We had calculated it precisely. Drawn up detailed plans, blueprints for our games. I'd even made a model from cardboard and wire, string and wax and the photograph torn from a magazine that had sparked the whole insane idea.
She'd taken it further and written the grant proposal. Delicately described as a consulting colleague, I'd sat in the room as she'd presented it to her college masters. I'd also watched her squirm and the flush run from the collar of her loose white blouse up to the roots of her hair, where a few loose golden strands curled softly against her skin and slowly darkened with sweat. Her responses were not due to their frankly flaccid attempts at probing her academic justifications, but in response to the ministrations of the vibrator I was controlling from the phone in my pocket. Though the unseasonably warm sun which poured through the skylights made a plausible excuse when she was forced to ask for a glass of cold water.
The money wasn't really necessary. If it had come to it, she could have bought the whole hotel, rather than just have us rent the room for a week. Still, we'd both enjoyed the game, and watched more than one of the panel leave the stuffy room uncomfortably aroused and confused as to their motives. Even the mousy looking wife of the master, whose blatant 'secret' affairs debauching the most virginal of her husband's students were the talk of the local pubs.
The room itself was decadent in its Spartan décor, and ideal for our purposes. Though the city beckoned to my camera, I had all that I needed to engross me in that room. We barely left. Each day working to discover the angles of light and the best choices for restraint. Generous gratuities with the front desk and the other staff meant that we were never interrupted, even though her occasional screams must have carried through the old building.
She told me when we were ready, and that night we dined in town so that our room might be cleaned in advance of the performance. We slept together, but apart, each curled in a sheet on the threadbare Turkish rug that covered the pitted wooden boards in front of the unlit marble fireplace, soothed by the regular crash of the shutter release in the stillness of the night.
I took candid shots as she bathed. In the early morning light, she cleansed herself as thoroughly as preparing for some mystic religious ritual. Her skin glowed against the crazed white enamel of the claw-foot tub. The breeze ruffled the long curtains that should have been drawn modestly over the closed shutters that covered the balcony window, painting her with moving shadows like wraiths. We had thrown everything open that morning uncaring of the ease of being overlooked.
And finally, with my camera once more safely mated to its tripod, blindly capturing our every move in its stentorian staccato, I began to bind her. Touching and teasing as we went. Caressing and urging. Occasionally, I would pause my exertions, allowing for the needs of a living being. We knew how it worked; water in, water out. I held her head as she sipped bottled water delicately though a straw, and caressed her arse while her piss flowed into the antique po my grandmother had randomly bequeathed to me, along with her jewellery.
Each fraction of a second captured by my camera blurred into the hours of that day. We were well rehearsed and knew our cues by heart. When the time came, the sun in just the place I'd planned, it took but a single touch to make her body arc. The camera snapped, and snapped again, never breaking its rhythm.
Twelve foot to a side on stretched canvas, cropped square and desaturated. We hung that image, my disembodied hand and the arc of her naked body exactly conforming to that of the bridge visible though the window behind us, on a black wall by the curtained door to a small room where the time lapse footage I'd cut together played endlessly on loop. The gallery's other walls played host to other images, smaller and neatly framed in simple black. It had taken weeks of pleasurable afternoons to pick our favourites. Strange how frequently some faculty members, and the occasional overeager student, would fail to see the 'Do Not Disturb' signs we posted on the door of her office and my studio during those reviewing sessions. Yet we received no complaints.
The exhibition itself caused the stir we intended. The conservative papers simply branded us pornographers, while the more liberal ones condemned their smallness of mind, though simultaneously hosted hand-wringing articles from self-proclaimed feminists and scantly covered lasciviousness from men and women alike on their websites. Adulation and condemnation ensued, for a while, until the next shiny thing caught the imaginations of the demi-monde and we faded back into comfortable insignificance.