Fun – friends – shenanigans. That was exactly what the night had been.
Until it wasn’t.
from Chapter 22.
The night before, we had exchanged real-life photographs.
Sending mine hadn’t felt flirtatious. By then Ken knew a great deal about me, and sharing a photograph felt like another way of saying, This is me. This is the real person behind Sophie.
I wasn’t wondering whether he would find me attractive. The truth is, it never occurred to me that he would.
Too many years of being hurt had changed the way I saw myself. Whatever other people may have seen when they looked at me, beautiful wasn’t a word I easily applied to myself.
Then Ken sent me his.
That was different.
I immediately messaged my SL sister.
He’s incredibly hot…Like model hot.
Apparently my ability to recognize attractiveness worked perfectly well in the other direction.
Even then, though, I didn’t assume anything had changed between us.
As far as I knew, Ken and I were friends.
The next night was Wednesday.
There was nothing particularly romantic about it. We were doing what we had been doing for weeks—hanging out with friends. Earlier that night, I’d posted a picture from Club Zero with Ken and another friend.
Fun – friends – shenanigans.
That was exactly what the night had been.
Until it wasn’t.
It was late, around eleven, when Ken suggested we take some pictures together. This was his idea, not mine.
I warned him that my pose inventory wasn’t exactly designed for friendship. I had couples poses. Intimate poses. Sexy poses. Apparently I had been much less diligent about collecting poses for two people who just wanted a nice picture together.
He still wanted to. So we left the group.
We moved somewhere quieter, where I could control the light. Photography was familiar territory for me, and at first that was exactly what it felt like.
We tried poses. Adjusted angles. Changed hair, then changed it back. We laughed at animations that didn’t cooperate.
The poses were closer than the ones we’d used around friends, but I’d warned him about that.
And then Ken suggested we take off our clothes.
For an artistic photo.
Of course.
I agreed.
At some point, the photographs stopped being the point.
The poses became more intimate. A hand resting somewhere it hadn’t before. Bodies angled toward one another instead of away. The kind of proximity that becomes difficult to explain as artistic experimentation once neither person is wearing clothes.
I paused.
Not because I was uncomfortable.
Because now I was aware.
“How far do you want to take this?”
“I’m enjoying this,” he said. “I didn’t expect it. It’s a surprise.”
We talked about what we were comfortable with and what we weren’t.
And then we kept going.
Afterward, we stayed. We talked.
About what had happened, yes, but also about work the next day and the increasingly obvious fact that neither of us was going to get much sleep.
Neither of us seemed particularly interested in saying goodnight.
At some point, Ken told me he was happy.
I was too.
Eventually, morning began to creep into the room.
I had to work. So did he.
This had started around eleven o’clock the night before with the perfectly reasonable idea that we would take a few pictures.
Instead, neither of us had slept.
I finally went to bed tired, happy, and more than a little surprised by what had happened.
But I wasn’t afraid of what would happen next.
That might have surprised me most of all.
