CHAPTER 15.
The next morning Ben again visited his father and Helen. On his way back for lunch, he dropped in at the electrical store where he had bought the spotlight. This time he purchased a USB-flash drive for Christine to record her private photos on.
It may, of course, not have been necessary for him to take this initiative. But Ben did not know the extent of Christine's computer literacy. Anyway, he intended to transfer the dress-folio, once he had put it together, via the hotel's business computer. From there, Christine could download it on the flash drive and view it, whenever she wished and had the privacy, on any computer without it leaving a record.
After lunch and some surreptitious flirting with Erika, Ben dropped in at Christine's office. Looking up from her desk, she greeted him with a broad smile, a questioning look and silence. Ben, therefore, came straight to the point. Placing the flash drive on the desk in front of Christine, he said: -
"I am going to put your dress folio together this afternoon. Whenever you are alone in the office this evening, send me a message from your computer. Then I'll transfer the pictures, and you can download them immediately on this flash drive. They'll be safe there!"
Christine needed no further explanation about the why and how of Ben' suggestion. She picked up the tiny drive delicately between two fingers, grinned at Ben, and said: -
"They better be! We were rather naughty in getting all these shots taken ... out of control ... at least, I was once you spread me out on the bed! I wish I could be with you when you make the selection."
"Don't you trust me to get it right?"
"You could be too bashful in the ones you delete ... not wanting to shock me with the ones you think too naughty. And I may especially want those!"
"Alright. I'll delete only the unclear ones. ... Thinking back, I am sure I must have been shaking on taking some of these pictures! If I give you all that are sharp; you can delete the ones you don't like on the flash drive yourself."
They agreed. Christine, not hiding her eager anticipation, would message him sometime after dinner. Ben, with both some trepidation as well as excitement, sat down over his Ipad. He had taken fifty-six shots of Christine in her sinful dress. Despite what he had promised, he would make a quite rigorous selection.
Ben started with deleting all pictures where his hand had not been steady or where the focus and light had not centred on or complemented Christine. It seemed the easiest of the selection-tasks. There was one image, however, where his hand had shaken, and the picture's deletion filled him with regret.
It showed Christine, lying on her side, the upper body raised on her elbow, leaning back and smiling up at him. There was the sensuality of her body, from her legs up over an exposed buttock to the perkiness of her breasts. It combined and yet contrasted with the loving tenderness with which Christine had smiled up at him.
Ben remembered the moment of taking this picture and how it made him feel. After a flurry of shots - which he had now before him all sharp and crystal clear - of Christine twisting and slithering in an almost orgiastic abandon over the bed, Ben had stopped shooting. Both he and Christine needed to regain a level of composure. When Ben was calm enough to continue, standing close to the bed he pointed the Ipad down on Christine. And she had half-raised herself from her - almost - post-coital stupor. She had smiled up at him.
The love he read in her face, her bliss about what had just happened between them, had made him shake. Now he was left with a blurry record of a meaningful moment. Ben deleted it; together with fifteen or so other attempts which had failed to clearly capture all of Christine's allure and stunning beauty.
Christine had practically forbidden him to delete or withhold from her any images that he might have thought too raw and sexually explicit. This made the final process of selection for Ben an easy one. All he had to do was eliminate the comparatively bland as well as the repetitive images from the assortment, regardless of their pictorial perfection. What he finished up with were images, each one so distinctive that Ben would not have surrendered one to oblivion.
In looking at the pictures in the sequence he had left them on his Ipad, Ben suddenly realised that they formed a story. The first eight depicted Christine's statuesque beauty as a powerful, almost intimidating presence. In all of them, she is upright, unsmiling, but neither frowning nor pouting as she looked at him. The skin-tight fabric of her dress accentuates every contour and swell of her body; sinuously alive but in its perfection almost like cast in silver. Christine's beauty and sexual appeal in these photos were striking; beyond the pretensions of glamour or professional porn.
In the next fourteen images, central to the story, Christine is on the bed. The statuesque temptress has become seductively alive! She is unreservedly responding and focused on Ben, and thereby on the lens which captured her expressions and movements.
And Christine is totally unbridled in the display of her sexual desire. Every fibre of her twisting, stretching body and her lust-filled, at times distorted face expresses her hunger to possess her evasive lover as much as to provoke him into possessing her. Christine's dress continued to accentuate the sexy allure of her body in the sinuous contortions of her love-making.
But in the shame-free daring of her sexual needs on the bed, Christine seemed no longer aware of her dress. In some of the pictures, the skin-tight material had slid up as far as her belly. But it was not the coquettish flashing of ass and pubes to complement her breasts and pointy nipples sexily arching under her dress. To her, a strong, beautiful woman unafraid in her uncurbed lust, the degree of her nakedness simply ceased to matter.
If Ben had been prudish or less assured about Christine's attitude to her own sexuality, he would have deleted most of the fourteen pictures. But to him, Christine in every one of the images was breathtakingly beautiful and desirable, and he hoped that she would see herself in them as he saw her.
The concluding five shots in the folio were of Christine, still on the bed, but now in a relaxed state. She is resting on and between the pillows, with her body in different positions. They are still arousingly sexy photos because, in all of them, the alluring swell and contours of Christine's nakedness underneath her dress are strikingly in view. But the dress clings now, orderly skin-tight, to her body between neck and knee. Only in two, with the beginning of a questioning smile, was Christine looking directly at him. In three of them, in a somewhat pensive mood, she looked past him or down on her body.
As they were clearly the last in an unaltered sequence of shots taken, Ben felt a twinge of guilt. Had he been manipulative? Had he, after triggering the orgiastic storm so central to the story-line, wanted to conclude their session with more than a touch of post-copulatory sadness in the concluding images? But then he remembered the shaky photo he had to delete. It was the missing link that would have told a truth that the surviving pensive three did not.
After dinner, Ben passed by the reception office without going in. He did not want to talk to Christine before she had seen the folio he had prepared. Christine was at her desk. She pointed at the computer, and they smiled at each other through the glass. Ben, back in his room, saw that her mail-message had arrived, giving him her computer's address.
His reply, to which he appended the desired download, read: -
To My Not So Coy Mistress: - "This is what my Ipad 'spied' on yesterday's magic afternoon. Will you condemn me for loving every one of the images it captured? B."
