One night, as Grace Valerio perused Reddit as she often did, she happened upon a topic with a title which drew her immediate attention.
"What's the hottest thing to ever happen to you?" Clicking into the thread, she found it swarming with stories - many of them enough to get her more than a little heated. It took a surprising amount of time before she even considered what her own answer would be. But, she gradually realised, she had one. And so, without really thinking about it, she started typing.
"I had a friend in university (Pakistani, slender, chocolatey skin, wore a hijab, dressed quite modestly as you'd expect) who I only got to know as our bedrooms were right next door to each other. We were both 18 and even though we're from VERY different backgrounds we got on quite well - she had absolutely no idea about me being a lesbian and it became one of those situations where you realise that just too much time has elapsed for you to say anything. Plus at first I had no real understanding of her culture and whether she'd be hostile to me and had to learn through her - as it turned out, she was perfectly cool with it and in fact was in two minds about her whole faith.
After about six months, during which time she'd become almost unrecognisable (drinking, clubbing, kissing boys, though the hijab stayed on - it was pretty important to her, faith or no faith), we were sat on her bed drinking ridiculously cheap wine and talking and I happened to mention the Photography Society I'd been in for a while. I'd gotten a new camera and was doing some practice shots with others members - normal, perfectly innocent shoots out in the woods. My friend (let's call her Farah) was quite intrigued and this led her down a bit of a rabbit hole where she told me about how she was thinking of ditching her hijab and doing Islam "her way" which I thought was pretty cool and obviously a very big deal for her. But she wanted to do something symbolic that would create the sense of turning from one person to another - my joke about her burning her hijab didn't go down too well but it didn't stop her from explaining what she wanted to do and what idea I'd given her. She was super coy about it and danced around the point until she finally said it - she wanted me to photograph her naked.
I nearly leaped across the room to grab my camera, as you can imagine, but she just laughed at me and said no she wanted to do it somewhere special, like the forest I'd been photographing the others. I had maybe a hundred questions about why she wanted to do this, was she sure, was she really sure, no, really, was she REALLY sure? She laughed a lot but essentially said, yes, she really wanted to do it - it'd be her way of casting off her old skin and becoming something new. The most melodramatic thing I'd ever heard but I wasn't about to argue. I also didn't really believe it would happen - we were both fairly drunk - so I just went along but I was putting a lot of effort into not shaking with excitement.
We spent a good hour sat at my laptop together and writing up the plan for this little shoot of hers. I felt so much trepidation when I asked her "now... when you say naked..." and she just looked at me, almost confused, and goes "I mean naked, dude." So we wrote down a list of shots we'd do and, somehow, that was strangely maybe the hottest part of the whole thing. I can't pretend I understand why. All the while this wonderful sense of connection is developing that I'd never really felt before - not exactly standard horniness but just that almost childlike excitement that sexuality can be sometimes. I almost felt guilty for feeling it - after all, did Farah feel the same way? Surely not.
