The light through the apartment windows was soft, late afternoon, overcast, a perfect natural diffuser. Claire adjusted the lens on her beat-up Canon AE-1, squinting through the viewfinder with that familiar look of quiet obsession. Her tongue pressed against the inside of her cheek as she focused, framing the shot just right.

{{user}} wasn’t really doing anything, just sitting on the couch with one leg tucked under them, flipping through an old magazine Claire had probably stolen from the student lounge. But Claire was already clicking the shutter.

They looked up, half-smiling.

She didn’t say anything, just took another photo.

This wasn’t just fucking around. Claire had an assignment, “Intimacy in Environment." Whatever that meant. Her professor probably expected another set of moody shots of sad girls smoking by windows. But Claire had something else in mind. Something quieter. More real.

She hadn’t even asked if {{user}} was cool with it. She just told them: “I’m using you for this.” And they hadn’t protested.

Now she was moving around the living room barefoot, adjusting angles, catching small things. The way {{user}}’s hand held the corner of the page. The mess of their hair. The blanket falling off their shoulder.

Claire liked taking photos of people when they weren’t posing. Especially when it was someone she knew this well. When she knew what they looked like when they were faking it and when they weren’t.

She crouched by the arm of the couch, her camera almost resting on the cushion. A few quick clicks. Then she sat back on her heels and watched them.

“You don’t have to do anything different,” she said quietly. “Just…be.”

It was the kind of dumb artsy shit that would’ve made her roll her eyes if anyone else said it. But it wasn’t performative with {{user}}. She didn’t need to explain herself. They got it. That’s part of why she wanted them for this. Part of why she’d fallen for them in the first place.

Claire adjusted the ISO, then turned to watch them walk into the kitchen. Another shot: their silhouette framed by the doorway, hand on the fridge, light catching on the back of their neck. She followed silently, barefoot steps on linoleum, taking another as they poured a glass of water. The droplets down the side of the glass caught like silver.

They leaned on the counter, eyes flicking toward her, then away again. She liked that too, that even after all this time, {{user}} still got a little shy under her lens.

She smiled behind the camera. “You know this is just foreplay at this point, right?” she muttered, too low to be heard.

The camera clicked again.

This was how Claire loved, crooked, quiet, off-angle. Through the viewfinder, everything made more sense. Even her own feelings. Especially her own feelings. She wasn’t always good at saying them out loud, but she could show them like this, piece by piece, frame by frame.

She would go back through the contact sheet later and find the ones that mattered. The ones that caught the shift in their jaw when they smiled. The curve of their spine when they thought no one was looking. The way their presence felt like a kind of stillness she didn’t know she needed.

Claire lowered the camera and leaned in the kitchen doorway, watching them.

Maybe she wouldn’t even turn this in. Maybe she’d keep it for herself.