by Callie Hart
One suit. One pair of jeans. One pair of Chuck Taylors. Two tshirts. Three pairs of boxers. Three pairs of socks. Everything else is camera gear—my Leica, and my lenses. My tripod, and my cleaning kit. Batteries. Filters. Extra lens caps.
The Leica’s an old film camera. I use a digital Canon for work, purely because clients want to see the end product before they leave the building, and that’s impossible when you have to go home and develop the shots. When I’m shooting for me, though, I’ll always use the Leica. It’s so old. It was the very first camera I ever bought, back when I was just a kid. I saved for two years solid, driving my mom around and running errands before I had enough money to pick it up second hand. I dropped it back in college and my heart nearly exploded out of my chest. Thankfully it survived. Mostly. Now it has beautiful, strange light leaks that color and distort the pictures I take. It’s like it’s haunted or something. Ghosts and obscure shadows hover in the backgrounds of the self-portraits and urban landscapes I develop.
Rae turns onto her back, breasts exposed, pussy exposed, and takes another long drag from her joint. Her auburn hair spills out on the mattress around her head like a pool of blood. “Will you bring me back a souvenir?” she asks. “Something really cheesy and lame. Something I can put on my keychain maybe.” Her face is suddenly hidden behind a veil of smoke.
“Probably not. Port Royal isn’t a souvenir kind of place. And I’ll forget.”
“Fair enough.”
This is the dynamic of our arrangement: Rae asks me something, I’m brutally honest in response, and she doesn’t get mad. Perfect. It works both ways, too. She doesn’t lie to me. Doesn’t play any weird head games. We tell each other exactly what we’re thinking, and most of the time it helps keep things ticking over smoothly. No hurt feelings. No unmet expectations.
“Are you going to hook up with your old high school sweetheart when you’re in town? That’s what happens when people go home for funerals, isn’t it?” Rae asks. She pouts, but she’s not angry with me. She’s undoubtedly sad that she won’t be able to join in. She doesn’t realize that what she’s said has made me angry, though. I turn my back on her, snatching up my t-shirt from the floor and pulling it on. I grab a fresh pair of boxers and pull those on too, my skin feeling hot and prickly.
“No. No high school sweetheart fucking for me.”
“Did she move away? Did you guys have a raging fight before you broke up? What was her name?”
“I didn’t have a high school sweetheart. I was a virgin until I was eighteen.” I grit out the words, hoping Rae will hear how clipped and pissed off I sound so she won’t probe any deeper into the matter, but she can be a little oblivious sometimes. Either that, or she hears how pissed off I am just fine and that only makes her more curious.
“But you loved someone through high school, right? You must have. Everyone had a crush on someone in high school.”
“Nope. Not me.”
“Liar.” She gets up off the bed and pads naked out onto the balcony. She flicks the butt of her joint over the side of the building and then leans against the wall, watching me. She crosses her arms underneath her breasts—the breasts I came all over about twenty minutes ago—and raises an eyebrow at me. “I was fucking my high school gym teacher when I was sixteen. He was my high school crush.”
“Somehow, that information does not surprise me, Rae.”
“He was married. Had three kids. I was fascinated by the fact that he had back hair. All of the shitty little punks in my year were still trying to grow pubes on their balls and Mike was just covered in all this hair.”
“That’s very disturbing information.”
“That I used to be into hairy guys?”
I throw a bunch of magazines onto the mattress—plane reading material—and then I duck down to cast an eye underneath the bed. My dress shoes are around here somewhere, I know they are. “No. The fact that you were fucking a married man with three children and you don’t seem all that bothered about it. That’s disturbing.” Damn. No shoes. Fuck.
“He was the one who was cheating, Callan. He was the one lying to his wife and kids when he snuck out at night. He told them he was going bowling with friends from work when really he was meeting me in a motel so he could fuck my little sixteen-year-old pussy.”
“So, he was a liar and a pedophile. Wonderful. Have you seen a pair of black leather shoes anywhere around here?”
“He wasn’t a pedophile. Age of consent in Maryland is sixteen. I was legal.”
I stand up straight and look at her. “That makes it totally okay then.”
“Why are you so pissed off, babe?” Rae pushes away from the balcony wall and comes back inside. She places her hands on my chest and makes the same soft purring sound she makes when I go down on her. “Are you mad that I was fucking an older guy in school and you weren’t fucking anybody at all?”
“How old was he?” I ask.
“Thirty-eight.” Rae announces this proudly with a toss of her hair. She looks up at me, defiance shining brightly in her crystal clear blue eyes. “That’s funny, actually,” she says. “I’ve just realized. That means that even back then, he was still nine years older than you are now.”
“Yeah. That’s pretty hilarious.” But I’m not laughing. I take hold of her hands and remove them from my chest. I don’t really feel like reminiscing with her over some dirty old pervert who took advantage of her way back when. It’s kind of weird that she’s so proud of it.
“You’re jealous,” she whispers, holding her hands up to her face so she can bite down childishly on her thumbnails. “Callan, you’re maddeningly jealous. How fantastic.”
I bend down so that we’re eye level with one another. “I’m not. I’m tired. And I think your moral compass is broken. That’s it. That’s all.”
She gives me a wicked grin. Her lips are full and stained bright red from her lipstick, swollen from the pounding they received when I fucked her mouth not too long ago. Those lips are part of the reason why I can’t really give her up. They remind me of someone else’s. “Your moral compass is broken, too, asshole,” she tells me. “You’re no better than me.”
“See, that’s where you’re wrong. My moral compass works perfectly. I just choose to ignore it. That’s something else entirely.”
Rae seems to think about this. “So, who’s worse, then—me, the woman who knows no better, or you, the man who sins with full knowledge of his actions?”
I return Rae’s awful smile, feeling my insides turn a shade blacker. “Me. I’m the worst. You know this.”
She nods, because she does. “It even said so in High Lite Magazine.”
“High Lite?”
Rae nods. “I bought a copy yesterday. Your face is plastered across the middle two pages like you’re goddamn revolutionary or something.” Her voice is peppered with something that sounds strangely akin to envy. I did an interview with a female journalist who works for High Lite about a month ago. She said she would push for an article about my work, but that I shouldn’t hold my breath. I haven’t been. In fact, I’d forgotten all about it until right here and now.
“Were they awful about me?” I ask.
Rae nods. “So mean. I can’t imagine what you did to deserve such a harsh editorial.” She can imagine perfectly well, though. She’s seen how I talk to people sometimes. She’s seen how abrasive I can be when rubbed the wrong way. Rae’s mouth pulls up at the corners into an impish smile. “The strap line was, ‘Callan Cross is a cunt .”
“Nice. I didn’t know you could say cunt in a magazine.”
Rae shrugs. “They’re sensationalists. They can do whatever they want.”
“What was the tag line?”
Rae puts on her best newsreader voice, which is actually quite impressive. “He’s tall, dark and savagely handsome, and he’s America’s most vitriolic photographer. At twenty-nine, Callan Cross has already conquered the world. Now he’s planning on burning it to the ground, one brutal image at a
time.”
“I like the tall, dark and handsome part.”
“They said you were arrogant and potentially delusional.”
“Who gives a fuck what they think about me as a person? What did they say about my work?”
“Incendiary. Wild. Stirring. Transcendental. There were a few other adjectives thrown around, but they got a little fantastical. I stopped reading after a while. I just looked at the pictures instead.”
“They were good, right?” I gave the journo some self-portraits I took of myself last year. My profile was in silhouette, and beneath it tree branches and a cold winter sky were visible in hues of blue and purple, which I transposed onto the image. The writer had asked if I’d created the self-portraits in Photoshop and that’s where the hostilities had begun. I’d told her, no, I had absolutely not used Photoshop. I had used an enlarger to blend the two images together, one on top of the other, and everything was done by hand. She’d looked at me blankly, like she couldn’t give two fucks, and I’d known immediately who I was dealing with: another hipster with an Instagram account, throwing a filter on a selfie and calling it art.
Infuriating .
“They were pretty dark and twisty,” Rae says. “Normally when you have your photo in a magazine, it’s a good idea for people to be able to see your face. You have such a nice one, after all.”
“Thank you. I don’t care about people seeing my face, though. I want to be faceless altogether.”
Rae scowls. She throws back the covers on the bed and climbs in, kicking my magazines onto the floor. “You are delusional,” she informs me. “I’m passing out now. I have an early call. I guess I’ll see you when you get back from your little jaunt down south.”
“You will.” I don’t kiss her goodnight. That’s not the kind of people we are. I continue to search for my dress shoes, banging around, my blood inexplicably fizzing in my veins, until I realize I’m never going to find them. Wherever they are now, they are no longer in my apartment. Once I’ve made my peace with this, I grab my keys and leave. Rae’s fast asleep, will still be asleep by the time I get back, no doubt, but I’m not even close to tired. I’m wired. Edgy. I need to know what that journalist wrote about me.
I find a copy of High Lite Magazine at a bodega on 5th , and I pay for it with a crumpled ten-dollar bill. I walk around in circles, looping the block while I read it.
The journo talks about my work—has very impressive things to say, which I like. She calls me a narcissist, which is a cloak I don’t mind wearing, I guess. It’s mostly true. Towards the middle of the article, she writes about my background. Starts talking about my dead mother. I pointedly did not tell her anything about my family, even though she did ask. Toward the end of the piece, she mentions the first picture I ever received recognition for, all those years ago. I’m bubbling over with anger by the time I turn the page and see that she’s printed the fucking thing. Without my consent. I’ve spent the last ten years trying to bury that image, and yet there it is in full color, monopolizing half a goddamn page of real estate in one of the countries biggest lifestyle magazines. Every time I see that picture, it feels like I’ve swallowed razor blades and I’m slowly bleeding to death internally.
It’s a picture of a girl. Her right eye is swollen and bruised, and her lip is split open. She has blood dried on her chin, and she’s crying. The girl was looking straight at me when I took the picture. She was naked, and she was hurt, and her blood and her tears were real. I should never have shared that picture. It was deeply personal. Deeply painful. It was a silent conversation shared between two damaged teenagers, who had been clinging to each other for survival.
I had no right to share the picture with the world, but I did it anyway. I’ve regretted it every single day since.
I really am a cunt.
*
Calico on Amazon.
Also by Callie Hart
R oad to Ruin
Rooke
Calico
Between Here and the Horizon
Vice
Badlands
C haos & Ruin
Violent Things
Savage Things
Wicked Things
D ead Man’s Ink
Rebel
Rogue
Ransom
Series Boxset
T he Blood & Roses Series
Deviant
Fracture
Burn
Fallen
Twisted
Collateral
Series Boxset