Cecilia had made a conscious effort to avoid base camp and bumping into Anouk while she was going through the works, but the moment the model showed up on the beach—hair long and loose, outfitted ina cutout black maillot, with a terry-cloth robe as a cover-up—Cecilia’s pulse quickened. There was no escaping the intense pull.
“Ahh,si belle. We make magic today, yes?” Didier greeted Anouk with the traditionalbise.
“Bien sûr. We make magic today.”
Anouk’s mood was light, happy. Cecilia assumed that she knew in the absence of the supermodels this was her opportunity to shine, that all eyes would be on her.
From beneath the canopy, Cecilia watched Didier, Jean-Luc, and Rafaella look over their notes, discussing what shots they already had in the bag and what they would need to round out the campaign. She was busying herself with prepping Polaroid film when Anouk sought her out.
“Ça va?” Her greeting was casual, breezy.
Cecilia could smell her sunscreen and whatever hair product it was Santiago had sprayed on her beachy waves. Something like watermelon, like sugar. She knew that if she looked her in the eye, there’d be no concealing every emotion she had been feeling since she left Anouk’s hotel room. And she knew that anyone around them would be able to detect it as well.
“Ça va,” she said, avoiding her gaze.
“It’s okay, your hand?”
“It’s okay. Yes. Thank you, again. That was very kind of you.”
Anouk was quiet for a moment, gauging Cecilia’s ambivalence, her avoidance.
“Yes. Well, good. I’m glad it’s okay,” she said eventually, before backing out of the tent and heading toward Beatriz.
Cecilia waited a long moment before glancing in the model’s direction. Beatriz was adjusting her straps, positioning the cutouts just so, and Anouk was smiling, her head tilted up to the sun, unbothered. As if she had not a care in the world. As if she had not had her fingers between Cecilia’s thighs a few short hours prior. As if a reckless dalliance on the job was nothing out of the ordinary.
Cecilia wished she could be that detached, but she was built differently.
The first few setups of the day went off without a hitch. The three models lying in the sand, bodies entwined, limbs entangled. Rafaella and Jean-Luc were more than satisfied. But later, after lunch, Didier decided he wanted to try something new, something slightly more “provocant.” Cecilia wasn’t certain if he was inspired by Anouk’s wardrobe change—a bronze string bikini, the hue electric against her skin—or if he’d been harboring the idea all along, but he led Anouk and Bas farther down the shoreline near the southern rock formation, and omitted Elliot from the shot.
Anouk was positioned prostrate on a beach blanket, her face resting on her arms, in the foreground, with Bas angled beside her, applying sunscreen to the backs of her legs. Didier had crouched in the sand in his white cotton twill pants, and was shooting them head-on, while Marc moved alongside him with a reflector. Apart from Beatriz, Santiago, and Sarah, who were huddled off to the side on their collapsible stools with their respective magazines and crossword puzzles, the others were all back up beneath the tent, sheltering from the sun.
Cecilia was standing just out of the way, attempting to load the second camera, when it started. Or at least that’s when she thought it started.
Didier had lowered his Nikon to readjust the bandana on his head.
“I need you to forget everything we shoot before this. Everything we did with the others. Because all those were sexy, but playful, yes? But this now needs to be full of passion. You two, you are madly in love. But it’s new. Like in the beginning when you can’t take your hands off each other. Don’t think so much about what the bodies are doing, I need to see this in the eyes. I need to feel the electricity between the two of you.D’accord?”
Bas, who was typically game for anything, paused for a millisecond, gauging Anouk. “Yeah.D’accord. Anouk?”
She nodded her head. “D’accord.”
Cecilia watched as the models absorbed Didier’s notes, adjusting their poses. The moment mutating into something more intimate, charged. Bas’s hands higher on Anouk’s thighs. Just below her ass. Anouk lowering her eyelids, parting her lips.
Didier shot off several frames before once again directing. “This.Yes. But even sexier. Don’t be afraid to touch her ass. It’s okay if he touch the ass, Anouk?”
Cecilia didn’t hear Anouk respond one way or another. She might have nodded.
Beatriz materialized then, unlooped the strings of Anouk’s bikini suggestively, and then slipped out of frame. They reconvened, Didier and Marc on their knees in the sand. Bas palming the outside of Anouk’s thigh, grazing her hip.
“Bas. This is sexy lite. I don’t believe for one moment you’re fucking this girl.”
“I just don’t want…” Bas trailed off, and then lowered his face to the side of Anouk’s, whispering something in her ear. She nodded. And Cecilia watched as his hand slipped up to the curve of Anouk’s ass, sliding in between her thighs, slow. She felt it as if it were happening to her and immediately turned her head away, eyeing the others up at the tent. Oblivious.
She did not see the expression on Anouk’s face, but she heard Didier say, “Yes, this. Yes,” and his shutter clicking in rapid-fire succession. And she knew that he was getting the shot he wanted.
The summer Cecilia met Lorry they’d spent a week with his family at their home in East Hampton. Cecilia had never had a serious boyfriend, let alone one with multiple homes—including the Park Avenue pied-à-terre, the Kenters had three—and so much of that experience felt like a fairy tale to her. As were the rules in Greenwich: she and Lorry were not permitted to share a room. That, however, did not stop them from occasionally slipping out to have sex on the beach after dark, and from him creeping into her bed after hours. On their final night together, with his parents in the other wing and his younger sister, Serena, and her girlfriend just down the hall, they’d engaged in a marathon lovemaking session, staying up until the sun rose. At some point amid their fervor, Cecilia masturbated for him, a first. Raised Catholic and the daughter of prim Jamaican parents, Cecilia had arrived late to the self-pleasuring game, not indulging until college. To do so in front of an audience was, to her, a profoundly intimate act. Lorry was sufficiently captivated, and so in the months and years thatfollowed it would become a regular thing. But that first time in the Hamptons, Cecilia felt as if she were baring her soul.
This act now, between Bas and Anouk, felt similarly intimate. One too intimate for those not partaking to witness. But she couldn’t help but think that maybe she was made to bear witness for a reason. And maybe, the very act of bearing witness meant that she was partaking in it after all.
