She cranes her neck, looking around. There isn’t anything to see in the enclosed entryway. “Is that coffee I smell?” she asks.
“I just put on a pot.”
She won’t come in for me, but apparently she will for coffee. Fine. “Can I take your coat?”
She shrugs out of it. Like an old habit, I check her outfit, trying to find a piece of the puzzle I’m creating in my mind. A picture of who she really is. Her top is white but the material is thick enough to hide her bra. With her hair down, her tattoo is hidden. She’s wearing black pants and those leather boots again that come up to her knees.
“I told a friend, a man, I’d be here.”
I blink from her legs to her face. I’m not sure how to feel about the fact that she needed to tell someone where she is. And to let me know about it. “Do I scare you?”
“No,” she says quickly. “This just isn’t something I’d normally do. Go to a stranger’s apartment by myself.”
I turn and lead her into the living room. “What do you think I’m going to do to you?”
She hesitates so long that I glance back at her. “Any number of things,” she says softly.
I’ve seen through her eyes. Maybe if I hadn’t peeked inside her mind, I might not understand. I do, though. She lives in vivid fantasies of love, sex, pain, need. Of course, a stranger would slip right into any role she wants—a hero to save her, a villain to be terrorized by. They both make for good fiction. “Don’t worry. You’re safe with me.”
She looks at the only things in the room—the big screen TV, a neutral-colored couch and love seat, an antique wooden coffee table. Books stacked on the window ledge above a vintage record player. My sneakers by the kitchen doorframe. My camera bag on the coffee table. That’s all of it.
She touches her neck. It’s possible I’ve made it too warm in here. “How long have you lived here?” she asks.
“Why not your boyfriend?”
She whips her gaze back to me. “What?”
“You said you told a male friend you were here. Why not your boyfriend?”
She swallows. I’d like to feel her skin on mine, the delicate ripple of her throat against my palm. She crosses her arms lightly, as if she needs something to do with her hands.
She looks so uncomfortable, I let her off the hook. “I’ll get the coffee,” I say, going into the kitchen. “I moved in last November.”
“You don’t have much furniture.”
I pour coffee from the pot into a mug, comforted by the black hole it creates. “I’m in the process of replacing it.”
“Bed bugs?”
“What?”
“Is that why you had to get rid of your furniture?”
“Oh.” Gross, but I’m not sure if the truth is worse. When I’d rented this apartment, I’d already begun moving things in from our house in Connecticut when Kendra found out about the affair. She’d made me move it all back. Not that I’d been upset to say goodbye to the butt-ugly, green-velvet couch she’d bought without my input, or the kittens-with-babies photographs she’d insisted on hanging in my mature daughter’s room.
I guess I should be grateful I got to pick out my own shit for once, but I’ve never had an eye for interior decorating. I only buy what I need.
I can’t begin to think of how to explain all that to Halston without freaking her out. “Sure . . .” I say. “Bed bugs.”
I return to the living room with two steaming mugs. She takes one before I even offer it, lifting it to her lips.
“It’s hot,” I say. “You’ll burn—”
She sips and winces, but hums with appreciation. Her eyes are closed, yet I can’t take mine off her. I watch her like she’s the goddamn Mona Lisa come to life. I want her to hum into my mouth, to melt like that with my tongue between her legs. The way she writes, the way she moves—she’s got to be sensuality personified in bed.
My craving for her makes it hard to talk, and even more difficult to control myself. “You shouldn’t do that, by the way.”
She opens her eyes. “Do what?”
“Go to a stranger’s place alone. Drink from a cup without knowing what’s in it.”
Her lips part for an audible breath. “But you said—”
“You’re safe with me. Just don’t make it a habit.”
She holds the coffee to her chest, right above her breasts, as if I might try to take it back. “It’s good. Where’s it from?”
This time, it’s hard to speak for a different reason. I’ve had a bag of Quench coffee in the freezer for a year. I couldn’t drink it after Sadie left, that shop the coffee came from was something special between us, but I couldn’t get myself to throw it out either. Now I realize I’ve filled the entire apartment with the smell of Sadie but am only now noticing it. I don’t want to be thinking about Sadie when I’m here with Halston, so I say, “Quench Coffee, a few blocks over.”
“I’ve been there,” she says. “They have a location in Chelsea Market, right?”
I nod. “Best coffee in the city, if you ask me, but like you said, Lait Noir is more convenient.”
“Not if you take Lexington. It’s probably about the same, distance-wise.”
I rub my chest. “I’ll go grab your journal.”
“Where is it?”
“My bedroom,” I say before I realize how it sounds.
“Your bedroom?” she asks.
Shit. It sounds bad, because it is. “I was just, you know, keeping it where I could see it.”
“Sure,” she says as I turn. “Leave the lotion and tissues, though.”
I look back, my eyes wide.
She’s busting my balls, and I have no comeback. Just a flushed face. I can slink off, shamed, or I can give it right back to her. “I’ve made no secret of the fact that your words do something to me. So, yeah, I did something to them. I’m sorry if that’s overshare, but why else would I practically hunt you down?”
She bites her bottom lip with all her teeth, hard enough to turn the skin around it red. “Finn . . .”
“Yeah, yeah, I know.” Boyfriend. Fuck off, Finn. This is dangerous territory. I go into my room and grab the leather book from my nightstand. I should return it to her and ask her to leave. It seems unfair, but as long as there’s a third-party, I can’t risk getting too close.
She has to go.
When I return from my room, she’s sitting on the couch, and I know right away that I don’t have what it takes to make her leave. If she does it on her own, it’d be hard not to stop her, but asking her to go? I can’t. I’ve never been able to flip fate the bird, as many times as I probably should have.
To put some distance between us, I take the loveseat. It came with the couch, or I wouldn’t know fuck all about loveseats, but now I’m glad for it. As tempted as I am to get physically closer to Halston, distance is my friend right now. Too close, and I might forget how it feels to lose what was never mine to begin with.
To her credit, she holds my gaze, even though I just admitted to jerking it to her words. She’s getting braver with me. I can practically feel her not looking at the journal until she caves and drops her eyes to my lap. “You read it,” she says quietly.
“Not all of it. But yeah. A lot.”
“And you can still look me in the eye?”
“I was caught off guard at first.” My hand sweats around the leather. “But you’re talented. You drew me in and I’ve been unable to get out since.”
I think I see tears in her eyes, but then they’re gone. “It’s just a bunch of random stuff. I wouldn’t have thought anyone would even get it.”
I wish I could explain how it felt to read through her pages. Like she’d been inside my head. “I get it.”
“Because of the sex?” she asks.
I sit back a little. “It’s more than that, you know it is. It’s really moving, the way you write.” She stares down so hard, I wonder if she’s even listening. “I don’t understand why you tried to deny it was yours.”
“I looked at your website,” she says quickly, glancing up again.
“Oh.” The subject change leaves me scrambling to shift gears. “My website?”
“It took almost ten seconds to load.”
“Yeah, that could be right.” I rub the back of my neck. I designed my own website, but I haven’t put much effort into making it any good. My technical skills have gotten me as far as I can go on my own, but it’s kind of like my apartment. Just the necessities. “It’s a work in progress.”
“I got bored waiting, so I went to your Instagram instead and looked through everything.”
Just like that, she’s turned the tables. Now I’m the one naked and on display. Ever since I quit my job, I’ve desperately wanted people to just look at my pictures, hire me for a gig or two. But suddenly, I wish she hadn’t. My work is nothing like her words. It isn’t worthy of her almost-stormy, definitely-confusing gray eyes.
We stare at each other.
Stalemate.
Neither of us wants to talk about our work. It’s too personal. Too raw. I actually care what she thinks, and maybe she feels the same.
“It’s good, your stuff,” she says finally. “But . . .”
My stomach drops. Well, fuck. I guess we are going to talk about it. “But what?”
“I’m—how do I explain this? One of my responsibilities at work is judging art.”
I set her journal on the cushion next to me. “What do you do?”
“Market research for an ad agency. You know how you go into a dentist’s office or a chain restaurant or even a clothing store and they have art displayed? Photos on the walls or sculptures out front?” She waits for me to nod. “I help businesses choose art that speaks to their customers. Or in some cases, doesn’t.”
“Why does a customer care what’s on the wall?”
“Because you don’t want art that’s so good, people get distracted from your product. Or you don’t want a patient to see something aggressive while waiting to have their mouth torn apart. Right?”
“I guess. I never really thought about it.”
“There’s a lot that goes into that.” She purses her lips. “I have a team that collects and analyzes data on consumers. We’ll run focus groups to see how people interpret certain images or colors, types of clothing, hair color. If you’re selling parkas, you don’t want people looking at a beach.”
I drink from my mug to hide my expression. Is my artwork the beach in this situation? After everything I just confessed this is beginning to feel like a sucker punch.
“That’s why I was at the City Still Life exhibit,” she says. “To network and buy some things for clients.”
The coffee tastes stale all of a sudden. “So it wasn’t crap then.”
“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 ho
w 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.”
Yours to Bare Page 4