Frame Four

An Exclusive Bonus Chapter from The Second Apartment
by Aurora North

⚠️ This bonus chapter takes place the night after the opening of Lived In, near the end of the novel. It contains spoilers and extremely explicit content, significantly hotter than the main book. Read the novel first. 18+.

Frame Four

JULES

The night after the opening, Sarah handed me back my own memory card.

She did it in her living room at nine o’clock on Saturday, with the lamp on and the rain finally gone and Lucy’s car somewhere on the Thruway headed back to Albany. I was on the ochre chair with my feet up on the arm, half asleep, still hungover on two hundred people and three plastic cups of wine and the word girlfriend said out loud to a man from a magazine. She came out of the bedroom and stood in front of me and held it out between two fingers. Small. Black. The size of a postage stamp.

I knew it before I took it. There’s a nick on one corner where I dropped it on a tile floor in Rhinecliff.

“Those are yours,” I said. “I told you. Nobody sees them.”

“I know what you told me. I’ve looked at them.” She didn’t sit down. She was in jeans and my gray sweater with the hole in the cuff, and her hair was down, and her face was doing the thing it does now when she’s decided something on her own and come to tell me about it. “I’ve looked at them a lot, actually. Do you want to know what’s wrong with them?”

“Nothing’s wrong with them. They’re the best pictures I’ve ever taken.”

“They’re all of me,” Sarah said.

I didn’t say anything.

“Every one. Me in the doorway. Me in this chair. Me undoing your shirt.” She turned the card over in her fingers. “And you’re not in any of them. You’re behind it. You were behind it the whole time. I’m sitting there with everything open, looking right at the lens, and the person I’m looking at isn’t in the picture.”

“That’s how pictures work, sweetheart.”

“Not tonight.” She held the card out again. “Put it back in your camera. Set it up on the tripod. Wherever you’d put it if you were shooting this room.” She tipped her head at the window, the chair, the lamp. “And then come and sit down in front of it with me. I want frame four.”

“Frame four.”

“Before, During, After.” Her mouth twitched. “Everybody in the Hudson Valley has seen those. I want one nobody gets to see but us. With both of us in it.”

I looked up at her for a long time.

I’ve been asked for a lot of things in that apartment. I’ve been asked to carry a chair up three flights. I’ve been asked to ask. I’ve been tied to an iron headboard with my own camera strap and asked to look at myself, and I did it, and it nearly killed me. But I’d always had the lens. Even with my wrists tied, the camera was in its bag by the door, and I knew it was there.

“You can say no,” Sarah said. “I mean that. If you say no, I’ll put this back in my drawer and we’ll go to bed and I’ll never bring it up again.”

“I know you would.”

“So?”

I took the card out of her fingers.

“Get the lamp from the bedroom,” I said. “This one’s too warm on its own. I want two.”

I’m good at this part. That was the strange thing. My hands knew it even when the rest of me didn’t. I set the legs on the blue tape marks by the bookcase, the ones she still vacuums around, and leveled the head, and put the card in and listened to the camera find it. I set the second lamp on the floor by the window, low, angled up, so it would put gold along one side of whoever sat in that chair and leave the other side in shadow. I moved the chair two inches. Then one inch back.

“You’re stalling,” Sarah said from the couch.

“I’m lighting.”

“You’re lighting very slowly.”

“Good lighting is slow.”

I screwed the little remote timer into the side of the camera body. It’s a cable with a box on the end, black, about the size of a deck of cards. I set it to fire every four seconds and left it hanging off the tripod, and stood back.

The frame was the chair and the window and the dark street behind it. St. Anne’s steeple faint in the top corner. Nobody in it.

“Now what?” Sarah said.

“Now I press this, and it takes a picture every four seconds until I press it again. There’s room on that card for about nine hundred.”

“Nine hundred.” She stood up off the couch. “Well. We’d better get going.”

I pressed it.

The shutter went. Four seconds. The shutter went again. It’s a soft sound, a small dry click like a tongue against teeth, and I’ve heard it a hundred thousand times, and I have never once heard it from the wrong side of the lens.

Sarah walked into the frame.

She didn’t hurry. She stood in front of the chair with her back to the window and the lamp on one side of her face, and she looked straight down the barrel at the camera, and then past it, at me.

“Come here,” she said.

I walked into the light.

Click.

The first thing I learned is that I don’t know what to do with my hands.

I’ve never needed to know. I’ve always had a camera in them, or a light stand, or a woman. I stood in front of the ochre chair with Sarah and the lens on me and my hands hung at my sides like I’d borrowed them.

Click.

“You’re doing it,” Sarah said.

“Doing what?”

“Holding your breath. And your face is doing the thing. The pleasant thing.” She stepped close. She put her palm flat on my chest, over my heart, the way she does. “That’s my face, Jules. You’re not allowed to have it.”

Click.

I laughed, and she caught the laugh with her mouth.

She kissed me slow. I felt the light on the side of my face, warm, and I heard the shutter go twice while her tongue was in my mouth, and I couldn’t stop hearing it. Every four seconds. A record. A frame I’d never get to compose. She pushed her hands up under my shirt and spread them on my ribs, on the ladder scar, and pulled back an inch.

“Take it off,” she said. “Facing the camera.”

“Sarah.”

“You’ve watched me take off everything I own in front of you. Facing the camera.”

I turned around.

The lens was a black eye on the tripod six feet away. I’ve looked into a thousand of them from behind. From the front it’s smaller and darker and much more patient than I’d ever understood. I took hold of the hem of my T-shirt. My hands weren’t steady.

Click.

I pulled it over my head and dropped it on the rug. No bra. I hadn’t put one on since the shower that morning. The lamp by the window threw gold across my small breasts and my ribs and left the rest of me in shadow, and I knew exactly how that frame looked, because I’d lit it, and I hated it, and my nipples went so tight they ached.

“Jeans,” Sarah said behind me, very quietly.

I undid them. Click. I pushed them down my hips with my underwear and stepped out of them and stood there on her rug, naked, in front of my own camera, with my arms at my sides and my face on fire.

Click.

She didn’t touch me. She stood behind me and let the camera do it. I could feel her eyes on my back the same way I could feel the lens on my front, and I understood, standing there, what I’d been doing to her all this time. What I’d been doing to every room I’d ever shot. Taking. Keeping. Never once being the one kept.

“How does it feel?” she said in my ear.

“Terrible.”

“Liar.” Her hand came around my hip and slid down the front of me, slow, and found me soaked. She made a soft pleased sound against my shoulder. “Look at that. Terrible.“

Click.

“Sit,” she said. “In my chair. Facing it.”

I sat in the ochre chair in the lamp light with the street dark behind me, and Sarah knelt down on her rug in front of me, still fully dressed in my sweater and her jeans, and put her hands on my knees.

“Open,” she said.

I opened.

“More. Put them over the arms.”

I put one leg over one arm of the chair, then the other. It left me spread wide in the gold light with nothing in the way between me and the lens except her, and she moved. She shifted on her knees to the side, out of the line of the camera, so it could see everything. So I could feel it seeing.

Click.

“Sarah—”

“Do you want to stop?”

“No.” It came out raw. “God, no. But I can’t—I don’t know where to look.”

“Look at it,” she said. “Look right at it, and think about who’s going to see these. Just me. Me in bed, with the lamp on, any night I want. Looking at you like this.” Her thumb moved on the inside of my knee. “You gave me the first card and told me it was mine. This is me giving you back the favor. You’re mine too. I want the proof.”

Then she leaned in from the side and put her mouth on me.

I nearly came out of the chair. Her tongue was flat and slow and hot, and she went the whole length of me in one long stroke and stopped at the top and circled, right side, the way she learned on her kitchen floor in October and has been perfecting ever since. I grabbed the arms of the chair. I made myself keep my eyes open. I looked down the room at the black eye of the lens, and the shutter clicked, and I knew exactly what it was getting. A woman with silver in her hair and her legs over the arms of a curb chair and her head thrown back, and another woman’s mouth between her thighs, and her own face doing something she’d never once allowed in front of glass.

“Sarah.“

She hummed against me. Click. She slid two fingers into me, slow, and curled them, and pressed up, and held there, and kept her tongue moving in that steady patient circle.

“Tell me what it’s getting,” she said, lifting her mouth one inch. Her lips were shining. “You know. You always know. Tell me what’s in the frame.”

“You.” I could barely breathe. “Your hair, in the lamp. Your hand on my thigh. My—God—my face. I’m looking right at it. My mouth’s open. I look—”

“How do you look?”

“Wrecked.”

“Good,” said Sarah, and put her mouth back on me and sucked.

I came with my eyes open on the lens. I didn’t decide to. It just went, all at once, hard, tearing up through me so fast I heard myself shout and felt my thighs clamp on the arms of the chair and my hips jerk up off the velvet into her mouth. She held me down with her free forearm across my stomach and kept going, kept her fingers deep and her tongue soft, while I shook and shook and the shutter went on clicking every four seconds like a heartbeat that didn’t care.

Click. Click. Click.

When I could see again she was sitting back on her heels on the rug, wiping her chin with the back of my sleeve, looking up at me with enormous satisfaction.

“How many frames do you think that was?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I wasn’t counting.”

“You’re always counting.”

“Not tonight.”

She smiled, slow, the real one, and got up off her knees.

“My turn,” I said, when I could stand.

“In the frame.”

“Everything in the frame.” I went to the tripod. I didn’t stop the timer. I picked the whole thing up, legs and all, still clicking, and carried it four feet to the left so the lens was square on the big west window, and the dark glass, and the lamp’s reflection in it. “Come here. Stand right there. In front of the glass.”

She came. She stood with her back to the window and her eyes on me, in my sweater and her jeans, and I took the sweater off her over her head and dropped it. She hadn’t worn anything under it either. I unbuttoned her jeans and pushed them down her hips with her underwear, slow, and knelt to get them off her feet, and stood up again and looked at her.

The lamp on the floor lit her from below. Gold on the soft curve of her stomach, the silver lines on her hips, the C-section scar, the full heavy weight of her breasts with the freckle on the left one. Her hair silver at the part and dark blond at the ends. Her collarbones going pink in a line, right on schedule.

She didn’t fold her arms. She hasn’t in weeks.

Click.

“Turn around,” I said. “Hands on the window.”

She turned. She put both palms flat on the cold old glass, one on either side of her own reflection, and I came up behind her and pressed the whole length of my body against her back, and she shivered.

“The street,” she said.

“Three floors down and nobody on it. And the lamp’s behind us. From out there you’re a shape.”

“And from in here?”

“From in here,” I said, into her ear, “the camera can see your face in the glass. Your face and mine. And everything I’m doing to you.”

She made a sound. Click.

I put my hands on her. I wasn’t careful about it. I’d had six hours of strangers telling me about light, and one night of her inside me with her harness on, and I wanted her so much my teeth hurt. I cupped her breasts from behind and rolled her nipples between my fingers until she pushed her hips back into mine, and I slid one hand down over her stomach, over the scar, between her legs, and found her slick and swollen and so hot it nearly put me back on my knees.

“You’ve been like this,” I said, “since the card.”

“Since before the card.” She was breathing hard against the glass. “Since I looked at those pictures this morning and thought, she isn’t in a single one.“

“And now?”

“Now you are,” Sarah said, and pushed back onto my hand.

I gave her two fingers and she took them with a gasp that fogged the glass. I gave her three, slow, and she said my name and dropped her forehead against the window, and I put my mouth on the side of her neck and my other hand flat on her stomach and held her there, against me, against the glass, and fucked her deep and steady while the shutter clicked behind us.

“Look up,” I told her. “Look at it. Look at us.”

She lifted her head. I watched her find us in the black window: her face, flushed and wide open, her breasts pressed to the glass, her mouth open; my face over her shoulder, silver hair, my eyes on hers in the reflection; my arm across her and my hand between her legs, moving. Two women in their forties in a lit window in a brick building in a river town, and not one thing about it hidden.

“Oh,” Sarah said. “Oh, Jules. That’s us.”

“That’s us.”

“That’s what you look like when you—”

“Yes.”

“You look at me like that?”

“Every day. Since the doorway.” I pressed my thumb to her clit and circled, tight, the way she likes when she’s this close. “You just never got to see it before. I was always behind the camera.”

She came.

She came against the window with both palms flat on the glass and her eyes open on our reflection, crying out, loud, every bit of it, the way she does now, the way she couldn’t for twenty-four years. Her whole body clenched on my fingers and shook against mine. I held her up. I kept my hand moving through it, slower, gentler, my mouth on her neck, her name and good and mine and I love you all running together against her skin, until her knees went and I caught her and we slid down the wall under the window together and landed on her rug in a heap.

Click.

Click.

Click.

We lay there on the rust and cream wool, naked, tangled, half in the lamp light and half out of it, and listened to the camera go on taking pictures of the empty window above us.

“You left it on,” Sarah said eventually, into my shoulder.

“I know.”

“It’s photographing a window.”

“It’s a good window.”

She laughed, low and wrecked, and lifted her head and looked down the room at the tripod.

“I want to see,” she said.

“Now?”

“Now. Bring it here.”

I got up. My legs didn’t work properly. I reached up and stopped the timer, and the room went quiet for the first time in forty minutes, a silence so big I could hear the radiator and the fridge and, faintly, through two walls, the television in 3C. I lifted the camera off the tripod and brought it back and lay down beside her on the rug and turned the screen on.

Six hundred and twelve frames.

I started at the beginning.

The empty chair. Sarah walking into it. Me walking into it—and I stopped there, with my thumb on the button, because there I was. A tall woman in a black T-shirt with her hands hanging uselessly at her sides and her face doing exactly what Sarah had said. The pleasant thing. The smile you give a room so it won’t look too hard.

“See,” Sarah said softly.

“I see.”

I clicked forward. The kiss. Her hand on my chest. My shirt coming off. Me naked on her rug with my face on fire and my eyes on the lens, terrified. Then the chair. Then the chair again. Then the chair, frame after frame, me spread over the arms with her mouth on me, and my face—

I stopped.

I didn’t know that face. I’ve photographed a thousand faces I didn’t know and never once been surprised by one. This one stopped my breath. It was open. That was the only word. Nothing smoothed over it, nothing held back for later, nobody behind the glass deciding what it was allowed to look like. It was a woman being loved, and letting it show, and not knowing she was being watched.

Except she did know. She’d known the whole time. She’d looked straight down the barrel and let it.

“Jules,” Sarah said.

I realized I was crying. Not much. Just a little, in the corners, the way she does.

“That’s me,” I said.

“That’s you.”

“I didn’t know I could look like that.”

“I did,” Sarah said. “I’ve seen it every night for two months. I just wanted you to have the proof.” She took the camera out of my hands, gently, and clicked forward, through the window, through her own face in the black glass, through both of us at the end of it, until she reached the last frame where people were in it.

It was us on the floor. Just after. My arm across her. Her face in my neck. Both of us blurred a little at the edges because we were laughing, and the lamp on the floor caught the side of her hair and the side of mine and made them nearly the same color.

She looked at it for a long time.

“That one,” she said. “That’s frame four.”

I looked at it. I’ve looked at a lot of photographs. I know when one’s right before I know why.

“Yes,” I said. “That’s the one.”

She opened the side of the camera and took out the card and held it up between two fingers. Small. Black. A nick on one corner.

“Mine?” she said.

“Ours.”

She thought about that. Then she got up off the rug, naked and gold and unhurried, and walked down the hall to her bedroom, and I heard the drawer of the marble nightstand open and close.

She came back and stood over me with her hands on her hips and looked down at me, sprawled on her rug with my camera lying open on the rug beside me.

“Bed,” she said. “And I’m leaving the lamp on.”

“You always leave the lamp on.”

“I know.” She held out her hand. “I like to see you.”

I took it. I let her pull me up. And for the first time in my life, I walked into a lit room and didn’t once think about where the camera was.

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