by Ciana Stone
Coming Home
A Cotton Creek Christmas
By Ciana Stone
Copyright © 2019 Ciana Stone
Cover art by Syneca.
Chapter One
Olivia was just sliding her iPad into her messenger bag when the hotel room phone rang. She picked up on the second ring to be informed her car was waiting to take her to the airport.
After a final glance around to make sure she hadn't forgotten anything, she grabbed her messenger bag and camera case and headed down to the lobby of the hotel. The magazine had sprung this assignment on her at the last minute and it was one of those rush jobs. They'd landed an exclusive interview with a film director whose breakout film was racking up nominations faster than a twelve-year-old boy playing a video game. Olivia was to meet him and the magazine’s senior writer at his house and shoot photos for the interview.
She was a little surprised the director called Cotton Creek, Texas home. She’d grown up in Cotton Creek and while it was a nice place to live, just a few hours south of San Antonio, it wasn’t Hollywood. She wished she’d thought to ask who the director was, but when the call had come in last night, she was already in bed. Besides, she wouldn’t have recognized the name if she’d been told. She didn’t keep up with who was hot and who was not in the entertainment industry.
These days when she wasn't working, she spent her free time running, working out, doing anything she could that was active. Nights were miserable for her and she found herself more times than not in her little home gym, working out until she was too exhausted to stay awake. The only thing she watched on television were nature shows and she didn’t watch much of those.
Olivia had started to wonder if this was going to be the permanent shape of her life. Her doctors and psychiatrist assured her that in time she’d get back to normal. She just had to keep trying, not give up. Her best friend, Lydia said maybe she wasn’t trying hard enough.
She wasn’t sure how much more trying she had left in her. Maybe she'd screwed up her chance at a happy, normal life a long time ago. Immediately, she sought to steer her mind from the direction it wanted to go at that thought. She had a job to do, and she had to be ready, even if she did feel she could sleep for a week if she let herself close her eyes.
She forgot about the job during the ride. It’d been a long time since she’d been back to Texas. Both of her parents were dead and since she had no siblings, there wasn’t much of a reason to visit. She did find it interesting how much the area had changed. When she’d left Cotton Creek, it was a sleepy town that was not yet starting to wake. Now it appeared to have expanded its boundaries considerably, with new housing developments, strip malls and apartment complexes crowding in on the border of the town.
Still, the town proper still had that quaint, hometown look despite what looked like a lot of new, upscale shops on main street and ten times the amount of traffic. She couldn’t help but wonder if the days of the small town, and the community feel it provided were numbered.
The fact that the place had changed a bit was an odd comfort. Had it been exactly the same place she’d left, the memories associated with it might have been too much for her. This way the changes, however small, allowed her to disassociate herself from memories that brought a heavy rush of emotions.
It wasn’t until the driver put on his turn signal that she recognized where they were. The drive they turned into had once belonged to a family that had made their fortune in the oil business. They’d built an enormous house on a thousand acres and at one time had operated a thriving business boarding and training horses.
There were a few horses in the pastures bordering the long drive, and she could see activity in one of the paddocks. Maybe the new owner had kept the business running.
The driver stopped and got out to open her door for her. Olivia gathered up her bags, thanked and tipped the driver and headed for the front door. She rang the bell and waited. Her phone chimed to indicate she had an incoming text. She pulled it from her messenger bag to check the message.
Just then, the door opened. Olivia looked up and for a few moments was struck dumb. This couldn’t be. Please let this be a hallucination.
She blinked once, then again. The vision persisted and her heart sank.
“Max?”
“Hey, Livi.” The handsome man at the door looked down at her and smiled. “It’s been a long time.”
Olivia tried to shake off the shock that had her locked in place, gawking at him, but her mind had turned away from the present to twelve years in the past.
Chapter Two
January 2007
Olivia finished straightening up the studio. Her last session of the day, a family with three small children, had taken longer than she’d anticipated thanks to the fact that the children had not been at all interested in sitting still to have their photos taken. Sometimes Olivia wondered if this was all her life would ever be; photographing families and weddings to pay the bills and feeling lucky when she got a freelance gig for a local newspaper.
She wanted to make a name for herself. She wanted to shoot the kind of photos that had made people like Eddie Adams or Timothy Allen famous. She thought she had a good eye, and she was proud of her portfolio, but there were not a lot of opportunities right now in the Cotton Creek area.
She’d only come back to the place she grew up because the small newspaper she worked for in Georgia had gotten gobbled up by a larger concern.
Her parents were both gone now, her father due to a heart attack and six months ago, her Mom in a car accident. They had left her everything. It wasn’t enough to consider herself wealthy, but had enabled her to open her studio.
She had some applications in at newspapers all over the country, and a couple looked promising. Maybe something would come through for her this year and she could broaden her experience as a photographer. But right now, her little studio had a lot of work lined up and she needed an assistant. It was only the first week of January and she was already booked through July with graduations, weddings, class reunions, and portraits for graduating high school and college students.
The sound of the small bell she’d hung from the front door of her studio sounded, alerting her she had a visitor. She hoped it was the young man who had yesterday about her help wanted ad. He was in high school and was looking for an after-school and weekend job. And he’d said he was available full time once school was out.
That suited her. Part time help would work for now. Come the end of May she could use someone full time. More importantly, she’d be able to afford it.
She hurried to the lobby. A tall young man stood waiting. Her first reaction was that he was very good-looking, but his stance and expression gave the impression that he was lacking self-confidence.
His thick dark brown hair was a little messy from the wind and his soulful brown eyes set beneath thick, elegant brows. With a straight nose and lips that surely had to inspire more than one teenage girl to want to steal a kiss, he was a great looking teenager on his way to being a truly stunning man.
“Max?” She asked as she walked over to him.
“Yes, ma’am.” His voice was deep, low and carried a clear note of nervousness.
“Hi, I’m Olivia Warren.” She offered her hand.
He took it and she felt the dampness on his skin. “Come on back to the studio,” she said as she released his hand.
She led him to the studio, watching his eyes as he looked around. She recognized that look. Eagerness. He wanted to get his hands on the lights and equipment. She knew the feelin
g. She’d felt the same way the first time she walked into a photography studio as a child.
“So, you said you’d taken some classes at school?” she asked.
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Great. You have a portfolio?”
He looked positively terrified at the question. “Uh–no. I mean, I have pictures I’ve taken, but it’s not professional or anything.”
“I didn’t expect that, Max. Relax. I’m just interested in what kind of photography excites you.”
“I want to take pictures that show what’s in people’s eyes.”
“What’s in their eyes?”
He flushed and looked down for a moment. “What they’re feeling. It shows in the eyes.”
Olivia was surprised. That seemed terribly mature for a seventeen-year-old boy. Another surprise was delivered when he looked up and their eyes met. There was an intensity in his gaze, accompanied by innocence, and an obvious fear of being ridiculed, that could not be faked.
“You’re right,” she agreed.
The relieved smile that came on his face had her smiling in return. “So, when are you available to start?”
“Now?”
Olivia chuckled. “Well, I’m actually finished for the day. I was— “ The sound of the police scanner she kept in her office had her stopping in mid-sentence. She raced to the door to listen.
“I have to go.” She snatched up her camera bag and headed for the door. “Come after school tomorrow.”
“Where’re you going?”
“There’s been a shooting in Rockridge. I want to try to get there before anyone else does to get some shots.”
“Can I come with you?”
Olivia stopped in her tracks and looked back at him. “Do you have a camera with you?”
“No.”
She ran back to her office and grabbed her spare camera bag . “Here,” she handed it to him as she strode past him.
“Cool.” He grinned and followed her out.
The Present
“Livi?”
Olivia blinked and looked up at Max. The boy she’d known was gone. The Max standing before her was a grown man. A very handsome man.
“Sorry,” she said and attempted a smile. “I had no idea.”
“It’s been a long time.” He said and stepped aside. “Come on in. Your reporter, Benjamin is already here.”
Olivia followed him inside. She felt a little like she was in shock, something she had experience with. Her body was moving and functioning, but her mind wasn’t firing on all cylinders.
Did he know she was going to be the photographer assigned to shoot the interview or was he as surprised as she? He didn’t seem surprised. What was going on?
And why was her heart beating too fast? She’d moved on from Max and what happened between them years ago—a lifetime ago. Hadn’t she? Yes. She had. Definitely.
At least that’s what she was busy telling herself until he stopped just outside the door to what appeared to be a den or family room. He looked down at her and her heart did a funny little flip.
“I’m glad to see you, Livi.” His voice was pitched low, an intimate whisper that brought back too many memories for comfort.
“Same here.” It was all she could manage. She wasn’t equipped for this, for the rush of emotions seeing him inspired; for the flood of memories that had her drowning.
What was wrong with her? She was good at containing her emotions and had learned not to let them hamper her, but seeing Max made her feel overwhelmed.
Max gestured toward the door. “Ready?”
“As I’ll get,” she agreed and preceded him into the room.
The reporter, Benjamin, was seated in a leather chair adjacent to the sofa. “I was beginning to think you’d gotten lost,” he remarked as she and Max entered the room.
“Sorry. Just got the assignment at one this morning.”
“Yeah. Josh was supposed to do it.”
“So what happened?”
“Beats me. Had a text this morning that you were flying in. So, how long will it take you to set up?”
“Not long.” She set down her bags.
“I’ll help,” Max offered and opened one of the bags.
That was the last thing she wanted, but she wasn’t about to protest in front of Ben. She focused on the motions. That was simple enough. She’d done it so many times she could operate on remote control.
What surprised her was how easily Max and she worked together. It was as if more than a decade of time and a million life experiences had not passed. They fell into sync effortlessly. Too effortlessly.
Watching him sent her careening back into the past, into memories she’d worked hard to forget.
January 2007
Olivia was like a lot of photographers of the past. When it came time to develop film, she didn’t worry about working in darkness. The process was ingrained into her muscle memory as well as it was her mental processes.
While most people had already transitioned to digital, she used both. There was just something about film that appealed to her. She’d already developed the photos she took of the shooting in Rockridge. She did that the moment she and Max returned to the studio since they’d beaten all the photographers and news crews to the scene. Someone from the local paper had picked up the negatives an hour after they were developed and some of her photos appeared in the next day’s edition.
Olivia was pleased about that. It hadn't paid a tremendous amount, but the photo credit beneath the images might be more valuable than the paycheck in the long run.
Now, she wanted to see what Max had shot. He’d seemed a bit hesitant when she mentioned she was going to develop the film after work.
She understood. As a novice, he was probably nervous about her seeing his work, scared that she would think he was no good. She remembered being in those shoes and could also remember vowing that if she was ever in the position to critique someone’s work, she would be fair, but also look for the strengths as much as the weaknesses.
After popping the seal on the canister, she cut off the lead of the film and loaded it into the developing tank reel. She’d already prepared her developer and Blix. She poured the developer into the tank and began the agitation cycle.
As she worked, she thought about Max and the effect he was having on her. She wasn’t entirely comfortable that she couldn’t seem to stop noticing things about him, the way the muscles in his arms flexed when he lifted a box of paper for her, the lean lines of his torso when he wore a fitted shirt, or the way he seemed to look right into her soul when he fixed his eyes on her.
It was disconcerting. She was only a couple of years from being thirty. The last thing she should be doing was allowing herself to be drawn to a boy who was not yet eighteen. It was embarrassing and yet she couldn’t seem to get beyond it.
Maybe it was a mistake to hire him. He was eager and worked hard, doing anything she asked of him. And he soaked up information like a sponge. He had an eye as well. Just yesterday, she’d been shooting a woman in her late thirties, and Max noted that if they angled her just a bit more to one side, tilted her chin down, and had her look up at the camera, it gave her a sultry look much like one of the popular television stars.
He definitely had something.
She finished the developing cycle, dumped the used solution back into the developer bottle, and then added the Blix, a bleach and fixer combo, to the tank.
Her thoughts remained on Max. She knew that he was developing a crush on her. It was easy to tell from the way he looked at her, and how eager he was to put in extra hours without pay. She couldn’t help being flattered. Her social life wasn’t exactly slammed. She’d had five first dates in the last year. None had led to a second. If she went out at all, it was with her neighbor, Sandy, up the street, a woman her age with three small children and a need for adult company now and then.
Max’s attention was good for her ego and she wondered if that’s all amounted to, her ego being st
roked. She almost hoped it was. That was a lot easier to accept than the alternative—that she had a thing for a teenager. That was too embarrassing to contemplate.
She turned her attention back to the task at hand, dumped the Blix, rinsed the film, and then removed it from the tank. After shaking and using a squeegee to remove the excess water, she hung it on the line above the counter to finish drying.
She cleaned up and turned on a dim light to look at the hanging negative strip. One look and she moved closer. The photos were of her. Every one of them. Max had shot her as she was shooting the event.
The most surprising part about that was not that he had photographed her, but how it made her heart beat a little faster.
Suddenly she was faced with the truth, that no matter what she tried to tell herself, this thing with Max wasn’t just an ego stroking. She was infatuated with him.
The Present
“Wow, you really know your way around a set-up,” Ben commented to Max as he and Olivia finished setting up her slave flashes.
“I worked for a photographer when I was in high school.”
“Really? Is that what got you interested in film?”
Max took a seat on the sofa. Olivia positioned herself so that she could shoot him with the light from the floor to ceiling window falling along the left side of his face.
My god, he’s beautiful. He had matured better than she'd imagined.
“No. I didn’t get interested in film until I went to college.”
Olivia fired a couple of shots, adjusted her settings, and shot a couple more. Max kept his eyes on Ben as he answered questions. Only once did he look up at her and when he did, her finger instinctively pressed the shutter.
What was that she saw on his face, and in his eyes? What had life taught or taken from him since she last saw him? Who had Max become in the twelve years since she’d seen him? Did he still want to see what made people tick? She’d have to see the film that was garnering him so much attention.
She was so lost in her own thoughts, studying his face in the viewfinder that she forgot about Ben. The drone of their voices was like a distant hum. Her entire focus was on what she saw.