Heart's Tempo

by C. L. Ryder

  “Not a thing. Except, ah ah! Keep those clothes off. It’s not every day that I have a gorgeous naked woman in my house, and I’m going to savor it as long as I can.”

  I smiled. “Fine. But only if you do the same.”

  She turned off the burner and transferred the grilled vegetables and sausages to a plate. Then she untied the apron, hung it up, and drew her shirt off from over her head and tossed it aside before taking out two pieces of bread from a bag on the counter and pushing them into the toaster. “Tea?”

  “Yes, please,” I replied.

  She put on a kettle and picked out a yellow heirloom tomato from a wooden bowl and sliced it into pieces. Next she got a ripe avocado, cut it in half and drew out the creamy green interior in slices onto a plate next to the tomato. Then she gave me a little smile and shimmied out of her shorts. Her lower half was conveniently hidden behind the counter, and she held up the shorts on one extended finger before flicking them aside. More aching warmth throbbed down between my legs, and in an amusing coincidence the toast popped up from the machine.

  “Breakfast, is served,” she said dramatically, bringing over two plates of food. The morning daylight arced off the curves of her breasts and her flawless skin, and I scooped up my camera again and fired another burst of photos. “Hey,” she protested. “I told you to hold that thought.”

  “I couldn’t help it. You look too damn good.” I happily snapped a couple more as she set the plates down on the table and went back to grab the tea. She turned around and posed with the mugs, bringing one to her lips with a sultry look. Winny probably had done dozens, if not hundreds of photo shoots before, and she knew how to strike a perfect pose, but regardless of that she had to be the most photogenic person I’d ever known.

  “Eat up, I’m already hungry for dessert,” she said, sitting down at the table. I laughed.

  Breakfast wasn’t fancy, just a simple grilled sausage and vegetables, but it was delicious and I ate hungrily, especially knowing that it was hand prepared by Winny. But mostly I ate quickly because I was excited to move on to the dessert course. We both cleaned our plates and then sipped our tea, silently gazing across the table at one another. I drained the last of my cup, and then stood up eagerly. My nipples were rock hard, and with how wet I was, I thought I might be dripping onto the floor.

  “Hello,” Winny said into her mug. “Someone's excited for dessert.” She put the mug down and then came over and kissed me. Our bodies pressed firmly together, and I enjoyed the smooth warmth of her skin on mine. I moved away and picked my camera up from the table.

  “Move over by the counter, where the light is,” I said, referring to a triangle of sunlight that fell across the kitchen. Winny went there and posed another one of her model-perfect poses, one of her hands threaded into her hair to show off its shimmering golden volume, the other resting on the counter. “Very sexy,” I said, snapping a few shots. She did a few more poses at the countertop, then moved over to the bamboo mat sitting area in the center of the room where we had our fun the night before. She stood up on it, the huge windows off to the side of the room casting her in a clean and gorgeous light. I framed her up to show not only her perfect physique but the beauty of her interior design. She laid back on the bamboo mat, gazing mysteriously at the camera. “You're too good at these poses,” I told her.

  “Part of the job, Lily,” she said, shifting poses. This time she opened up her thighs, and slipped her hand down to spread herself open.

  I bit my lip and snapped a shot. “Those are part of the job too, huh?”

  “This is just for you. Okay, when's it my turn?”

  I was used to shooting photos, not being in them (especially naked), and I shyly turned my camera over to her. She told me to lay down across the couch, and I obeyed. I was feeling slightly self-conscious, but that didn’t stop the warm, aching excitement growing inside of me. She snapped away, changing my poses with the ease of a natural director. Winny was good at singing, design, cooking, and I wouldn’t be surprised if she was good at photography too.

  After a few poses on the couch, Winny set my camera onto the table across from us. “Do you have a remote control for this thing?” she asked. My heart leapt, knowing exactly what she wanted to do.

  “In my bag,” I said, and she went and pulled out the small black remote. Then she came over to the couch and brought herself down onto me. She lowered her lips to mine. Kachick! She hit the remote on the shutter and took a photo. Having the camera watching us only made me more aroused, and I reached down began to slowly circle my fingers around her wetness as we kissed. Kachick!

  Soon Winny had me bent over the arm of the couch, my ass up to her, and was licking me from behind. The camera continued to chatter as she fucked me with her tongue and her fingers, right up until she left me gasping with orgasm.

  We looked at the photos together while we laid together naked on the couch laughing at some of the earlier ones, and commenting on how good they looked. “These belong in a magazine,” Winny said. When we reached the photos of our fun on the couch we both got turned on again, and put the camera down and rubbed each other to climax. Then afterwards we looked through the rest of the photos and agreed that now that we’d had our fun we should delete them.

  “I want to keep the first ones,” she said. “For our private collection. They’re too damn nice to get rid of.”

  It was something that I should’ve thought twice about, considered all the possible repercussions, but at the time it didn’t seem like a bad idea. They were our private photos, and they were really nice. So I wholeheartedly agreed.

  I swapped out the memory card for a blank one, in case Alex or someone decided to use my camera, put the used one into a plastic case, and zipped it into a pocket in my camera bag.

  Ten

  We developed a sort of routine over the next two months. Winny was in the process of completing her new album, and so I would accompany her to shoot photos for our “project”. Despite seeing her quite often, and me always being as polite as I possible could stand for a woman as distasteful as she was, Linda refused to warm up to me. She always treated me with distrust, probably because I hadn’t been hand chosen and vetted by her. She always seemed to be watching Winny and me, and there were a few times when I wondered if she suspected we were more than what we made ourselves out to be. We were always careful not to get too close while in public (asides from when no one was looking and we could sneak in a little kiss or squeeze), but despite that it always felt like she knew. Maybe it was just my own paranoia, I didn’t know, but I always remembered what Frankie said.

  Frankie was incredibly supportive of our relationship, and still upheld the act that he and Winny were a couple. They went to the screening for his latest movie, where I was given a press pass and shot photos of them hand in hand on the red carpet, and afterwards the three of us came back to Winny’s place where the two of us cooked dinner for him and we all sat around playing board games. One weekend, Alex came over to meet Winny and Frankie. He was completely normal around Winny, but she went slack jawed star struck when he was introduced to Frankie.

  “H-huge fan,” he had gaped. I had never seen him like that before—he was usually so deadpan about everything. After a few glasses of wine he loosened up, and he and Frankie got along really well. I wondered if part of their bonding came from being the only two people who knew about Winny and my relationship. Solidarity in being the male best friends to two lesbian women, maybe?

  That was another thing—I’d become comfortable with referring to myself as lesbian. Of course, it was still just between our small group, but it was still quite a big jump ahead in terms of accepting a new identity.

  For the first time in a while, things were going pretty damn good in my life. The adventure of our relationship was a fine diversion from the career and life dilemmas I was wrestling with before I had met Winny. Of course, like any diversion, it could only last for so long.

  “What’s the matter, Lil
y?” Winny asked. It was a warm Friday in August, and I lay stretched out across Winny’s couch with a copy of one of her interior design photo books spread out over my chest. She was sitting in a chair across from me doing digital design sketches on a tablet laptop, something she often did to unwind at the end of the day along with play music on her guitar. I had drifted off into my thoughts and was staring up at the ceiling.

  “Hm?” I said vacantly, turning to look at her.

  “Something is bothering you. And don't tell me there isn’t, because I know there is. So what is it?”

  I closed the book and set it onto the coffee table. “I think you probably know.”

  She put her tablet aside, resting the stylus pen on top of it, and came over to sit with me on the couch. I sat up to make room for her, and she slipped her arm around my waist. “Keep applying around. I know you wanted Homeowners Mag, but you could always start small, you know?”

  I nodded. “I’ve been sending my portfolio around, trying to get more eyes on my website,” I said. “But that’s only part of it, Winny. What about you?”

  “What about me?”

  “How long can you keep this up? I mean, how long can we keep this up?”

  “I don’t know what you mean.”

  I squeezed her leg reassuringly, knowing I would be treading into touchy territory. “Doesn’t it bother you that we both have to hide our lives? We’re living a lie, as cliché as that sounds. You don’t want to be doing what you’re doing, are you going to be happy knowing you’ve spent so much time working on something that doesn’t fulfill you? And of course our relationship. Are we going to keep it a secret forever?”

  “I don’t like it either, Lily, but you know that we can’t go public about it.”

  It was odd to think about having to “go public” about something as personal as a relationship—the most “going public” I was used to was setting a relationship status from “Single” to “In a Relationship” on Facebook, but when it came to Winny it meant actually going public. The entire world knowing that we were together, that Winona Heart had been having a secret lesbian romance.

  “I know,” I said sadly. “It bothers me, but I do understand.” I took her hand. “And I’ll have to deal with that…but I what about your work, Winny? You can change that.”

  She looked away. “I…My fans. And I’m under contract. I couldn’t.”

  “Your contract was for five albums. This is your fifth album, and then you can renegotiate. What’s keeping you doing this, Winny? I know it’s not the money, and it’s not the fame. And anyway, you could write your own music. Change genres, put out your own albums. People would still buy them, even if you weren’t signed under the label. And then you could go back to school.”

  She stared ahead blankly.

  “Hello?” I said. “Are you there?”

  “Yes,” she replied, with just a tinge of annoyance in her voice. I frowned.

  “You could go back to school, and continue making music for your fans,” I said. “It wouldn’t be the same pop stuff, but it’d be the stuff you wrote yourself. It might not sell as well, but does it matter? You—”

  “That’s not going to happen, Lily,” she said, with a cord of tension in her voice.

  “I don’t understand. Why? Tell me why.”

  “Because. I don’t know. I wish it was as simple as you say, but I have people to please. Corporate sponsors. The expectation of another five albums. A world tour. All of my fans.”

  “And you’re telling me that those things mean more to you than following your life’s passion. And asides from your fans, because it's not like you would stop making music.”

  She was silent, her faced turned down into a rare preoccupied frown.

  “Is it your mom?” I asked, already knowing the answer. “Look, Winny,” I said, squeezing her hand. “You’ve lived so much of your life for her. If you don’t start doing things for yourself, you’re going to look back and wonder if it was all worth it. I’m here to help you. I’m with you the entire way.”

  She took a deep breath, pulled me in close and kissed me on the top of my head. She didn’t say anything, but I couldn’t expect her to.

  I knew how she wanted to make her mother happy, and I knew how incapable she was of defying her when it came to matters of her singing career. It was something that I could sympathize with, but would likely never be able to fully understand. To have grown up practicing singing for so many hours a day, every day of the week since she was just a child. To be told that she would become a star one day and to be raised in the Hollywood environment with famous parents. The most that I could relate to was that I had taken piano lessons for two years when I was in elementary school, but otherwise it was all way beyond my realm of experience. But I could at least understand that this was something that was deeply ingrained into Winny, and helping her out of it would require more than a simple talk.

  I spent the following day updating my portfolio and resume to include the photos I had taken of Winny’s apartment, and charged ahead sending out my work with a new vigor. Maybe if it I were hired somewhere, it would help Winny make the decision to go back to design school. Of course, I knew that was a long shot. Sitting at my desk in my tiny studio, I thought about the ways I could help her. In the end, the issue was that she was bent on making her mom happy. She seemed to think she was doing it all for Winny’s benefit, but I knew that her reasons were selfish ones. I concluded that the best way—the only way—would be for Linda to encourage her daughter to go back to school.

  That would never happen. Not on its own, at least.

  I couldn’t talk to Linda. She barely even acknowledged my existence as a human being, let alone someone who had any right to be talking to her about her daughter’s life—after all, to her I was just Winny’s photographer. Someone she liked and respected would have to talk to her, and I knew just the person—the only person—who could do it.

  Frankie and I met for brunch at Mr. Nice, which was the only place I was familiar with that was a safe spot for celebrities (and the only one that would let a regular girl like me in). He looked tired, and when I asked, he explained that he had been doing the voice recording for that animated movie he was in, all while showing up for a few guest roles on TV.

  “It’s nothing,” he said, taking a sip of his espresso. “Did you know when Michael J. Fox was making ‘Back to the Future’, he was shooting ‘Family Ties’ during the day and coming on set for the movie at night? He barely got any sleep. A real inspiration. Anyway, you wanted to talk about Winny? Everything alright?”

  “Everything is wonderful,” I said. “But I’m worried about her. And by extension, about us.”

  “You don’t like keeping things a secret,” he said. It wasn’t a question. Frankie was like Alex—it was hard to hide anything from them.

  “Yes,” I said. “But more than that, I don’t think the reason why we are keeping things secret makes sense. It’s to protect Winny’s career and the identity and persona she’s built up with it, but I know that Winny isn’t fulfilled by her work. I understand that the pressure she’s facing is more than anything I’ve ever had to deal with. I know that it's more than just wanting to please her fans, it’s wanting to please Linda. It’s not what she really wants. I love her, and I want to see her go after what she really wants, because otherwise I know it’s going to catch up with her later.”

  He nodded. “Yes, Winny has had a crazy amount of responsibility on her shoulders since she was young, and a lot of it wasn’t her choice to carry. It might not be possible for her to step away from that life, even if she’s doing it halfheartedly. Because you know, her whole heart might not be in it, but it isn’t like she hates it or anything. Winny is a performer. She loves the spotlight.”

  “I know. But she doesn't have to give up her singing career, I think she needs to take hold of it. Did you know she used to write her own music?”

  “No.”

  “She’s recently started agai
n. She doesn't have to keep doing the pop star act—she could write and perform her own music on her own schedule while going back to school. It’s just Linda who is responsible for keeping her on this path.”

  “Yes, I agree with that. So what will you do? Have you talked to her about this?”

  “I have, and she’s really sensitive about it. I can do what I can to push her, but in the end I’m not sure I can do anything.”

  “Because of Linda.”

  “Right.”

  The waiter came around to fill up our coffees, and tray of freshly baked bagels with cream cheese and lox, on the house. The perks of being a celebrity. Frankie took a thoughtful bite from one of the bagels, then a sip of his coffee. He nodded.

  “Okay. I’ll talk to Linda.”

  I probably should’ve expected him to have known what I was going to ask, but I was still surprised.