“No, it was. I went there for cliché pieces. When I want non-crap, I go elsewhere.”
“So you’re the final authority on these things?”
“I don’t know if I’d say that, but by now, I can almost always predict how a piece will make someone feel.”
“Isn’t there a word for that, when you see what you want to see? Confirmation bias.”
“No, that’s not what I mean.” She crosses her legs, the leather of her boots creaking. “I’ve just been doing this a while.”
She can’t be much older than twenty-five, twenty-six, which seems young for someone to have all the answers. “Not to discredit you, but I’m fairly certain each person would react differently.”
“You’d be surprised. And anyway, we’re looking at the majority.” She says all this straight-faced, like art is akin to science. “I determine what’s practical. I’m an objective voice in a largely subjective industry.”
“I’ve never heard of a job like that,” I say, mostly because I don’t like the idea of it and I’m a little stung that she of all people is implying my work isn’t viable.
She flinches. “It’s real. It’s what I do. Art analyst.”
“All right, well.” I lean my elbows onto my knees. “Go ahead and say what you were going to say. That stuff you saw—it’s not all current. There’s a lot more.”
“Okay.”
She chugs her coffee like it’s fucking Gatorade. I should offer her more, but I’m feeling like a giant exposed nerve right now, and I don’t really want to move. Maybe it’s a good thing if she doesn’t like what she saw. I want to move people, not have them treat my work like it’s scenery. It’s how I connect. It didn’t occur to me before Halston that the person I was trying to connect with might reject my art.
“Don’t get me wrong, your photographs are nice, but I didn’t feel anything.”
I glance down at my hands. They’re red from gripping the mug. She has balls, I’ll give her that.
“Are you mad?” she asks.
A week ago, I might’ve written off her critique, but when I untied that leather bow and read Halston’s words, something in me jarred loose. I was never angry with Sadie. It was the situation, not her, not me. But yes. I am mad. Because Halston’s right. I’ve been looking through the lens, aiming, and hitting a button. Treating the camera like a tool. Forcing it, because I can’t not take pictures after I quit my job to do this. I’ve felt so goddamn numb the last year, though. It’s not even that I want to be. It’s just how I am now.
“It comes with the territory,” Halston says. “If you want to be an artist, you have to be able to take criticism.”
“Really?” I look up. “Is that why you hide your work? So you don’t have to hear what people think of it?”
“I don’t write for anyone but myself.”
I should want to crush her like she just did to me. I put everything into this. I gave up a six-figure salary on Wall Street. I disappointed my ex-wife and her overbearing family. I took stability away from my child. For what? To take uninspired junk photos?
I can’t do it, though. It’d be a lie to say her work is anything but perfect to me. “You should,” I say. “It’s a shame to hide it.”
“I can see you’re good at what you do,” she says quickly, scratching the inside of her elbow. “God. I’m such a jerk. I should’ve started with that.”
“You don’t have to say that.”
“No, I’m serious. You have an eye for this. Maybe it’s the models.” She fidgets and glances at the journal every few seconds. “Where do you find them?”
“Wherever. Craigslist, art school, the street—”
“Would you photograph me?” she asks.
She’s just spoken right to my dick. There might not be any quicker way to get me going. Her question inspires all sorts of reactions in me, like how good it feels to look through a lens at someone you want to fuck and know you’re capturing that moment permanently. I’d probably do anything to her she’d allow, but photograph her? I’d give my left arm to have her at my disposal for a few hours—and under my direction.
I don’t need any more invitation. I understand what my work is missing. Her. Someone to move me enough to do more than aim. I pick up my camera bag from the coffee table.
“Oh, no,” she says. “I wasn’t saying . . . I just meant hypothetically.”
“No you didn’t.” I glance up at her. It occurs to me that maybe that’s why she’s here. Maybe this, coming to a stranger’s apartment and having her photo taken, is the red bra. The tattoo. The tell in whatever game she’s playing. “You’ll be a beautiful model,” I reassure her.
“I don’t think . . .” She stares while I unpack the bag, like the camera’s a surgical instrument I’m about to flay her with. “Why?”
“Why not?” I ask.
“This isn’t me.” She uncrosses her legs, smoothing her hands over her knees. “I’m no model, obviously.”
I can tell by the redness creeping up from her collar that she’s nervous. Good. That will come across nicely in the photo, and maybe raw is what I need. “You’d be doing me a favor.” For me, this’ll be almost as good as sex, getting to look at her as long as I like, position her how I want. Except afterward, I can release her back to her boyfriend without feeling like I’ve lost so much. “Ever since I read your journal, I’ve got all this pent-up energy.”
Now, she’s red all the way to her forehead. She’s embarrassed by this, or, maybe she’s turned on. I hope it’s a little bit of both.
“Okay,” she says. “But . . .”
“But?”
“Not my face.”
I frown. Without that, she could be anyone, and that’s not the point of this. She’s the reason I want to take the picture at all. I lower the camera into my lap. “It’s all in the eyes, Halston.”
She shakes her head. “Doesn’t matter.”
“Why?”
“I don’t want it in the shot. It’s better for you anyway. You’re selling a fantasy. Men who want one. Women who want to be one. Without my face, the imagination can play.”
Call me a greedy bastard, but I want all of her. That’s why I sought her out. Why I’m sitting here with her when I shouldn’t be. I pick up her journal again and flip through it.
“What are you doing?” she asks.
“I want your face, but if I can’t have it, I’ll take this instead.”
“I don’t understand.”
I’m careful with the pages, as if I’m handling a relic. I hardly know where to start. I want to take a picture that matches how her words make me feel. Sensual, suggestive, unsettled in a way.
I know the passage when I see it. I spread the book and give it to her. “This one.”
“This one what?”
I pick up her coffee mug. It’s empty to the last drop, so I take it in the kitchen, refill it, and return to the doorway. Halston traces her fingertip over the open page. Her blonde hair drapes on both sides of her face, hiding her from me. My couch looks bigger than I remember, she’s so small in the middle of it.
“Read it to me.”
She looks up. “Seriously?”
Steam curls up from the mug. The coffee maker drips behind me. I nod.
“I can’t. I never have, not aloud.”
“Really?”
“When would I have? Nobody knows it exists, except you.”
My lungs inflate. No shit. I’m the first? Not even her boyfriend? I’ve built the journal up so much in my mind, this is like . . . like watching a flower open or witnessing her first orgasm. It’s getting to see something nobody else has, bringing down a wall, and now I want it even more. “Try. Please.”
She looks at the coffee in my hand like I’m holding it hostage. I don’t give it to her.
Dropping her eyes again, she scans the page a few times and begins. “‘Rough me up, dark as . . .’” She reads slowly, her voice raspy. With a short shake of her head, she tries to pass the jo
urnal back to me. “I can’t. You do it.”
I walk by her to the other side of the room. If I stand still, she’ll notice how much a single sentence, not even a sentence, affects me. I could’ve guessed listening to her read would be sexy, but her bashfulness about it is making my pants uncomfortably tight. The girl who wrote these things was supposed to be bold. Daring. Walking sex. Halston is subtle, nuanced. Beautiful, but in a quiet way that draws me in.
“Keep reading,” I say, pacing.
She sighs. “‘Rough me up, dark as coffee. Burrow deep, make me drip with it, get me so high, I forget how it feels to . . . crash.’”
Neither of us speaks.
“There,” she says finally. “Happy?”
Happy? I could eat the words like candy, right off her tongue.
“What’s wrong?” she asks. “Did I do it wrong?”
Words aren’t my strong suit, and I can’t describe how hers make me feel. That’s why I have the camera. The mug burns my palm. I offer it to her. “Hold it in your lap.”
She looks from me to the coffee, obviously wary. She takes it, lowering it like I told her to, and shifts against the cushion. “It’s hot.”
I have to bite my tongue to keep from asking how that intense heat feels against the tops of her thighs. I shouldn’t be so turned on by someone I can’t have, but it’s the first time in a year I’ve needed something more than air. I pick up my camera.
“What do you want me to do?” she asks when I aim it at her.
“Nothing.” I study her through the lens a few seconds. I desperately want to capture her confused, timid, curious expression, but I promised—not her face. “Show me your palm, just the right.”
She balances the mug with one hand and opens the other.
I slide the coffee table back a few feet to squat in front of her. I fold all her fingers into a fist except for the index and middle ones, and that alone sends my mind to the gutter. They’re my two favorite fingers, the same ones I’d use to see how wet she was before I fucked her.
I breathe through my nose to calm myself. This isn’t just about me. She has to trust me for this to work. I step back a few paces and perch on the edge of the table. With the camera over one eye, I cut off anything above her lips and say, “Put your fingers in the coffee.”
“They’ll burn.”
“You don’t have to keep them there.”
She curves both fingers and dips them into the mug, wincing from the sting of heat just as I snap the photo. She pulls them out and sticks them in her mouth but not before a stream of coffee spirals down her forearm.
I capture it all and lower the camera. Normally, it’d take several shots to satisfy me, but that was it. That was the moment.
“That’s it?” she asks.
I lean my elbows on my knees and view the first photo. Her fingers are thrust into the mug in her lap like she’s going for climax, and one side of her mouth is curled in an ambiguous snarl. It could be pleasure. It could be pain. I show it to her.
She nearly gasps. “It looks like I’m . . .”
“Masturbating.”
“But it’s a mug of coffee.”
“Burrow deep.”
We meet eyes, and it clicks for her. “Like what I wrote,” she says. “It’s just a cup of coffee, but . . .”
“It feels like fucking.” I put it out there. “That’s your talent. I want to do that too, make people feel like that.”
“You do,” she says, her gaze drifting back to the camera.
Do I? I didn’t before, according to her. But her breasts rise and fall a little faster. Her cheeks are still flushed. Is she aroused? I’m tempted to check for myself, test her nipple with the pad of my thumb to see if it’s hard.
Swallowing, I go to the next photo. Again, the frame spans mouth to lap. She’s sucking her fingers, her lips pink and plump. Coffee drips down the meat of her palm and over her wrist.
She shakes her head. “You made me sexy.”
“All I told you to do was put your fingers in the coffee.”
“Have you done this before?” she asks. “For your own . . . not for work?”
My mind flashes to Sadie, who, in this same apartment, played for my camera. Different couch, different situation. Since her, it’s been nothing but meaningless shit. Until now. “No,” I say.
She glances at me from under her lashes, her bottom lip hanging, almost in a pout. “Really? Or are you just saying that?”
“Yes, really.” I’m about to ask why she thinks I’d lie, but the hope in her eyes answers the question. She wants to be special. Maybe she doesn’t know she already is. Maybe she thinks I do this all the time. Her sudden doubt is stark against the lens-sharpened sensuality I just saw.
“Halston. Look.” I move next to her on the couch and flip to the last of the three pictures—the tip of her tongue, pressed to her wrist bone as she catches a drop of coffee. I got her eyes in that one by accident. “You’re better than anything I’ve shot, but you know that.”
Almost imperceptibly, her body softens, and she tucks her hair behind her ear. She isn’t spice-scented today, more girlish, like a flower. Not as strong as roses. I can’t really place it since most flowers smell the same to me. “What are you going to do with them?” she asks.
“Nothing.” I flip between the photos. Fuck, they’re good. With some editing, they could be great. The composition isn’t perfect, but that makes them more real. The day’s end offers just enough natural light, and some darkness too. If I faded them with a filter, turned them gray, they’d be eerie, and sexy. “Or, I could post them.”
“You think they’re good enough?”
“You’re the expert,” I point out.
“Not when it comes to myself. I think they’re, you know . . . I love them. But I’m biased.”
“They need . . .”
“What?” She looks me full in the face, and it suddenly occurs to me how close we are. Our outer thighs are pressed together. Lips within kissing distance. Her white skin is pink and patchy from the way we’ve been talking, and I think I could smooth it all away with my touch. I lean in. I need to take her mouth for my own. Dive into its heat, own her in seconds, claim what I should’ve days ago.
She exhales a breath I can practically see, and I stop an inch from her mouth.
“What’s wrong?” she asks.
So much. So much is wrong with this. Cheating is the one thing I can’t do again. I’ve been scalded, and I’m still one giant scar. I’m vulnerable as fuck to Halston’s spell, but I knew that before she walked in the door. I have only myself to blame for feeling helpless. “Nothing,” I say, easing back. “It’s my issue. Not yours.”
“What issue?”
I shouldn’t have to tell her she has a fucking boyfriend. Isn’t that enough to explain why I won’t touch what doesn’t belong to me? “What was I saying?”
Her shoulders fall. “That the photos need something. They’re not right?”
“Yeah. No. They’re right.” I rub my jaw. I shaved for her. Did she notice? “I want your words.”
She blinks a few times. “My words?”
“As the caption.”
“No.” Her eyebrows draw in. “No, you can’t.”
“Why not?”
“I told you, I didn’t write that for anyone but myself.”
“And I told you, you should. You have a gift. Don’t waste it.”
“But it’s no good. I went to business school.” She shifts forward, away from me. “I look at art, I don’t create it.”
“Then why do you write?”
“To get it out. To feel something.”
“Why do you have to write to feel?”
She looks away. “I have a good life. Simple. My dad is conservative, and so are our clients. He’d be embarrassed if anyone in the industry found out. I would be embarrassed. I’m past the stage of my life where I need to shock people.”
Maybe that’s a valid reason, but I recognize her fear. It
took me almost ten years to work up the courage to take a second chance on my art, and even now, putting it out there isn’t easy. My best work comes from vulnerability, and nobody wants to be judged with their walls down. But I have yet to regret it. “Then nobody has to know,” I say. “Just us. I’ll make sure you remain anonymous. Promise.”
She presses her lips together, suppressing either a smile or a frown, I can’t tell. She touches her palm to her chest. “My heart is racing. The thought of someone looking at me like that . . . or reading my stuff. I shouldn’t want to do it, should I? I don’t know.” She takes the camera from me and examines each photo again. “I think I do.”
She may not know, but I have some idea. All the hints I’ve been collecting—the bra, the tattoo, the forbidden thoughts—tell me what I need to know. If she was raised conservatively, then she’s probably been burying her sexuality in this journal for a while, hiding it even from herself, and it’s seeping out in other ways.
I’m not about to explain it to her, though. I don’t want this to stop. “Is that a yes?”
She exchanges the camera for her coffee, and after a pause, looks at me. “That’s a lot of trust to put in you.”
“I told you earlier—you’re safe with me.”
“I’ve critiqued people’s work,” she says. “Sometimes solicited, sometimes not. If I put something out there . . .”
“You’re opening yourself up to criticism. But does it feel less scary if nobody knows who you are?”
Slowly, she nods. “A lot less scary.”
I relax. I’m too relieved to get something I didn’t know I wanted a few minutes ago. “Then I’ll post this picture with your words, and you’ll see. People will love it. And if you’re still scared after that, I’ll take it down.”
“And if I’m not?”
I swallow dryly. “Then we can talk about posting the second one.”
She nods and finally, a smile breaks through. “I should go. It’s getting late, and there’s dinner . . .”
“Yeah. Okay.” I hold out her journal.
She just looks at it, balling her fists in her lap. “Keep it.”
I raise my eyebrows at her. “Yeah?”
“Not forever. Only for a little while. When I take it home, I hide it, and it’s sad. Maybe it should be somewhere it can actually breathe.”
Tempt Me: A First Class Romance Collection Page 5