by Cara McKenna
“Can I think about it and let you know later?”
“Um, sure. Give me a call by two. That’ll give me time to grab the right equipment, depending on the setting, and meet you wherever.”
“Cool. Talk to you in a bit.”
“Bye,” she said, just as his end of the line blooped softly and went dead.
“O-kayyy,” she said, staring at her screen, lit with his name and number and the length of the call—fifty-six seconds. It wasn’t even eleven yet. “Okay, that’s fine.” Another three hours of waiting and uncertainty, and praying he’d actually call.
Fine. No problem. Best birthday ever.
—
“A party?” Clare echoed. It was five minutes past four—two hours and five minutes past when Mica had said he’d call, but who was paying attention?—and she hadn’t even left the apartment yet, she was so preoccupied with waiting for her phone to ring. She’d all but given up hope, but now that it had rung, she was in for a curveball. He’d suggested she come to a party with him that night, in lieu of an afternoon meet-up.
“At my roommate’s friends’ place,” he said. He sounded distracted, like he was doing something else as he spoke to her. “Kicks off at nine. I couldn’t think of a good place for the shoot—you know, anything that screams me or whatever, but then I remembered the party. That’s a good setting for me. I’m social.”
“Is it like a get-drunk party, or a cocktail party, or . . .”
“I’m not sure. Thought I’d show up and find out.”
Clare frowned, imagining it. The lighting could be sketchy—maybe totally useless and too dark, though possibly there might be some gem of an opportunity. But really, considering it was already after four and the day’s light was on its way out, what choice did she have? If she had to choose between a less-than-ideal opportunity to get this man on figurative film and none at all, the answer was obvious.
“Sure. Sounds fun.” Plus, it was her birthday, and she wasn’t going to be celebrating with the girls until Saturday night. Might as well go to a party, and ostensibly with one fuck of a fine-looking date.
“Should I meet you there?”
“I’m not sure where it is. Meet me at my place and we can get a ride with my roommate. I’ll text you the address.”
“Okay. What time?”
“Nine, I guess.”
“Sounds good. See you then.”
And with a parting “Later,” he was gone.
She stared at her phone, feeling uneasy.
Come on, now. Am I after punctuality and professionalism, or a chance to photograph the hottest man I’ve ever seen?
To her moderate shock, his text arrived only a minute later.
Not a total flake, then.
The address he gave wasn’t far, so at quarter to nine she set out on foot, slipping into a jacket to combat the night’s growing chill. Her nerves set the city vibrating around her, the streetlights looking extra crisp, the smell of spring strong and damp in her nose. She’d told Bree about her plans and promised to text by eleven to say how things were going, though her nerves had nothing to do with the fact that she’d soon be climbing into a car with one near stranger and one complete stranger. No, this felt way more like first-date jitters.
Cool it, now. For all I know he’ll disappear with some other girl the second we get there.
Mica’s building was an unassuming brick two-story in the Hill, with a barbershop on the ground floor. Clare found the buzzer for apartment C on the bank inside a tight foyer and pressed it. There was an intercom, and she stood with her thumb hovering over the TALK button, but then the door buzzed, unlocking, and she pulled it open.
The unit was on the second floor, down a short hall lined with tired but recently vacuumed carpet. She knocked on the door, just below the brass letter C, and through the wood she heard a voice call, “It’s open.”
She let herself into an empty kitchen—nothing fancy, but pretty tidy save for a cluttered dining table. She shut the door behind her, just as Mica appeared from the next room. A TV was droning, the sounds of the news.
“Hey, you,” he said, and his smile was unexpected, upending—warm and practiced, almost like they’d slept together. Clare had to work to keep her own smile from giving away her pleasure at his familiarity.
“Hey.” She accepted his greeting—a quick one-armed hug, just enough contact to tease and to tell her he smelled faintly of some pleasant, earthy scent—then turned her attention to the room, hoping he wouldn’t notice her blushing. “So, this is your place.”
He shrugged. “My friend’s place. I’m just crashing through August.”
It had that unmistakable scent that every one of her Pittsburgh rentals had had, until the current one—she and Bree lived in the second floor of an aging three-family home, and it lacked that apartment-building aroma. It wasn’t a bad odor, merely distinct, like the way all grade schools seemed to smell alike. Nostalgic.
Mica was just as hot as she’d remembered, dressed in jeans and a pale heather gray henley with all the buttons undone. The color brought out the rich tan of his skin. His dreads were down, the longest ones brushing his shoulders. Around his neck he wore a thick cord, its three fat silver beads resting in the V of his open collar. On one wrist was a worn leather cuff, and those fat silver rings adorned his fingers. He belonged on a dusky beach someplace, barefoot and bohemian and tasting of salt spray. She half expected that if she kissed his neck, she’d taste the ocean.
“Where’s the party?” she asked, tearing her attention off his throat.
“I’m not sure.” He turned to the adjacent hall and called, “Yo.”
A distant “Yeah?” answered.
“Where’s the party at?”
No reply at first, then footsteps sounded, and a man appeared. “This side of the university.”
“This is my friend,” Mica said. “He knows the people throwing the party.”
“Vaughn,” his roommate confirmed, and stepped forward to offer a hand.
Vaughn was handsome—not freakish, traffic-stopping, model handsome like Mica, but a more ordinary persuasion of good-looking. About six feet tall, very dark skin, short hair, with a nice, solid shape to him behind his fitted tee and jeans. And very white teeth, she noted. Gorgeous smile, this guy had. Disarming, and not in that Mica way. Mica was disarming in a manner that was tough to trust, like a third shot of something strong when you really ought to be switching to water.
Clare shook Vaughn’s hand and it was exactly as she’d have expected—curt and warm and full of authority. She wondered what he did for work, that gave him this aura of calm confidence.
“I’m Clare. It’s nice to meet you. I hope it’s cool that I’m crashing.”
“Absolutely. It’s an apartment-warming. Real casual.”
That was good, as she’d not exactly dressed for a sophisticated soirée—denim skirt and a sleeveless patterned tee. “I didn’t bring anything,” she said as she realized it.
“That’s fine—drinks are on them, and I’ve got a load of snacks and stuff in the car. We won’t be empty-handed. I’m driving, by the way.”
“He’s not much of a drinker,” Mica added.
“Not when I’ve got work in the morning. I’m ready when you guys are.”
“Lemme grab my shit,” Mica said, and disappeared down the hall.
After an empty pause, Clare asked Vaughn, “And what are you getting up for tomorrow? What do you do?”
“I drive an ambulance. I’m an EMT.”
“Oh yeah. That would require a clear head.” And it explained the capable build and the whole cool-and-calm vibe.
He nodded. “I don’t know how I did it when I was younger—work through a hangover.”
“No kidding. I feel like I hit twenty-eight and suddenly my bedtime went from two a.m. to ten thirty.”
“Exactly.”
Mica reappeared, slipping a wallet in his back pocket and threading his arms into the sleeves of a green hoodie. “Ready.”
Vaughn switched off the TV and lights and led them all down to the street, where his car was parked—a modest black sedan, maybe five years old, with a few minor dings. Mica offered Clare the front seat, but she declined.
“The back’s better. Room for all my crap.” She slipped her bulky camera bag and her tote from her shoulder.
“So,” Vaughn said as he pulled away from the curb, “Mica told me you’re doing a photography show. Something about ethnicity?”
“Yeah. I’m trying to find subjects to shoot who’re like me—mixed. I’ve spent a lot of my life getting asked, ‘So, what are you, exactly?’ And that’s the theme of the show.”
“Is that annoying? People always wanting to know?”
“It used to get to me when I was younger, but now I trust that most people are just curious. Tactless but curious.”
“It’s not the most polite way to word it, huh?”
She laughed. “No, not really.”
“You get that much?” Vaughn asked, turning to Mica.
“Back home? Constantly.”
“It bother you?”
“Fuck yeah, it bothered me. I grew up in gang territory. Standing out doesn’t do you any favors.”
“What’d people think you were?”
“Fucking everything. Native American, Korean, Brazilian. They had no clue. Then you say half-Malaysian, and it doesn’t mean anything to them anyway.”
A pause from Vaughn. “I ever ask you that?”
“Probably.” He shrugged. “But we were teenagers.”
As they made their way down the quiet residential streets, Vaughn passed a three-decker house where a man was sitting on the ground-floor porch, reading a newspaper by the light coming through a front window. Vaughn gave the horn a quick beep and raised his hand. The man did the same.
“That’s my dad,” he told Clare, and turned a corner.
“Oh, cool. Did you grow up there?”
“I did. And I see him a lot. Sunday dinners, and usually lunch on whatever weekday I’m not working.”
“You must be close.”
“Yeah. Very.”
“He’s a good dude,” Mica tossed in. “I just met him over the weekend. Explains how you ended up such a pillar of the community.”
Vaughn made a skeptical noise, but Clare was willing to bet his friend had him pegged about right. You could sense steadiness and reliability on a person the same way you could sense sheistiness. Vaughn was also infinitely easier to talk to than Mica . . . though much of that was surely down to the fact that making eye contact with Mica took her breath clean away.
“Are you from around here?” Vaughn asked Clare.
“Yeah. Arlington.”
“Your parents still down there?”
“My mom is. They split up when I was five. My dad moved to Steubenville for a job, then all the steelwork dried up. But he’s still there, managing a warehouse.”
“You see either of them much?”
“I see my mom most weeks, and my dad’ll drive in and meet us for dinner maybe once a month. He remarried about ten years ago and has three stepkids, so he’s busy, but I see him.”
“Nice that your folks still get along enough to hang out,” Vaughn said.
“They’ve always gotten along. I get this feeling like they can’t figure out why they ever thought getting married was a good idea, but they obviously like each other. They crack each other up. They just couldn’t handle living together.” Clare’s parents had taught her what friendship could look like between exes, but not modeled any kind of marriage she’d like to one day find herself in. They’d fought a lot when she was little and the noise and chaos of it had frightened her, so when she grew up and met a guy who was stoic and responsible, she’d tried like hell to be happy with him. Respect was important, and so was steadiness. Davis had offered those things in spades, and they’d never fought once. But there were other things she’d needed that he just wasn’t giving, in the end. Spontaneity, for one. Excitement and desire—some heat in her lover’s gaze when he looked at her. To be treated like a lady, sure, but also like a piece of meat on occasion, as it turned out.
Clare was dying to toss the conversational ball to Mica, to find out what the deal was with his family, and why he’d referred to his parents in the past tense at the coffee shop. She’d just found the nerve when Vaughn eased the car to a stop on a crowded street before a long yellow-brick four-story. Clare swung her door out. Music and chatter spilled from the open windows of a third-floor unit on the end.
“Bet I can guess which apartment is your friends’,” she said to Vaughn, shouldering her totes and slamming the door.
He opened the trunk and pulled out a couple of shopping bags. One crinkled and one clinked, and he shut the hatch with his elbow.
“So whose party am I crashing, exactly?” she asked as they made their way up the stairs. It was a nice building: newly remodeled, the habitat of young professionals.
“My friend Linnea and her fiancé, James,” Vaughn said.
“Nice building.”
“No kidding, right? I’m starting to wonder if maybe I should have gotten myself a degree, after all.”
“Not necessarily,” she said. “Mine’s not exactly paying the bills.”
Vaughn knocked when they reached the unit, and a pretty, curvy woman opened the door and engulfed him in a hug. This was Linnea, Clare found out when introductions were tendered. She welcomed them all inside and told them to help themselves to anything they saw.
Funnily, Clare bumped into someone she knew barely ten feet from the door—an old college classmate. They chatted for twenty minutes, until the topic of how Clare had come to be here arose, and she realized she’d better find her subject. Who knew what sort of a partygoer Mica was? She’d be smart to get some early shots, in case he was inclined to get wasted or disappear with a girl. The latter thought stung more than she wanted to admit.
She found Vaughn first, chatting with a small group in the living room. “Have you seen Mica?”
“Fire escape, I think. Through the kitchen.” He nodded the way. “I’ll come with you. I could use the air.”
Air quality wasn’t exactly on the menu—the fire escape was long and broad, accessed through a propped-open door past the fridge, and Clare could smell the smokers before she and Vaughn even stepped outside.
A half dozen guests were chatting and joking in the cool night air. Mica sat on the corner of the railing, talking with a slim white guy. Someone had draped strings of Christmas lights from the metal slats above, and their glow and the smoke lent the scene a curious ambience.
Clare would’ve about died of a heart attack if someone had told her to sit as Mica was, but he looked perfectly oblivious to the dangers of his perch. He spotted her and Vaughn and beckoned them over.
He smiled, holding her in thrall as his gaze dipped down her body and back up. He blew smoke over his shoulder, then said, “I wondered if maybe you’d found a better offer.”
“That guy in the kitchen? No, we just went to school together. Small world.” She glanced around them. “This light is actually pretty great. Would you mind if I took some shots out here?”
“Go crazy.”
As she got herself positioned, Clare imagined how nice the contrast would be—pitch-black background; soft, sexy light; points of white from the bulbs; the atmospheric veil of smoke. Both the yoga studio and kitchen shots she had were dominated by bright light, and these would break up all that white nicely.
Her shutter clicked and clicked as she captured him. His face and body were pulsing with energy, eyes always moving, hands restless, expression cycling from bemused to intrigued to what she c
ould only describe as seductive. Even with her shooting rapid-fire, every single frame would be unique.
He was charismatic with his eyes averted and the cigarette at his lips. He was engaging when he turned at another partygoer’s comment, offering her his profile and a broad grin. But when those eyes met hers, boring into the lens, and the smoke painted his exhalation milky white . . . Christ, he was sex. Sex in a hoodie.
Through the viewfinder he asked, “Getting what you’re after?”
I’m not in a bed with you yet, so not entirely.
“I can’t say I know you,” Clare offered, adjusting the settings, clicking away, “but this all looks very you. Do you feel at home on fire escapes?”
He smiled, shrugged. “I like heights.”
“No lie.” This from Vaughn, loitering at Clare’s back.
She lowered the camera, thinking she’d captured more than enough photos out here. Many would be blurry from the low light, but there’d still be dozens of stunning ones to choose from. She half wished she could run home now and glue herself to her computer, curating.
Mica snuffed his cigarette on the railing, then flicked it to the alley below. “Think I’ll grab a drink.”
“Good idea,” Clare said.
A backward glance told her Vaughn had gotten drawn into another orbit. She tailed Mica into the bustling kitchen, where she poured herself a glass of red wine. Mica took the bottle when she’d finished, eyed its dwindling contents, then tipped it to his lips.
“Hang on,” she said, laughing, and set her glass aside to lift her camera. His eyes met hers through the lens and she snapped fresh shots of him, drinking from the bottle, rings glinting, throat working.
“Vice suits you,” she told him, then captured his resulting smile, her body flushing warm and curious. She lowered the camera when he did the same with the bottle.
“Get all the pictures you need?” he asked.
Clare nodded, though her stomach tightened at the words. Was he getting tired of her shooting him? Was she about to be dismissed?
Mica didn’t know it, but it was her thirtieth birthday, and she was spending it doing the thing she loved best, in the company of one of the most stunning men she’d ever seen. If he shut this night down now, she’d be lying if she said it wouldn’t sting.