“Here’s the thing, Alice, and I understand that you’ll never grasp this at your age, but the way you look now, you are not going to look like this forever. And you’ll want to preserve it somehow. In pictures. Trust me.”

“Do you want to take the pictures right now?”

“No, not right now. I just wanted to make the suggestion. If we do it, I’d want to make everything perfect. The lighting. Everything.”

“I don’t mind, but I don’t want anyone to see them except for you. Ever.”

“I promise,” he said. “They will just be for me. And for you. One day, you’ll cherish them.”

That weekend they took the pictures. Jake bought a fancy-looking camera for the occasion, plus a light meter, and Alice posed on the bed in the master bedroom. At first she was nervous, and self-conscious, but then it started to get fun and sexy. Jake was surprisingly quiet the whole time; Alice thought he might have specific ideas for how she should pose, but he didn’t—he let her do what she wanted. When she thought they were done, however, Jake said, “Let’s take some in your old bedroom.”

“Why?” Alice asked.

“It’s more you,” Jake said. “In here it looks like you’re playacting. In your room it will look more natural.”

She did what he asked, feeling a little strange posing on her single bed underneath the Duran Duran poster, and the small shelf that held her cross-country trophies. But it made Jake happy, and after he put the camera away, they had sex in Alice’s old room for the first time. Afterward, Alice asked, “Where will you get the pictures developed?”

“I have a friend at work with a darkroom, and he said I could use it.”

“You won’t show him?”

“No, of course not. Those pictures are just for us.”

“I don’t want anyone else to see me like this. Ever. Just you.”

“One day you will. One day I’ll be too old for you—I’m probably too old for you now—and then you’ll find someone else, someone younger. I won’t mind. It’s natural.”

Alice didn’t say anything right away. It was not that she didn’t know that Jake, almost fifty, was considered too old for her—although she thought about Richard Gere in Pretty Woman, and how hot he was—but she had somehow never imagined him getting older. She imagined herself getting older, but him staying the same. “I don’t know about that,” she said.

“You will,” Jake answered.

They lay on the bed a little longer. “Did you always want this?” she asked.

“Want what?”

“Want me. Want me more than you wanted my mom.”

Alice heard the faintest clicking sound. It was Jake, tapping his teeth together, something he did when he was thinking. “Yes,” he finally said.