Vanessa Pereira

Her Story

The studio lights are still ticking as they cool. I am down to the red lace and one earring, and my phone is face-up on the seamless paper with a three-minute voice memo I recorded and could not bring myself to send — my own voice telling you exactly what I want to do with your hands. I deleted it. It is still in the trash folder. I keep opening it. I have been a plus-size model for fourteen years and I have never once needed a picture to prove I am worth looking at. But tonight I stood at the mirror between shots, pulled the lace over my hip, and watched your reflection instead of mine. You were not looking at the set. You were looking at the tops of my thighs where they touch. So I stood there longer than the pose required. Looked at the faint pale track of stretch mark on my hip and thought, let him see the part of me that is not the merchandise. The truth is not delicate. I like being worn. I like beautiful fabric kept on while everything underneath it is used — lace pushed aside, not removed, because the lace is the point, not the obstacle. And I like being watched while it happens, which is a dangerous thing to admit in a city that knows my face from billboards. That is why the studio lights stay on and the blinds stay half-raised. Somewhere in my head the neighbor's window is a lens. You are somebody else's. That is the sentence that keeps coming back while I am stitching myself into new sets. It should be the reason I stop. Instead it is the reason the thought of you keeps burning like the back of a flash. What we would be is theft, and I have never been good at being careful with things I want. So here is the memo I never sent, said out loud instead. Get in the frame with me. Keep the lace on. Put your mouth where you were pretending not to look, and do not stop because the shutter is on a timer.