The Hand in the Picture

The Hand in the Picture

Before Mae tried to make Ben look at her, Tara had already made him easy to want.

She brought him into rooms where nobody had to decide whether he was safe. She laughed before he finished certain stories, handed him her keys without checking which pocket they went into, and left him talking with Mae when she went to refill a glass. By the time Mae noticed how well he listened, Tara had already shown her what he looked like when a woman trusted him.

Tara had not meant to advertise him. She had simply made him known.

Mae had met Tara through Tara's older sister, June. By the time June moved to the United States, Mae and Tara no longer needed her to keep the friendship together. They had their own lunches, their own voice notes, and enough shared history for Tara to arrive at Mae's flat without knocking.

Ben entered that friendship as Tara's new boyfriend.

He was not the sort of man Mae usually noticed first. At a crowded table, he spoke rarely and remembered everything. He listened until somebody said the thing beneath the story and answered that instead. At one gathering, Mae mentioned spending Saturday assembling a desk for her son. Two weeks later, Ben remembered the drawer that would only open if threatened.

Mae found herself talking toward his attention.

They became easy in groups. If Tara went to the bar, Mae and Ben continued whatever conversation had already begun. If Mae made a cruel little joke under her breath, his smile arrived before he looked at her. Nothing needed to be hidden yet. Tara saw them getting on and seemed pleased by it.

The first private message came after a garden party. Mae posted a photograph of a cold beer balanced against her leg. She was sitting on the back step in shorts that had ridden high. The can was bright with condensation. Her thighs occupied most of the frame.

Ben replied before anybody else.

That's a dangerous way to advertise a beer.

Mae looked at the photograph again. The can tilted toward the soft inside of her thigh exactly as she had intended.

What? You don't like the brand? she wrote.

Ben answered, The brand isn't what I noticed.

Oh. The legs. Didn't even realise they were in it.

His reply came with a laughing face. Your legs are doing most of the advertising.

Mae laughed aloud in her kitchen, alone. Not because the exchange was funny. Because he had accepted the lie and returned it intact.

After that, they had a language.

Mae was supposedly interested in Callum, a divorced man she had met twice through work and had not thought about between meetings. Callum became useful the moment Ben asked whether she was seeing anyone. She said perhaps. A week later, while getting ready for drinks, she sent Ben two mirror photographs and asked which one might get Callum's attention.

In the first, she wore a black blouse open one button lower than she would wear it outside. In the second, her hand was on her hip and the fabric pulled more tightly across her breasts.

Ben chose the second.

Mae asked why.

Your boobs look amazing in that one 😍, he wrote.

Mae put on the first blouse arrangement and sent Callum nothing.

Ben never asked whether Callum liked the pictures. He asked whether Mae had worn the blouse, whether the bar had been good, whether she had reached home before the rain. The questions let him behave like a friend. Her answers let him know the other man had failed without requiring him to exist.

The photographs became a game of incremental permission. A dress from the front. The same dress from the side. A changing-room picture with one bra strap showing. Mae always supplied a reason: Which one? Too much? Would this work? Honest opinion. Ben learned to answer the question she had not written.

He liked her legs. He liked the weight of her breasts when a neckline did not pretend otherwise. He liked her in red, though she distrusted it on herself. Once, after she sent a photograph with wet hair and an old shirt clinging to her, he wrote only, That one looks like you.

That answer stayed with her longer than the explicit ones.

Tara was the reason Mae could not send a photograph with no alibi. She was also part of the reason Ben's attention felt so exact. Mae did not want a man who wandered through the world approving women. She wanted this man, already chosen by someone who knew her, to interrupt his ordinary loyalty and look at Mae instead.

She disliked that truth enough to keep feeding it.

At the coast, Mae's photographs reached Ben in a flurry from the beach. Her sister kept taking them, and Mae kept sending the ones that gave him something new to notice.

The first showed her standing beside a sun lounger in a green bikini, one hand at her waist.

For Callum? she asked.

Ben wrote, Callum should be grateful you remember his name.

The next photograph came from a sun lounger. Her knees were raised and the lower half of the green bikini showed beyond the curve of her stomach.

While Ben was replying, Mae scrolled back two summers and found another beach photograph of herself. She wore a patterned bikini with the top twisted into two shell shapes and had her tongue out at the camera.

Mae wrote, I want one like this again.

Ben replied, Because a man can take it off by pressing down?

Mae sent a laughing face. He had answered the woman in the old photograph in the present tense.

Ben wrote, Take the next one from higher up. Show more boob.

Mae pressed the heart beneath his message.

Mae wrote, They're practically gone.

Ben answered, Enough to fill a man's hand and make him happy.

Mae smiled at the screen. For that, I suppose they're enough 😜😍

Until then, Ben had described what he could see. Now his hand had entered the picture.

He followed it with a meme. Across the top it said, Her: be creative and not just say “hi”. Beneath the words, a small, shy alien held out a heart that read: Ride my face.

Mae asked, Is that what I think it is?

It is, Ben replied. Your thighs against my cheeks and my hands free.

Mae sent a laughing face. It's one of my favourite positions.

Mine too.

Mae told him, I'm tired of taking photographs 😂

Then she sent another.

This one faced the camera directly, framed from the lower band of her green bikini top upward. The cups lifted her breasts and held them close, leaving their upper curves bare and the cleavage between them impossible to miss. The beach light sharpened her collarbones and made her face look leaner. Nothing in the picture pretended she had been caught by accident.

Ben sent a row of heart-eyed faces. You're beautiful, Mae 😍😍

Mae answered with another photograph from the same afternoon. This one had been taken from behind. It showed the length of her back, the rounded weight of her backside, and the narrow green fabric between her legs.

More hearts appeared beneath it.

Mae looked through the photographs again. Praise had made the polished ones easy to send. The next one asked something else.

Her sister had taken it on the shore. Mae had one arm around her son. Her backside was turned to the camera, unarranged and plainly lit. The marks on her skin showed. So did the fact that her life continued beyond the edge of a bikini.

Mae sent Ben a warning first.

I'm going to disappoint you.

She sent the photograph.

Ben skipped the speech about flaws. He asked whether the sea had been cold because her son was standing on one foot. Mae told him it had been freezing. Ben said the boy looked determined. They spoke about the wind, the beach, and the absurd price of two chairs.

Ben returned to the question beneath the picture.

You haven't disappointed me.

Mae sat on the end of the hotel bed with his answer above the photograph.

He had seen the whole arrangement now. Not only the body she could angle into a mirror, but the life attached to it.

He had not looked away from either.

When Mae returned home, Tara arranged dinner on the terrace of a crowded restaurant. She sat opposite Mae with Ben beside her. Nothing had changed in the visible world. Tara complained affectionately that Ben had bought the wrong coffee again. Ben rested one hand on the back of Tara's chair while the waiter squeezed past.

Mae listened and joined in. She was not waiting for Tara to reveal some hidden cruelty that would make any of this easier.

Ben looked below the table.

Mae wore a short linen skirt. His gaze stopped at the strip of skin above her knee. The beer photograph passed between them so clearly that she could almost feel the cold can against her thigh.

Tara asked whether Callum had ever replied.

“Not really,” Mae said.

Ben lifted his wine. A smile started and disappeared behind the glass.

When he lowered it, he met Mae's eyes. She did not look away.

That was when Mae understood they were not approaching an affair.

They were already inside one.