Tahseen finds the loft-style studio’s only windowsill sooty yet cool beneath her backside. That anyone was leasing any part of this warehouse-district four-story was news to her. Local legendry that still surrounds the place and its past as a crematorium had hurt its market desirability as well as that of neighboring addresses, and had kept it largely untenanted for years. Tahseen stretches, arching her bare back, supposing that perhaps some truth lie in the adage about time healing all wounds. God knows she needs it to be true , after her unexpected performance here tonight.

The night steals a taste of moist skin, its breezes lapping reverently at her tender nipples and still-tingling sex. Across the room, the door to the refrigerator where Myles chills beer for visitors hangs opened, and Myles, a sinewy masterpiece of angled sepia, stands relishing the coolness therein. “A five-minute break” he’d promised her hours ago; then they’d continue the photo shoot. Five orgasms later, the camera lies as forgotten as the clothes she wore over here. Phantoms of her photographer’s hands frolic over her arcs. Myles licks Tahseen’s payment from his lips.

“Delight Your Man With Nude, Sensual You,” read the classified ad that lured her here. Tahseen lounges ravaged and sticky, imagining her lover’s eyes as he peruses the personalized erotic pictorial that will be her gift to him; every page featuring her Burmese mystique, each picture’s thousand words speaking of unabashed lust. On those weekends when his band tours out of town, these photos taken tonight will remind her Andrew that one-night stands make poor substitute for what exotica awaits his return. They’ll testify to Tahseen’s devotion to a fiancé she didn’t think of once while Myles was inside her…