by Rosie Danan
“Right.” Josh turned to look around the room. “Maybe we could discuss that later?”
Oh. Perhaps he was trying to give her the brush-off after all.
He pulled two printed tickets out of his back pocket. “Don’t forget, we’ve got Rocky in two hours.”
Of course. She’d purchased the tickets weeks ago and hung them on the fridge. Josh must have snagged them on his way out this morning. Clara had been so sure then that the movie marathon would be a platonic outing. But now . . . She gulped.
“Ginger said your note about cheating her body to the camera in that last scene made a big difference.”
The compliment sent a pleasant warmth blossoming in Clara’s chest. “Everyone has been very kind. I think I’ve gotten more hugs in the past few weeks than I did in my entire childhood.”
Josh frowned.
“Wheatons typically reserve physical contact for special occasions,” she said in explanation. “Also, everyone has started calling me Connecticut. I’ve chosen to believe they mean it as an endearment.”
“Naomi shows affection in strange ways.”
“Asking her to lead the project was the right call. She’s got so many ideas. I didn’t realize that sex could involve that many hijinks.”
“Stu’s certainly not afraid to laugh at herself or her partners in the bedroom,” Josh said.
“But she also has these stories that are incredibly heartfelt. A lot of the performers do. It’s like they’ve gotten comfortable enough with sex to uncover another plane of intimacy. I’m used to worrying about how my body looks or if the guy is picturing someone else every time he closes his eyes.” Clara shook her head. All that was in the past now. In the land before Josh. “But some of the stuff Naomi’s directed, it’s amazing. I think our videos could help people see what sex is like when partners really trust each other, and the interest from the press has been tremendous. I’ve lined up all kinds of interviews for the two of you for launch next week.”
Clara had grown to appreciate putting her doctorate skills to use in new ways for Shameless, but at the end of the day, Josh and Naomi still had the most to lose. The former flames remained the only A-list names attached to the project. Their reputations had to carry the site, at least until they built a subscriber base.
“Those press releases you drafted were amazing. I guess you’re pretty good at mixing business and pleasure.”
Clara leaned toward him. What if he kissed her right now, in front of everyone?
“Excuse me.” A blonde in glasses and a tool belt stood in front of them. “Can one of you sign off on this lighting design before I start drilling the mounts?”
Josh jumped up from his chair like someone had poured hot coals in his lap. “Oh hey, Wynn. Stu mentioned you were in town visiting. I didn’t realize she’d roped you into manual labor during your vacation.”
The blonde smiled wryly in the direction of where Naomi bent over a set of test stills. “She called in a very old favor.”
“Have you met Clara? She’s the brains and the bucks behind this operation. Clara, Wynn’s a carpenter and set designer by trade and the only person alive who knows any of Stu’s secrets.”
Wynn held up a pair of callused palms. “Only because I met her almost immediately after she exited the womb.”
Clara quirked an eyebrow.
“Our mothers took the same Lamaze class and became joined at the hip,” Wynn said in response.
“Ah. Well, nice to meet you. It’s very generous of you to give up your personal time to help us out.” Clara extended her hand and Wynn took it.
“No problem. It’s refreshing to do work at a place where the people in charge don’t all look like a stock photo for white male privilege.” She turned to Josh. “No offense.”
“None taken. Clara can sign off on your designs. She’s got the better eye. I’ll head back to the edit bay and try to be useful.” Josh excused himself.
Wynn handed over the sketches for the mounts. Each image detailed the way the light and shadows would play across the set and the performers.
“Wow, these projections of the light trajectory are incredibly helpful.” Clara studied the images, looking for anything she’d change and coming up short. This design was more than practical, it was art. “I don’t suppose there’s a chance we can convince you to move to L.A. and join us as a full-time hire?”
The blonde wrinkled her nose. “Tempting, but no. My family, my job, and my boyfriend are all back in Boston. Hannah makes skipping town look easy, but I’m a hopeless homebody.”
Clara nodded. “I had to try. You’re very talented. Where did you learn all of this?”
Wynn’s face crumbled. “I didn’t grow up with brothers.”
“Excuse me?”
“Sorry, gut reaction.” Wynn winced. “Almost any time someone compliments my work they follow it up by asking if I grew up in a household full of boys. You know how girls in movies who can change a tire or throw a football are always explaining their skills away as if talent transferred through proximity to testosterone?”
“Ah, yes. Well, I’ve got a brother and I’m certain he wouldn’t have any idea what to do with your tool belt.”
Naomi placed a cup of coffee next to Clara’s elbow. Surely the beverage was a nonverbal gesture of acceptance?
“Thanks.” Clara leaned over the steaming liquid in the hopes of giving herself a caffeine facial. She’d barely gotten four hours of sleep last night. Right now her eyelids weighed twenty pounds each.
“You look like you need it.” Everything Naomi said came out sounding like a threat, but Clara now knew that she meant well. “You two met?”
“Yep. I was just admiring some of Wynn’s work.”
“She’s obnoxiously talented. Practically perfect.” Naomi sighed. “If only she weren’t tragically heterosexual.”
Wynn peppered a kiss on her friend’s cheek. “And on that note, I’m gonna go screw something that’s not one of your performers.”
Naomi turned to Clara. “Why are you making a mess of my studio?” She gathered a handful of the balls of crumpled scrap paper scattered around Clara’s computer.
Oops. Clara hadn’t realized how many doodles of logo designs she’d accumulated while watching the preview clips. It had been years since she’d drawn anything for eyes besides her own. But something about channeling Chagall for Josh last night had released dormant artistic impulses. Among other things. She’d always associated Chagall with love, and not just any love. He painted the romantic love of myths and fairy tales. True love. The kind between soul mates. Love that she and Josh could never have. Except that falling asleep in his arms felt disconcertingly right.
Naomi lingered over one of the first images Clara had sketched, a pair of typefaces that broke down Shameless so that while still written as a single word, it read more like a declarative statement: Shame. Less. “You like it? I thought that—”
“You don’t have to explain it to me.”
“Right.” Should she mention the change in her relationship with Josh? She didn’t want to hide the information from their business partner. Naomi seemed to value honesty above all else. But what if she freaked? Or decided Clara wasn’t good enough for her ex?
“Can I ask you a question?” Clara blurted out the words before she could think better of it.
Naomi looked at her with pursed lips. “One.”
Clara planted her feet and stood up extra straight. “Do you think people can change?” What she meant, but couldn’t bring herself to say, was Do you think someone like me could ever be right for someone like Josh?
Naomi didn’t answer right away. She twisted her hair up into a bun and stuck a pen through it in a way that Clara thought only worked in movies. When she did respond, her voice was thoughtful and her eyes were sharp.
“Can? Yeah. If the circums
tances are right. But you have to want to, and most people don’t.” She took a deep breath. “Or something big enough has to happen to you. Something that leaves you with no other options.”
Something—no, someone—big had happened to Clara. But she couldn’t figure out if the effects would last.
Naomi stared at her. “That’s how I got into porn.”
“It was?” Living with Josh and working alongside so many different kinds of performers had significantly opened the aperture on Clara’s definition of a porn performer.
“Believe it or not, I had a pretty perfect high school experience. I wasn’t as much of a brownnoser as you.” Naomi smirked. “But I got good grades and I was captain of the soccer team, class president, the whole thing. I even had the perfect boyfriend.” Naomi’s lips twisted as if she’d sucked on a lemon.
“Life pretty much came crashing down around my ears when said perfect boyfriend shared the private pictures he’d begged for as an eighteenth-birthday present with the Internet. You see, I’d told him I wasn’t ready to sleep with him.” Her voice rang hollow.
Clara wrapped her arms around the other woman’s shoulders without thinking. She expected Naomi to toss off the physical contact, but instead, she leaned her chin on top of Clara’s head and sighed. “If you tell anyone about this, I’ll deny it, and then kill you.”
Eventually, they stepped apart sheepishly. When Naomi spoke next, her voice allowed pain to bleed through.
“I knew that no matter what I did, those images would be out there for people to see without my permission. Knew that no matter how many years passed, no matter what I went on to achieve, some people would always define me based on my body alone. So I came out here. I took my own pictures. I figured if I flooded the market I could decrease the value of those original poses. That I could reclaim my body on my own terms.”
“That’s really—” Clara started to say.
“Impulsive? Juvenile? Stupid?”
“Brave.”
Naomi looked Clara in the eye. “I was terrified and so mad I couldn’t see straight.” She picked up Clara’s coffee and pushed it into her hands.
Clara took an obedient sip. “What about your family? Your friends? Did they support your decision?”
“I didn’t ask for their permission then and I don’t plan on asking forgiveness now. Even Wynn, who understands why I had to leave, can’t comprehend why I’ll never go back.” She held her hands up in front of her chest. “That is not an invitation to hug me again.”
“I wouldn’t dream of it.”
“Most people will do anything to avoid change.” Naomi brushed her flame-colored hair over her shoulder. “Even the ones who try often revert back to old habits as soon as life gets hard. Remember that before you go doing something crazy. Sometimes we think we want something until it’s time to live with the consequences.”
The answer wasn’t pessimistic, just grounded in the firm dose of reality Clara had grown to expect from Naomi.
As the bitter coffee played across her tongue, Clara tried not to close her eyes. She wanted to believe in change. To believe she could leave her old life, her old responsibilities and baggage, behind for Josh, if he’d have her. She wanted people to say, Oh yeah. Clara can always roll with the punches. She takes big honking bites out of life.
But Naomi was right. It was easy to try. To swallow the insecurity triggered by working with so many beautiful women who knew so much more about sex than she could even imagine. To dodge calls from her mother and blame it on the time difference. To fan the fantasy of her and Josh living happily ever after while his performing hiatus helped stall the thousands of obstacles standing in their way.
This was summer vacation from real life, but sooner or later, summer would end. She’d have to face her family, would have to choose between the life she’d been groomed for and the one that hung at the edge of the horizon, outrageously tempting, but with a price tag of all she held dear.
“Change always comes with a closing cost,” Naomi said. “But it’s still worth trying. Not because the odds are particularly good, mind you, but considering the alternative. There’s value in the struggle. Value in touching the raw and bloody parts of our souls, opening them up to the sunlight, and hoping they heal.”
Clara got the message. If she wanted a future with Josh, she’d have to fight for it. “You know, you’re the first person I’ve ever met who I think might actually change the world.”
Naomi grinned over her shoulder as she walked away. “Tell me something I don’t know.”
chapter thirty
JOSH WOULD STOP at nothing in his quest to take Clara on a real date.
While he’d loved sharing breakfast food with her during the middle of the night, he wanted something more formal. An arranged outing versus the casual hanging out they’d been doing for weeks. Everything had changed for him last night. Now he needed to figure out if Clara felt the same way.
All day he’d felt like a teenager, green and unsure, pussyfooting around. He’d spent enough time with Clara before they got physical to know that this thing between them was more than run-of-the-mill attraction.
He wanted to plant a flag. To show Clara he was all in.
He didn’t mind that this movie marathon had been her idea. Ever since they’d first watched Speed, whenever he thought about car chases and standoffs, he thought of Clara. She was surprisingly bloodthirsty for a woman who, a week earlier, wouldn’t let him smush a spider that had showed up in the bathtub.
“I probably should have tried to take you somewhere more romantic than the megaplex.” He helped her out of the rental car.
“Are you kidding? I love Rocky. Sylvester Stallone taught me how to punch.”
“You know how to punch?”
Clara planted her feet and made tiny fists.
Her form wasn’t half bad. “Okay.” Josh held up his open palm. “Gimme your worst.”
Clara’s smile made him overheat and her punch landed with a resounding smack and not an insignificant amount of force.
He shook out his wrist. “Damn. You weren’t kidding. Sometimes you’re alarmingly scrappy.” Josh let his hand linger on her lower back as he ushered her inside.
Josh had dressed up for date night in a crisp white button-down and his nicest pair of jeans, but he still felt like a putz next to Clara. She’d taken off her cardigan and looped it over her arm, revealing a black dress he’d never seen before, held up by two tiny straps that he could, and hopefully would later, snap with his teeth.
He’d gotten used to her beauty on low volume at the house. No makeup, sweats, hair piled on top of her head like a cinnamon roll. All done up, in natural light, she took his breath away. He hadn’t used the right words last night when he’d confessed the way he felt about her. Certainly hadn’t used the one word that had been swimming in his brain ever since their barbecue.
But that was okay. He could make it right. Tonight he would issue a proper declaration. One that wasn’t based on her physical characteristics but told Clara how she made him want to recite epic poems. If she’d let him, he’d do his best to lay cities at her feet, to sail for fourteen years only to find his way back to her bed.
“Did you know Rocky is both an invigorating tale of determination and grit and a romance for the ages? You’re in for a real treat.” Clara used the know-it-all voice that drove him wild.
“You think everything’s romantic. You tried to convince me that The Mummy was a love story.”
“Of course The Mummy is a love story.” Clara thrust her hands on her hips. “You’re off your gourd.”
“Off my gourd? No wonder you like that movie. You’re one pair of horn-rimmed glasses away from a librarian yourself.” He tried to think of a compliment worthy of her. How could he tell her how much tonight meant to him, without saying something ridiculous like Your eyes shine like diamo
nds?
Clara turned up her nose. “Thank you. Librarians are pillars of society.”
Josh wanted to dip her, like an old-timey dance move. He wanted to lower her into a dramatic arc and claim her lips for his own while everyone around them cheered.
He’d had to lie low at the studio so as not to attract unwanted attention from Naomi. The last thing he needed right now was to deal with the consequences of his ex-girlfriend-turned-business-partner’s rage.
Somehow, defying the laws of logic and science, Clara seemed genuinely interested in him. He was the luckiest son of a bitch alive.
“Next,” the ticket collector called.
Josh realized he and Clara had been standing, smiling at each other, holding up the line.
“Sorry,” he told the older couple behind them.
“No trouble,” said the woman, patting the arm of her companion. “We remember what the early days were like.”
He expected Clara to protest, but she simply gave him a shy smile.
Pride added an inch to his height. A stranger had mistaken them for a couple. No, wait. Not mistaken. A stranger had recognized them as a couple.
Josh’s stomach tumbled merrily, and he managed a nod.
As they headed to the concession counter, Clara reached for his hand. He tried not to let on the way his whole body tingled in response. Josh had participated in sex moves he couldn’t spell, but none of them had made happiness pump through his veins like holding hands with Clara.
She studied the menu. “Should we get M&Ms or Skittles?”
“Obviously we need to get M&Ms and dump them into the popcorn bucket.”
“People do that?”
Josh pressed his thigh fully against hers. “Oh, Clara. Stick with me. I’m gonna show you a whole new world.”
They found seats toward the back of the theater. Not the row occupied exclusively by teenagers who came to make out, but close enough that Josh figured he could at least get away with putting his arm around her.