She must have come to the wrong place. Again.

And then a voice from nowhere said, “You’re late.”

“I…I got lost,” she stammered, startled by the sound. “All the factories look alike.”

“Excuses are for catfish,” the voice said. “Never mind. You’re here. Get undressed.”

“Wh…what?” For the second time within a minute, she found herself stammering.

“You’re Ashley Moore, aren’t you?”

“Y…yes…” She had to stop this. Whoever it was would think she had some kind of impediment.

“Stapley sent you?”

“Yes.” There, that sounded like a human being.

“So, get undressed.”

“Look, I didn’t apply for a nude modelling job.”

“Look yourself, kid,” the disembodied voice continued, “you’re obviously new, so let me explain a couple of things to you. There are only two kinds of men in the fashion business…the designers and the buyers. The designers want to put clothes on a nude woman, and the buyers want to tear them off. Either way, they want to see the nude body they’re buying. That’s my job.”

“So you’re a tearer-offer.”

“I’m not either. I’m not selling clothes. I’m selling you…in my pictures. So, all I want to see is you. Forget the clothes.”

“Seems I’m nude to everyone,” she noted.

“Now you’ve got it, kid,” the voice laughed. “So strip. Time’s a wastin’.”

“Do I ever get to see you? Or are you going to remain a ghost in the walls.”

“I’ll be in as soon as I get dressed. I was in the shower.”

“That hardly seems fair. Surely both of us should be starkers.”

“Fair is for balls hit to center field,” the voice said. “This is my place. I call the shots.”

“Then you must come over to my place and I’ll take some of you in your nothings.”

“Let’s keep this businesslike,” the voice grunted. “So you’ve got ten seconds to be in the buff. After that, I rip your clothes off and throw them down the elevator shaft, comprenez?”

“Gotcha.” She swallowed hard and pulled her tank top over her head, allowing her fullish breasts to bounce free.

“Gotta do somethin’ about those breasts,” the unseen voice said.

“You want bigger?” she gasped.

“Uh-uh. Far too large. They’ll probably want ‘em downsized.”

“Everything’s getting downsized these days. I don’t see why my boobs should have to follow the trend.”

“You wanna be an expensive model, or just be a cheap whore?” the voice asked. “Get ‘em a tuck job. Time’s money, and you’re wasting it. You got panties under them shorts?”

“Of course.”

“Take them both off at once. And your shoes.”

“You got a place where I can hang my things?”

“Does it look like it?” the voice sneered. “Kick ‘em all into that corner. There’s nothing big enough in there to walk off with them. I know. I swept last month.”

“Look.” She stopped in the act of pulling her shorts and panties over her hips. “Are you sure I’ve come to the right place? I was expecting…”

“Klieg lights, tripods?”

“I’d settle for a camera, even,” Ashley said. “And maybe a photographer behind it.”

“Voilà.” A man stepped out from behind a stack of cartons she had hardly noticed amid the general clutter. “Your heart’s desire.”

Ashley took a good look at her ‘heart’s desire’. He was maybe twenty-eight or nine and shorter than she was, so he stood maybe five-foot nine and she doubted if he weighed as much as her one-twenty. He had long, unkempt red hair, and the pasty white complexion that often goes with it. A little scraggly goatee, still dripping wet from his shower—At least he showered!—and milky blue eyes completed his distinguishing features. But they were hardly the last details of his unpleasant first impression. Despite his recent shower, his dirty fingernails and the filthy Band-Aid on his index finger rather offset whatever cleanliness he had achieved, as did the fact that he wore a pair of his rumpled dungarees and apparently not much else, for he had no shirt and she could see no waistline of underwear at the top of his dungarees’ leg holes. Likewise, his feet were bare and already—or still—covered with grime.

“You look vaguely disappointed.”

“If I was looking for a man, I guess I have a right to be,” she said, still irritated by his rudeness.

“And you got me. I’d say sorry, but I’m not. I am, however, a photographer. Surely you don’t find the idea of posing nude before me threatening now that you’ve seen me, do you?”

“I don’t know,” Ashley said. “They say small dogs—mongrels in particular—are the most dangerous.”

“Only to other dogs. So stop pretending you’re a bitch and strip, for Chrissakes. Or I’m likely to show you my bite is worse than my bark.”