold of velvet near her shoulder, and his shadow crossed her whole body.

Alec felt a hot spike of something go through his chest. It took him a second to name it, and when he did, he was embarrassed. It wasn't jealousy. It was closer to pride, like the feeling of watching your kid take a trophy, except this was his wife and the thing she was winning was being looked at. He shifted on the stool and said nothing.

"Good," Nik said from the bed. "Hold that. Alec, there's water in the fridge if you want it."

"I'm fine."

"Suit yourself." He got off the bed and fired off a dozen frames in about fifteen seconds. Then he lowered the camera and looked at Lynne. "Okay. The sheer set. Let's do the series with the clasp."

Tracey came over with a second garment on a hanger and Lynne disappeared behind the screen again. While she was back there, Nik wiped a smudge off a light and Tracey drank half a cup of coffee and asked Alec if it was their anniversary coming up and he said yes, seven years, and she said that's cute, most women come in here after a divorce. He didn't know what to say to that so he drank his coffee.

Lynne came out in a white bodysuit this time, still sheer, with a front clasp between the cups. Nik put her on the bed again, sitting up this time, one knee bent, and talked her through a series where she was supposed to be looking off toward the window like she was waiting for someone.

"Now the clasp," Nik said. "You do it. Slow. Don't look at me, look at the window."

Lynne's fingers went to the clasp. Alec watched his wife's hands, the same hands that signed the mortgage papers and pulled splinters out of his thumb, unhook a clasp in the middle of a white-lit loft while a stranger looked through a lens at her. The fabric fell open and she held it shut for three frames, and then let it fall the rest of the way.

Alec's mouth went dry. He looked down at his hands and they were shaking, actually shaking, a fine tremor on the thermos cup. He clenched them together and the shaking got worse before it got better. It wasn't embarrassment exactly. It was more like the moment on a roller coaster where you crest the top and there's nothing left to do about it.

"Beautiful," Nik said, quiet, to the camera more than to her. "Hold. Good. Again with the exhale."

Lynne let her breath out and her whole body changed and the shutter clicked eight more times.

Alec heard himself say, loudly, "The lighting's better on the left side."

The room stopped. Nik lowered the camera and looked at him. Tracey looked at him. Lynne turned her head and looked at him, topless in front of everybody while he sat there clutching his cup, and she raised one eyebrow.

"The lighting," she said.

"It is. It's better on the left. The shadow's hitting her... it's better on the left."