"Flash" "Sure, whatever," says the bartender. She turns away from the man with the camera and bends way over to pull another can of tomato juice out of the tiny fridge on the floor behind the bar. Lee's eye is caught by the motion of her turn and dip. Lee's eyes rest for a moment on the smooth muscular curve of the bartender's ass. Her jeans are extremely, even obscenely, tight. The seam must almost be pushing inside her cunt lips. A tiny flicker of motion pulls Lee's gaze away. The camera man's index finger twitches once, twice, as he takes a pair of exposures. Lee's imagination fills in the frame. The twin globes of the bartender's ass fill the top third. Above is a thin crescent of tanned flesh where the red and white striped blouse has ridden up from the bartender's waist as she bent over. The angle foreshortens the blouse; a burst of red curls is barely visible at the top of the shot. The man with the camera is fairly tall, leaning a bit over the bar. From this angle, his camera will capture all of the tight denim encasing the back of the bartender's thighs and a hint of the hard knots of calf muscle. The camera man won't be able to fit the bartender's high-heeled sandals in his shot unless he changes the camera angle slightly between exposures or he digitally stitches the two images together later. The bartender straightens and turns, her vision tracking across Lee and the others in the clump of drink-eager customers. The camera man receives a big, dizzying, practiced smile. Lee sees his other hand, his left, slide a switch on the camera. When he takes his third picture, the bartender's smile is already fading. This time the man's index finger doesn't tap the shutter release surreptitiously, this time he raises it high and brings it down decisively, as if he were playing a note on a piano. This time, the flash goes off, bursting brilliance eradicating everything in its path. Lee orders a beer. There is an amorphous yellow-green blob hanging over the bar where the bartender's face should be. It's disconcerting, and there is no way to tell if the bartender's radiant smile is flaring underneath or not. By the time Lee has paid for the drink and left a dollar on the bar, the afterimages are starting to fade. The man with the camera has faded out of sight as well. Lee thinks of saying something. Maybe, "Hey, that guy just took a picture of your ass." What word tastes least absurd on the tongue? Ass? Butt? Rear? Other customers are being served. If there was a moment to say something, it was in that unreadable instant in which the shock of the flash had erased Lee's vision. And anyway, the pictures can't be un-taken. Later, Lee thinks of the man with the camera. Imagination builds another scene. The man is alone in a motel room. The curtains are drawn; the only sources of light are the bluish glow of a laptop screen and the slow green wink of the smoke detector. The laptop is on a small round table; the camera is connected to it by a thin cable. The man is seated at the table, in front of the computer. There is enough light to see that the man is wearing just a T-shirt and boxers. The screen's illumination comes from below his head, so his face is sharply shadowed and hard to read. One of his hands rests lightly on the keyboard; the other is thrust down the waistband of his boxers. While thinking of the man with the camera, Lee is naked beneath a thin sheet in a dark and anonymous motel room. It could easily be the same motel in which Lee pictures the man. The curtains in this room are open a crack at the corner, so that a thin slice of light halves the room. It falls diagonally across the bed. This wedge of light reveals the inverted "Y" shape of Lee's body: feet tenting the sheet at opposite corners of the bed, hands between the legs. The sheet over the body is restless where the legs meet. Shadows seem to chase each other as the the sheet bunches and twists, pulled in different directions in response to the motion under it. The man with the camera is running a slide show program that displays a series of images from his camera. He has deleted most of the washed-out, overexposed shots of a succession of smiling women's faces. What remains are pictures his subjects never knew were taken. Blurry exposures he made while he was walking. Ill-framed pictures taken with the camera around his waist. Women reduced for the man's viewing pleasure to a series of parts: asses, legs, feet, a hard-muscled shoulder blade and a well-defined upper arm. The man strokes his penis more quickly. Lee's hands move more urgently. The man leans forward into the screen, his eyes wide, white, and avid. What excites Lee is how the man needs this transgression to fuel his excitement. Lee knows firsthand how completely unattainable the women the camera man favors really aren't. It's not as if he has some horrible deformity; he's actually rather good-looking. A pleasant hello with a welcoming, if falsely open, smile. A casual offer to buy a drink; it's not so very hard. He could easily be sliding his stiff prick into one of those tight, barely hidden pussies or one of those even tighter asses. Instead he pulls the tip of it out of the top of his boxers, rubbing around the head with his thumb. So part of the point has to be that he steals his excitement. That's pervy, a little dangerous, and Lee, who could have said something, but didn't, was a little complicit earlier in the evening. Lee is much more complicit now, with busy fingers getting closer and closer to the peak. Twofold shameful excitement. First, the fervid look in the eyes of the photographer, the quiet sound of his flesh against his own flesh, the sweaty masculine tang of him. Second, the objects of his obsession themselves, taut torsos and limbs, lurid in their pixelated glow. Bodies so round and ripe for invasion, by digits, penises, anything. The pictures of the bartender are the last two in the slide show. The man takes his hand away from the keyboard. He pulls his cock through his fly. He pumps the shaft furiously and slides his other hand inside to gently stroke his balls. His breathing is ragged. With the bartender's perfect ass brilliant before him, it isn't long before the man comes. Semen arcs up like a fast-action lava lamp. Lee imagines the clumpy rope, a come shot frozen in the flare of a strobe. A moment later, perhaps just one thin wall away, Lee climaxes too. "Yes," the bartender says. The clench of her teeth makes the word a hiss. "Come for me, both of you." The room where the bartender is splayed across the bed is brightly lit. The closet doors opposite the bed are mirrored. One of the bartender's hands reaches under a thigh to push a dildo into her pussy; one lies flat across her belly to press a small vibrator against her clit. This is her habit; this provides the best view. If the bartender's eyes were open and her head were slightly raised, the bartender would see the reflection of her cunt as it grips the dildo. But now her eyes are clenched as tight as her vagina, her head is thrown back. She sees again in her mind the startled face of her attractive customer as she turned back toward the picture taker. The look that had inspired such a broad and genuine smile. Shock, and a smidgeon of disgust, but revealed in the widening eyes staring at the camera, underneath, a lust that the customer seemed as yet unaware of. Eyes on her body, a camera on her body, eyes meeting eyes in a collision of desire. Events set into motion with the inevitability of billiard balls smacking one another. "Come for me!" the bartender urges again as throes sweep through her. In one dark room the man pulls his T-shirt over his head and uses it to mop up the puddle around his crotch. He licks a few stray drops from his fingers before powering down the machine. In another dark room, there are a few small moist sounds, but Lee's hands are in the gloom, away from the streak of light. The illuminated line of sheet is finally still. When her heart rate feels like it has returned to normal, the bartender slides the thick plastic cock out of herself gently. The vibrator has already fallen away unheeded. She fumbles for its buzz and switches it off. She inserts the slick dildo between her lips and starts to suck her taste from it. Outside the open window, a flash goes off.