by Alexis Hall
“No, I was just…”
“Just what?”
Fuck. George was great, and I knew she wouldn’t particularly care, but for my own damn sake, I couldn’t keep whining to her about my stupid emotions and my stupid ex-boyfriend. “I was just wondering why photography.”
“Is this an interview?”
“I’m curious. Don’t I get to be curious?”
“Always. But I suspect you’re indulging me.”
“Isn’t that what people do when they like each other?” I sidled a little closer across the covers. “And you’ve indulged me plenty.”
She gave me a sharp look. “Does your none-too-subtle Battle of the Somme approach to bedspace mean you want to be snuggled?”
“Would…would that be okay?”
“Of course.” Flinging out an arm, she made a nook for me against her side and I gratefully wriggled into it. We were both still pretty sticky, but it didn’t matter—the warmth and welcome were what I really wanted. “Just be aware that I’m rolling away later. I can’t have you lolling on top of me all night. A lady needs her sleeping space.”
I kissed the nearest available piece of skin, which turned out to be the crease of her shoulder. “This is perfect. Will you talk to me about photography now?”
She was quiet for so long I didn’t think she was going to, but then she said, “I suppose, being an English graduate, you’re familiar with Roland Barthes?”
“Yep, yep. I got familiar with avoiding him for three years.”
“Perhaps you’ll become better friends when it’s not required. His last book, Camera Lucida, was written after the death of his mother—he was, of course, terribly French and terribly homosexual, so they were close.”
“If you’d been my tutor at Oxford,” I told her, “I’d have got a first.”
“If I’d been your tutor at Oxford, I’d have been fired for fucking you against the fourteenth-century oak panelling.”
“Not true. You don’t get fired for fucking people at Oxford. They just tell you that you probably shouldn’t.”
That made her grin. “Good to know.”
“So what’s the deal with Camera Lucida?”
“It’s a very strange piece of writing: a famous work on the subject of photography that is, in many ways, barely about the subject of photography.”
I blinked. “And that made you want to be a photographer?”
“Towards the end of book, Barthes is looking through pictures, trying to find what he calls ‘the air’—the truth or the spirit—of his mother within these collected images of her. Eventually he finds what he’s looking for in a photograph of her in a winter garden, taken in 1898. And he weeps.”
“Oh wow. Maybe I shouldn’t have pretended I had a stomach bug when we did the post-structuralists.”
“It moved me.” George gave a clumsy shrug, given she was lying down and I was plastered against her. “It still does. The vulnerability in that work. And in that moment, when critical objectivity—when the discipline he himself helped shape—gave way to the subjectivity of pure emotion. I would love to make someone feel like that. Even if only for a moment.”
I opened my mouth, then closed it again, slightly overwhelmed. A huffed breath from George could have just been, well, a huffed breath. Or a sign she’d revealed more than she’d entirely intended—a state of affairs I was far too familiar with, albeit usually from the other direction.
“So,” I said slowly, “what you’re basically saying is: You want to fuck people in the heart.”
She let loose a great bark of laughter. “Yes. Yes. That’s it exactly. I want to fuck people in the heart.”
Then I was being unceremoniously tumbled out of her arms, pinned down, and kissed hard and rough and just the way I liked it. I emerged, a few minutes later, breathless, with stinging lips, and watering eyes, and found George staring at me with unabashed ferocity.
“I’d like to photograph you, Arden.”
I made an uncertain giggle-hiccough-type noise. “Haven’t you already?”
“For a book.”
“A book? One of your books? Me?”
“Yes, you. Yes, one of my books.”
“You mean like”—I glanced over towards her bookshelf—“there’d be an Arden?”
“There’s already an Arden. But yes.”
My mind was a haze of omigodomigodomigod. “Are you serious?”
“I never joke about art.”
“But I’m…I’m not art.”
She bit the edge of my jaw, not exactly gently, and I was too dazed to even yelp. “Don’t say stupid things, poppet.”
“Sorry. It’s just—actually, I don’t know what it’s just.” Breathe. Do some breathing. “What do you…I mean, how does it work?”
“I spend time with someone. And I take pictures.”
“But isn’t us spending time together, y’know, sex?”
“Yes. I was rather hoping you’d noticed.”
It was at that moment that I apparently chose to remember Luis. In all his very intimate glory. “Does that mean they’d, um, be sexy pictures?”
“They could be. As long as you weren’t uncomfortable.”
“Uncomfortable?” I repeated. “Why would I be? The Internet is already covered in photos of me looking goofy as fuck.”
“It can feel quite different, though—to move from private subject to public object.”
I shrugged. “Maybe. But honestly, it’s the idea that you think I’m good enough that I’m having trouble getting my head round.”
“If you can’t find faith in you—which you should have, by the way—at least have faith in me.”
“Oh my God, I do,” I cried. “What I’m trying to say here is…if you think I could be, y’know, not terrible, I am in. I am so in.”
A smile, softer than any I’d seen on her face before, tugged her lips. “Then it’s settled.”
I nodded.
“You know”—she nudged my legs open with hers and pressed our hips together—“I was about to say something sensible about how late it was getting and sleep being generally considered beneficial, but I’m rather too horny to care. Think you can get hard again?”
“I can try.”
And for the record, I succeeded. Admirably.
Chapter 8
True to her word, George dropped me off at Milieu the next morning. Of course, I was wearing the same clothes and moving rather gingerly, which led to Tabs greeting me with: “Oh, you dirty stop-out.”
So I shot her my best and sassiest look. “Very dirty.”
And then limped sassily to my desk. I could already tell sitting down and me were not going to be friends today, but I booted up my computer and got stuck into polishing up a feature about the best diamonds to wear with leather. Mainly because I didn’t want to deal with the fact I’d accidentally volunteered for or been tasked with a piece on beard gadgets.
I was on my third Diet Coke (which I had hidden in my top drawer because it probably counted as clutter) when my phone rang. This usually meant the caller had dialled my number by accident while trying to get someone more important.
“Arden St. Ives.”
“Hello,” came a voice I sort of recognised but couldn’t place, “this is Nathaniel.”
Oh.
My.
Fucking.
God.
“Nathaniel who?” Okay, so that was cheap. But the bastard had called me Aidan at least twice.
He made this soft sound, like a laugh with extra condescension—as if to say, I am aware you’re being incredibly and potentially self-destructively petty right now, but being the better person, I shall rise above it. Then he actually said, “Nathaniel Priest.”
“Sorry. Yes. Of course.”
The office had gone night-before-Christmas still around me. When something significant was happening at Milieu, everyone just kind of sensed it. Probably you only got such finely honed gossip antennae from years of exposure. At least, I hoped that w
as the case, because I was seriously not there yet. I’d even managed to miss Donna Karan’s chocolate Labrador getting briefly but dramatically stuck in the revolving door because I’d been scoffing a cheese sandwich.
“So,” I asked, “can I help you?”
There was a moment of silence across the line. Shit—I could see the dark shadow behind the far wall, which meant Mara was lurking.
Then, “Caspian and I have discussed it. And we would like to do the interview.”
“Oh. Wow.” No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t get anything into my tone. Not a single flicker of human-ness. It was like I’d been replaced by Alexa. “That’s so terrific.”
“Excellent. I’ll have our assistants coordinate our schedules and send you some dates.”
The rest of the call, brief though it was, went by in a blur of logistics and email addresses. It was all totally civil, but by the time I put the phone down, my palms were sweaty and my face felt as red as my arse had been last night.
“That better be the interview George promised me,” said Mara, swooping in.
The first time I met Milieu’s editor-in-chief, I’d been expecting Miranda Priestly because, frankly, who wouldn’t. But Mara was very much opposite of that. She was lively and vigorous—even warm when she chose to be—with a passion for horses and the English countryside. Which was helpful because her husband apparently owned a lot of both. And while there was definitely a glamour to her, the vibe was much more matriarch in a Jilly Cooper novel than bulletproof fashionista.
I nodded. Tried to think of something unbothered and audacious to say. Came up empty. Settled on “Yes.”
“Good.” She began prowling thoughtfully between the cubbies and I hastily closed my drawer on my Diet Coke. “You know, I’m thinking we should run with this. Go full rainbow for February.”
Tabs’s head came up. “Oh?”
“Why not? Diversity’s on trend right now.”
“Is it?” I asked, in a smaller voice than I’d have hoped. “Or is it more of a thing that some people just kind of, like, are?”
“Not the cover line we’ll be going with.” Mara’s attention—always erratic—landed on me momentarily, flicked away again, and then returned. “The Hart-Whatshisname piece: Let’s try a romance angle with it. Pretty Woman if one of them wasn’t a hooker. Cinderella except with more dicks.”
I shifted a bit on my chair. “I can try, but we’re still talking about two privileged white guys getting hitched here. It’s not exactly Evelina and Lord Orville, is it?”
“Caspian Hart’s a bajillionaire,” put in Tabs. “That’s almost as good as a nonracist royal or a semi-attractive earl. And he’s marrying the sort of person anyone could be. What a story.”
If I could have climbed into my desk alongside my Diet Coke, I would have. And never come out again.
“That reminds me.” Mara turned on Tabs. “Find me a gay duke. Let’s do a feature on him as well.”
Tabs fiddled with an earring, frowning slightly. “I’m not sure there are any.”
That was met by an impatient snort. Mara tended to get horsey-er when crossed.
“Wait, what about Lord Mountbatten?”
“The younger son of a marquess? Get a grip, Tabitha. You know nobody will care unless it’s a duke.”
“Poshest historical gays?” I suggested. “Then we’d be able to include actual kings.”
Mara gave a sharp nod. “Yes. Good. Get someone on that.”
The conversation moved rapidly, as did most Mara-centric conversation, but I tuned it out. After all, I had a job to do. A horrible job I had brought upon myself through a frankly incoherent combination of bravado and personal masochism. But in those first moments of seeing Caspian again, I would have done almost anything to pretend I wasn’t utterly destroyed. All the power he had over me, I’d given him willingly enough, believing love would make me invincible, but God, it hurt. Sometimes it hurt so fucking much.
Anyway. The interview had been a bluff, and a pretty transparent one at that. A way to get out of the room with some semblance of pride. I couldn’t imagine Caspian actively wanting to take me up on it. So that left me wondering: Why had Nathaniel? What was he trying to prove? And to whom? Because if this was aimed at me, I’d already got the message. Loud and fucking clear.
Although my feelings on the subject were actually more mixed than they probably should have been. I mean, it was a bit of a Lady Catherine de Bourgh–type situation, wasn’t it? You didn’t go around telling people they had no right to marry Mr. Darcy unless there was the teeniest tiniest possibility Mr. Darcy wanted to marry them. By the same token, Nathaniel wouldn’t need to make big I’m with Caspian gestures if he truly believed he was. And wasn’t that a whiskey sour of an emotional cocktail? Being smug and hopeful and bitter and sad all at the same time. Which so wasn’t me. I was a strawberry daiquiri boy, through and through.
The worst of it was, I didn’t actually want Nathaniel to be insecure or uncertain—even if it meant I was completely out of the picture. I’d spent quite a lot of my relationship with Caspian that way and it hadn’t been a whole lot of fun. I guess I’d just assumed Nathaniel would have been basking in victory, but maybe it didn’t look like victory to him. Maybe it looked like he was second choice. That Caspian had only come back because what he’d tried to have with me hadn’t worked out.
Urrrrrrgh. Having to think about Nathaniel like he was a real person was literally the worst. And now I was pretty much mandated to do it for work. I could probably have claimed personal issues—because I did, actually, have personal issues—and passed the interview to someone else. But this was a big deal. Not career defining, perhaps. But most likely career delaying if I walked away. So fuck it. And fuck Caspian. I chose me.
Did it make it more or less creepy to be Googling your ex-boyfriend’s ex-boyfriend-turned-present-fiancé when it was your job? Well, it didn’t matter either way. I was doing it. Research and shit. I was mildly proud of the fact I’d never e-stalked Nathaniel before—I thought it demonstrated, if not actual sanity, at least some degree of self-preservation. And in the end, the results surprised me. Well, I say surprised. It didn’t turn out he was secretly a stripper or a superhero or already married or anything. He just wasn’t quite what I’d been expecting.
I’d always taken it for granted he was like Caspian: born to wealth and power. But he’d grown up in Manchester. Gone to university in Leeds. His father had his own accounting firm. The sort of place that proclaimed, Forty years of experience working with entrepreneurs based in Manchester and the surrounding areas, as if that was something special. His mother taught in an inner-city school. The Internet being what it is, I even managed to look up their house on Streetview. It was a three-bedroom, redbrick semi with a pointy roof and a bog-standard hatchback parked in the drive.
My mind was honestly blown. Nathaniel was just so polished that I couldn’t imagine him ever having lived such an ordinary a life. Walked to school under grey skies and the shadows of old factories. Slept in a bedroom that probably always felt too small. Carried the burden of his parents’ pride with him all the way to his mid-tier university. It had never occurred to me that he might have worked for anything. That success hadn’t just been brushed over him like gold leaf by a benevolent universe. That he had, in fact, earned his place in the world. His identity. His chance at happiness. Same as me.
Or, y’know, probably more so. Because if you got past the whole having to run away from my abusive father when I was barely old enough to remember situation, the most traumatising experience of my life was the first person I’d fallen properly in love with deciding to marry someone else. In any case, creepin’ on Nathaniel, and having slightly uncomfortable realisations about myself, kept me pretty busy until home time. I can’t say it was the best day in the office I’d ever had.
Ellery was there when I got back to the warehouse. She was sitting on the sofa, with her feet pulled up, painting what looked like angry pig faces on
to her toenails.
“Hi, honey,” I trilled, “I’m home.”
She glanced up briefly. “Dinner’s on the table.”
“Seriously?”
“No. But there’s Coke in the fridge.”
“The kind you put in your mouth or up your nose?”
“Maybe”—she thought about it—“both?”
Ever the optimist, I checked. And it turned out there was only the undrinkable variety. Sigh.
Neither quenched nor on drugs, I slumped down next to Ellery. “Caspian and Nathaniel are engaged.”
There followed a very long silence. “I suppose you’re going to want a hug or some shit like that?”
“Yes please.”
A deep, pained sigh. Then, with great deliberation, she put down her brush and held out her arms. I bounced into them and cuddled for all I was worth. Which, on the cuddle front, amounted to a lot. Believe me.
She made a sound like a cat bringing up a furball. “Your hair’s in my mouth.”
I squeezed harder.
“Ow. Arden.”
Probably best to let go. I did and Ellery withdrew to a corner, all aggressive knees and elbows.
“Fuck,” she said, after a moment or two. “That shit’s fucked up.”
“Hugging?”
“Caspian.”
“I thought you didn’t care about him.”
Her head snapped up, eyes flashing—the blue fractals in their depths most reminiscent of her brother when she was annoyed. “I don’t. He can be miserable forever and I hope he is. But I hate the way he always drags other people down with him.”
Ouch. Caspian and Ellery’s relationship wasn’t so much a car crash as a pileup on the M1. I’d accidentally got caught up in it once before and the situation had become so unspeakably horrendous that it had left me questioning whether I could actually be with Caspian. It was the first time, outside of a sexual context, I’d seen him be cruel for the sake of it. And to Ellery, whom I loved. The worst of it was, I was sure he loved her too, and the way he treated her was his twisted idea of looking after her.