Ryan St. Germain

The white lights twinkled all over the front of the department store. In the middle of the afternoon you might not have noticed them from as close as I was standing but the sky, which had been blue and was giving way to gray as it did every afternoon, gave the little lights a better chance of being seen.

I’d arrived early and stood outside waiting. I’m almost always early to a first meting and this afternoon I’m come to meet Miu for the first time. I’d left the house later than I expected, still arriving in the square earlier than I thought I would. I looked around as I waited for her to arrive, having a vague notion but no certainty of which direction she was coming in.

A man sat with a xylophone in his lap, playing something that sounded vaguely like christmas music, but I wasn’t sure what it was. It was light, but not quite cheerful and felt just a little off, sort of like the sky did. Birds passed low overhead as people parked and collected bicycles from the sea of them that surrounded me. Footsteps fell on the cobblestones in varying heaviness as people of all sorts passed me by.

I saw Miu approaching from a distance and knew it was her with immediate certainty. The first thing that I noticed were the earmuffs she was wearing, followed by the face that I’d seen in photographs. She saw me and waved, greeting me with a smile.  When we were face-to-face we shook hands and went inside.

The people inside were clustered together, but it wasn’t as busy as I might have expected. A man dressed as Santa stood near the front doors and that’s where the largest congregation of people were gathered. We moved past him and to the escalators, riding up the five or so floors until we came to the cafe where we ordered coffee and muffins. We took a seat at the far end of a long table, which I figured would afford us the best opportunity to talk privately.

Taking off our coats and scarves, tucking away our gloves, the conversation we’d started outside continued. The low hanging orbs that held the lights over the table came between us and threw my reflection back at me with all the care of a fun house mirror. I noticed my hair, which I’d described to Miu in the text message before meeting as “sort of long dark blond”, looked wind whipped and in need of a cut. I took the seat across from her as we chatted about how long we’d been in this city, where we’d been before, what the differences were from where we’d come from and where we were now.

The conversation moved gradually to the material we’d discussed shooting. She’d seen some of the samples of the videos that I’d shot in the past and she knew that bondage and tickling were what I was proposing. She asked about the other things that I’ve and in a way befitting the tone of the conversation I assured her that I wouldn’t do anything that would leave any marks (and that I’m not shooting anything explicit any more).  She seemed relieved and having gotten that out-of-the-way, we talked about other things, only coming back to the shoot when it came to figuring out when we’d work together.

I glanced around the room and doubted that any of the people that I could see would suspect what Miu and I were talking about. If they were to look in our direction, they might think “small” or “soft-spoken”, but I doubted that bondage and tickling would be conclusions they would come to without help from us. I appreciated the mixture of ease and delicacy which she approached the discussion.

We finished our coffee and made plans to shoot after the holidays. I made a note of it in my phone and bundled up again for the cold outside. We rode down the escalator again, passing by a group of young women in hijab having their picture taken with Santa before exiting to the square where we said our goodbye’s.

It was sprinkling just a bit as I walked away and I called Mina to tell her to bring an umbrella when she came to meet me. I walked quickly through the crowds, determined to out distance the rain and not be forced to buy another umbrella. Cold drops splattered on my warm cheeks and the wind made my scarf ripple behind me. My boots hit the ground with a strong cadence as I worked my way around people, rarely stopping, rarely slowing. I crossed the streets, thinking about how I’d hoped for more time this year to do a christmas themed shoot, but that the loss of my camera had put an end to that. I blew past the sex toy shop that I’d meant to stop in before I knew it, I was standing outside of the restaurant waiting for Mina, having arrived sooner than I thought I would.