Kots by Eirinie Carson

He is the first Black photographer she has ever worked with, older than Steffi but nebulously so, in that she isn’t sure his exact age. Later, he will tell her he is 25, but something about the way he repeats this age, almost insisting, will make her think he is lying. It feels important that he is Black, noteworthy, like a new age in the fashion industry and Steffi is a part of it. She is excited, or as excited as any school aged Londoner can be about anything. The first shoot is a test shoot arranged by her modelling agency and her agent, Sasha, to refresh Steffi’s book, because it’s always good to refresh your book, Sasha says. The clients want new; they want exciting, cutting-edge photos inside of the plastic A3 portfolio Steffi drags around to castings, and apparently Kots fits the bill. 

“You’re funny,” Kots smiles on that first shoot, after she has described the outfit she chose to bring as salt-of-the-earth slut. He laughs genuinely, and her shoulders relax, and she settles into this new role as someone who isn’t just quite-pretty-for-a-Black-girl. It feels good to be more than “just.” 

When the photos come back, Sasha is lukewarm. 

“They’ll do, I suppose,” she says as she tosses them onto a desk filled with dozens of photos and comp cards of other girls Steffi half recognises from casting rooms. Despite this, one of Kots’ photos is awarded a spot on her comp card, not the big space on the front where Steffi’s name is but the back with her measurements, and despite this, she still makes a coffee date to show him, and he is as pleased as she had anticipated he would be. It is the photo of her in the wind, hair in her face but just enough of a breeze that her brown eyes show through, and it’s a little blurry which Steffi likes because now is the season of the crisp, sharp photo, so this picture feels rebellious.

Kots has a low voice, Barry White low, and it’s so low that when he calls Steffi’s house, before her mum hands the phone over she holds the receiver against her chest like she’s Amanda Wingfield and mouths he’s lovely! at Steffi, and Steffi hears Jonquils!. Later, much later when it all comes apart, and even later than that, when she becomes a parent herself, she will wonder why her mum never asked his age, never questioned what he was doing calling a teenage girl at her parents’ house.

Their first shoot was organized by Steffi’s agency, but after that they begin to make their own arrangements, meeting to try out a new lens, or photograph a new hairstyle. Steffi doesn’t tell Sasha, or anyone. Their shoots become more regular, and he describes her as his muse, which feels special, which feels important. Steffi’s mum either makes her feel like a child or like someone who should know better, and she’s never been anyone’s muse before, but she knows Kate Moss is Lagerfeld’s muse, Naomi Campbell is Alaïa’s. All Steffi ever gets are go-sees to Adidas and Nike and Sweaty Betty, and all of the streetwear castings she’s been sent to have been fruitless, but they keep on coming. Every morning on her school holidays she goes to her agency up the King’s Road and Sasha prints out her itinerary for the day, and then Steffi sits on the oversized couch in the waiting room with the other models and a mini A-to-Z and figures out which tube she needs, and how long it’ll take her to get to each. She writes little notes in the margins of her itinerary- 20 min walk from Marylebone station, take the 38 to Victoria, stuff like that. She’s good at navigating, and maps of London begin to build in her head like a video game so that she can draw upon them without even opening the A-to-Z. The castings are exhausting, and even if she times it just right, she still ends up ten minutes late for each one, not that it matters because they’re always running at least 45 behind, and they always have a line of bored, hungry looking girls on the floor, heads leaning against the wall behind, waiting. 

Being someone’s muse sounds more glamourous than that. 

You can really see what you’re up against in those things– hundreds of gorgeous girls a day, girls she is told she looks identical to although the only similarity Steffi can see is skin tone, and sometimes not even that. They only hire one Black model every once in a while, so as to not overwhelm the consumer, which means Steffi ends up seeing the same faces a lot, and while they are cordial they never make friends, never really warm up, because it’s hard to be warm when the competition is so hot. 

But Kots, Kots only has eyes for her. He is careful not to cross any boundaries, he even leaves the room when she changes, knocking on the door timidly before re-entering, he talks to her about school and boys and keeps it all above board, but sometimes there are moments in which it feels like time has frozen and it is just the two of them trapped together in amber, no one saying what they want to say. Steffi feels combustible around him, like if he were to touch her she would explode into a million dazzling pieces and the threat of that keeps her coming back, later and later into the evening. Kots sometimes arranges shoots after his day job at the Battersea Arts Centre, and they shoot in an upstairs room he has turned into a studio, and the light always fades before they finish. As time goes by he stops calling her funny, although she still tries to be. Instead, he begins to stare deeply into her eyes as he adjusts the focus on his Nikon. And one day, in a voice so quiet she has to say pardon? to get him to repeat it, he asks her if she would take off her clothes. And she does, shyly, to reveal a matching black bra and underwear that makes him set down his camera and cover his mouth in restraint. A thrill will tingle up between her legs then, and although something about it feels not quite right, when he comes toward her in the darkening wood panelled room she doesn’t stop him, doesn’t flee. No; she’s curious. She wants to see what will happen if she allows this, if the joy she’s been waiting for will manifest, and so before Steffi knows it, his tongue is in her mouth, and his hands are on her body with such fervour that it is borderline abrasive. He starts to move his fingers towards her knickers and that breaks the spell, because she’s got her A Levels coming up, and she’s still not sure how old he is or why she keeps coming back here, and he stops too because he is, by his own admission, a gentleman.

That scares her off for a bit, she’s not sure what to think. When he calls her house and her mum comes to her, face flushed and smiling, jonquils in her eyes, Steffi waves her off, tells her no. And then her mum’s grin drops a little, and she gets back on the phone in a voice too high to be natural and makes excuses for her teenaged daughter to this grown, grown man.

Steffi gets a boyfriend, no one special just someone who skates in the park near her house. They tell each other they’re in love, they kiss so long their mouths hurt, they have sex, her first time, passionately and they both cry from the ecstasy of it all. They always meet at his house, because she doesn’t want to bring him home yet to her mum who will definitely not be very nice to him, who isn’t very nice to anyone. Skaterboi and Steffi will have lots of sex that Skaterboi will diligently note down in salivating detail in what he loftily calls his journal like he’s Ernest fucking Hemmingway but is really just like any old diary, covered in his graffiti tag. Steffi still scrolls in her phone to Kots’ number and looks at it, but she never calls, and neither does he. Something in her wants him to care that she’s too busy for him, but he’s a grown up, isn’t he, he probably hasn’t even noticed she’s gone.

Skaterboi will meet Steffi after her castings, after the job for New Era that is shot on a rooftop in Shoreditch, and Steffi will show him round the trailer with all the diet cokes one could possibly desire neatly stacked into the minibar fridge. Skaterboi will fill his Jansport with them even though Steffi is embarrassed, says he shouldn’t, says he’s taking the piss, but at the end of the day they’re both kids from a poor neighbourhood and all this is exciting, isn’t it? It’s supposed to be exciting.

When Steffi finally introduces Skaterboi to her mum, her mum will be interested and ask him questions and invite him to dinner, and when he misses the last train she’ll even let him stay the night in the guest room and Steffi will feel like she’s grown up a little, her mum is finally seeing that she’s not a baby anymore. But the next day she wakes up after her mum has already gone to work, and Skaterboi is also gone and there’s no one to ask what happened, or why. When she calls him later that day he tells Steffi that when he got up to go to the bathroom in the night, her mum was sat in a chair in the hallway, guarding Steffi’s door. She made a motion for him to go back to the guest room, and so he did, and he pissed in the plant pot instead out of spite, and left before the sun rose.

Steffi is furious, and when she confronts her mum, she is indignant.

“I don’t let boys into my house just so they can sleep with my teenaged daughter!” She shouts, and so Steffi shouts back that she doesn’t understand, that he’s a really nice boyfriend, and she’s lucky because so many of her friends are with like, really inappropriate people. And Steffi’s mum will reach for the cliché and snap back,

“While you are under my roof, it is my rules.”

And eventually Steffi and Skaterboi will break up, but not because of her mum, or not just because of that. Whatever ecstasy they found together will harden, as it often does, into resentment. Skaterboi will get jealous of the parties she goes to; of the boys she poses with on shoots. He will show up to summer park hangs he wasn’t invited to, a little drunk and a lot high, and start fights with her. Steffi’s friends will urge her to dump him, but she’ll be reluctant, and then one day his mum will find weed in his room and rage at him in Polish and will go to the hardware shop and buy a screwdriver and take his door of the hinges. Then Skaterboi will be a little too busy fighting with his mother to bother Steffi, and they will both just evaporate out of each other’s lives.

And after Skaterboi has gone, Steffi will start texting Kots again. He will text back a little too quick, and she’ll use up all her phone credit in two nights texting him T9 style on her Nokia brick so that he has to top it up for her, which feels significant. Steffi is grateful, and they plan the flimsy pretence of shoot together. 

When she gets to the little attic room of the Battersea Arts Center, long after everyone who works there has left, she will show him a torn-out page of a magazine she has brought as a reference, a topless brown-skinned girl with a big fro like her, high-fashion-mean-mugging and clutching on a breast like it’s an emergency. Kots will take a long time to look at this, and with the faintest trace of a smile he will look up at Steffi and says in his bass,

“Take off your clothes.” 

And she does, and he helps her, and he is growling in her ear before she knows what’s happening, and suddenly she wants him, really wants him, and she tears at his clothes too, and all the while he is snap snap snapping away. When she thinks back to that time she will think of flashes of lightning and wonder what happened to the photos. The sex is disappointing once it actually starts, he is far too sweaty and far too grateful and Steffi finds herself watching him disinterestedly, like he is on Animal Planet or something.

Steffi looks over at him lying on the floor next to her, and he is still panting and out of breath even though it’s been over for at least 10 minutes, and all at once she notices how his body reminds her a bit of her grandfather’s, something in the sag and the wear, and she realises he definitely isn’t 25 and that there’s probably a reason she has never been invited to his house, even though he says he lives alone in a big penthouse flat in Canning Town. And Kots will turn to her and see the look in her eye, and know in that moment that he got what he wanted for the last time ever, and he will get dressed shamefully, trying to hide his body in the shadows as he tugs his trousers on around his loose arse, half hopping in an undignified manner. 

Weeks later, Steffi and her mum will go to the agency together, and her mum will use her cringe phone voice to greet Sasha, and the two of them will discuss Steffi’s look as if she’s not there, suggest a shorter hairstyle because those are really in right now, for Black girls. Probably because none of the hairstylists actually know how to do Black hair, so it’s easier that way. And Sasha will show Steffi’s mum the new comp card, and Steffi’s mum will turn it over and ask who did each of the three photos on the back and Sasha will tell her one by one until she gets to the one by Kots where Steffi will interject,

“That one is by Kots, you remember him. He used to call our house all the time?”

And Steffi will wait for some reaction from Sasha or her mum but get nothing until her mum gives sigh and says,

“Oh Kots! Yes! He was lovely.”

Eirinie Carson is an award-winning Black British writer living in California. She is a mother of two children and sits on the boards of both The Writers Grotto and Mesa Refuge. Her work has appeared in LitHub, The Notre Dame Review, Electric Literature, The Sonora Review, Unibrow and others. She was the NEA Distinguished Fellow at the Hambidge Center. She and her work have been supported by the Virginia Center for Creative Arts, Hedgebrook and the Wassaic Project. A short story, One Last Thing, was Highly Commended by the 2025 Bridport Prize. She is also the recipient of the Headlands Center for the Arts McLaughlin Children’s Trust Award, which recognizes a writer with a clear dedication to their craft. 

Eirinie’s first book, The Dead Are Gods (Melville House, 2023), was critically acclaimed by Oprah Daily, Nylon Magazine, Shondaland and The Washington Post as well as winning a Zibby Award. It was also named one of Kirkus Reviews Best Books of 2023. Eirinie’s first book of fiction, a maternal gothic novel called Bloodfire, Baby, sold at auction to Lashanda Anakwah at Dutton.

27 March 2026