The Surrender of Nina Fontaine
Awakening Series Book Two
Michelle St. James
Blackthorn Press
Contents
The Surrender of Nina Fontaine
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Links
Also by Michelle St. James
The Surrender of Nina Fontaine
Awakening Book Two
by Michelle St. James
This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright 2018 by Michelle St. James aka Michelle Zink
All rights reserved.
Cover design by Isabel Robalo
Created with Vellum
1
Nina sipped her coffee and flipped through the photographs on the desk. Some of them were weather-worn, curling at the edges from heat or moisture. She paused at one of her favorites — a picture of a woman sitting on a bench in Washington Square. The shot had been taken from behind, the woman’s coiffed silver head centered in the frame. Beyond her Nina could make out the blur of moving bodies traversing the park’s pathways, the fountain a smudge of movement in one corner.
It wasn’t unusual for the face of the subject to be somehow obscure, a fact Nina had immediately appreciated about the images, which had clearly been taken without permission. The identity of the subjects wasn’t the point.
The point was their solitude.
Nina had come across them one night after having dinner with Karen in the West Village. It had been unseasonably warm for January, the breeze unusually gentle. It had felt like a mid-winter gift, and Nina had put off heading for the subway to walk through the park alone, enjoying the quiet and thinking about Liam and Jack.
She’d thought time would make everything that had happened between them clearer, but after eight months alone, she was still as conflicted as ever, the two men intertwined in her mind whenever she thought about her first few months in the city.
Liam had been traveling overseas for the past four months, working on a series for a travel magazine, something Nina only knew thanks to Moni’s strategic and transparently casual leaking of information.
And Jack… well, Jack was being Jack, attending black-tie events and keeping everyone speculating about his latest romantic exploits, a pastime that had grown more frenzied since he began showing up alone to galas and fundraisers and award shows.
Nina had been drawn to news of the two men like a moth to a flame in the beginning, but over the past few months she’d been content to focus on the present. There were endless things to beat herself up for in the past. The way she’d handled everything with Jack and Liam was definitely a contender for number one, but there was nothing she could do but learn from it and move on.
She was learning to forgive herself the crime of being human.
Taking long walks through the city had become a kind of therapy, and she’d felt surprisingly happy walking through Washington Square after dinner with Karen.
The first photograph had been taped to a light post. She’d thought it was a flyer at first, but when she got closer she’d realized it was a photograph of a young woman leaning against a tree, a book in her hand, the titled obscured by her bent knee. Her face was bowed, her features unclear. Nina had felt the solitude in the image. Had seen her own mirrored there.
A sense of peace had immediately descended over her, and she’d continued walking, a smile tugging at the corners of her mouth. She’d still been smiling when she saw the next picture taped to a park bench.
This one had been taken while in motion. The back of a woman was at the center of the frame, her brilliant red hair spilling over a navy coat. Whoever had taken the photograph had done it while walking behind the subject, and while the photograph didn’t show the woman’s face, it felt intimate in a way Nina couldn’t explain.
There had been more pictures scattered throughout the park, all of them featuring women alone. In every case, the people around the subject were slightly out of focus, as if they were only bit players in the women’s play.
Nina walked the park for nearly an hour that first night looking for the pictures. It was only later that she wondered why she hadn’t felt creeped out by the whole thing. It hadn’t taken long to find the answer: the pictures had the glow of innocent fondness. Nina could feel the care with which the photographer had chosen his or her subjects, the caution taken to insure their identities couldn’t be determined.
They felt like love letters from one woman to another, and Nina had left them that night, not wanting to disrupt whatever message was being conveyed.
But she’d been drawn back to the park again and again, not entirely surprised to find more pictures. After the first couple times, she’d taken one every now and then, studying it for clues, dreaming of finding the photographer and offering them a show at the gallery. She was a manager now, and while she hadn’t ever held her own show, she had a feeling Moni was just waiting for her to ask.
The pictures in front of her had been squirreled away over a period of weeks, each one increasing Nina’s desire to find the secretive photographer, each one adding to her list of questions.
Why the park?
Why leave them out where they could be rained on? Where they might blow away? Where someone might take them? Were the photos a celebration of solitude as Nina suspected? Or did the photographer have something else in mind?
“You’re going to make yourself crazy.”
Nina looked up as Moni dropped her bag behind the desk they shared at the back of the gallery.
“Did the bell ring?” Nina asked. “I didn’t hear you come in.”
“It rang.” Moni smiled. “See what I mean?”
Nina laughed. “Point taken.”
“I’m just giving you a hard time,” Moni said. “This isn’t crazy — this is professional obsession.”
Nina looked up at her. “Something you recognize, I take it?”
“The understatement of the year. Want a coffee?” Moni headed for the coffee machine.
“No, thanks.”
“Why don’t you find her?” Moni asked as the machine sputtered. “It probably wouldn’t be that hard.”
It’s not like Nina hadn’t thought about it. More than once she’d caught herself on the way out the door, already thinking about the trip to Washington Square, already planning how she would wait.
“How do you know the photographer is a woman?” Nina asked.
“I’d bet a thousand dollars she’s a woman.” Moni carried her coffee to the tiny office enclosed in frosted glass. “That’s not a male gaze. It’s…”
“Sisterly?” Nina offered.
“Exactly.” Moni looked more closely at Nina. “Nicely done.”
“I’m learning from the best.”
“You can’t learn that kind of insight,” Moni said. She leaned over the pictures spread out on the desk. “Whoever
it is either likes the retro look, or doesn’t have access to a newer camera. Looks like these were taken with a Leica M.”
“How can you tell?” Nina asked.
“It’s got the Leica Glow.” Moni pointed to an out-of-focus area at the edge of one photo. “See this here? It’s a hallmark of Leica: these blurry areas at wide aperture. The colors are really saturated too. Leica saturated.”
Nina looked more closely at the parts of the photo Moni had described. “Interesting.”
Moni straightened. “So? Are you going to try and find her?”
“I don’t know,” Nina said. “I don’t want to impose. Maybe she doesn’t want attention. Maybe that’s why she leaves the pictures around the park.”
“Maybe, but it can’t hurt to ask. If nothing else, it’ll satisfy your curiosity.”
“That’s true.” Nina slipped the photos back into the manila envelope she’d been carrying around. “How’s Tobin’s new stuff?”
Moni barked out a laugh. “Nonexistent.”
“Seriously?” Moni had given Tobin Berkowitz his first show two years earlier. It had been her first huge success and he’d been promising her another show for over a year.
“Seriously.” Moni took a drink of her coffee. “Just some questionable test shots.”
“Yikes. What did he say about it?”
“That you can’t rush genius.”
“No he didn’t!” Nina said.
Moni nodded. “He did.”
“Well, at least we have Morris’s show coming up.” Morris LaGrange was a reliable and prolific artist who was known for taking eerily beautiful pictures of trash.
Moni raised her coffee cup in silent toast. “Thank god for trash.”
Nina stood and stretched. “You okay if I head out? I need to go to the market before it gets crazy.”
“Go,” Moni said. “I’m good.”
“You’re coming to yoga tomorrow right?” Nina had finally convinced Moni to attend one of Amy’s potlucks and had been gratified to discover that she’d been right: Moni fit right in. Being a single mom to her eleven-year-old daughter, Angela, meant she didn’t have a ton of time to socialize, but she’d taken to joining the group whenever she could.
“I wouldn’t miss a chance to sweat and stretch with a bunch of skinny-ass white girls,” Moni said.
Nina laughed. “Good.”
Their discussion about the lack of diversity in yoga class was ongoing and necessary. Moni’s on-point commentary only made it more interesting.
Nina slipped on her coat and grabbed her bag. “See you tomorrow night.”
“We’re still going for food after, right?” Moni said.
Nina headed for the door. “Do you even need to ask?”
“Good, because I’m mostly in it for the food.”
“You and me both,” Nina said.
2
She balanced the grocery bags in one arm while she slipped her key in the lock, then stepped into the lobby. Mister Twinkle met her at the door, barking like he’d never seen Nina before while Sal, the building’s Super, stood near the top of a ladder twisting a new lightbulb into one of the lobby’s light fixtures.
“You’ll have to wait,” Sal said without looking at her.
“That’s fine.” The ladder blocked the staircase. “Let me hold that for you.”
She worked around the yipping dog, careful not to step on one of his feet like she had three months earlier, a mistake she felt certain had set their tumultuous relationship back months.
After setting the grocery bags on the floor, she grabbed onto the ladder to steady it while Sal finished the job.
“Was that you blaring your music last weekend?” he asked as he replaced the light fixture’s cover.
Nina cringed. She’d hoped Sal either hadn’t heard or had forgotten about her late night hosting Karen, Robin, Amy, and Moni. They were usually gone by midnight, but last weekend Moni’s daughter had been staying with a friend, a fact that may or may not have contributed to the increasingly dirty conversation, four bottles of wine, and an impromptu 80s dance party.
Nina tried playing dumb. “Last weekend?”
Sal climbed down from the ladder and scowled at her. “Don’t give me that innocent face.”
Nina bit her lip, her cheeks flushing like a schoolgirl caught breaking curfew. “Sorry. I didn’t realize how late it had gotten.”
He pointed at her. “Get it together, Fontaine. You’re not a kid for chrissakes!”
Nina suppressed her laughter and tried for a somber expression. “You’re right, Sal. I’m sorry.”
“You should be,” he grumbled, folding the ladder. “A woman your age… Come on, Mister Twinkle.”
He headed for the door to the supply closet.
“Need help with that?” she called after him.
He waved her off without turning around and she bent to pick up her groceries and started up the stairs. She couldn’t help feeling like Sal’s criticism was a badge of honor. In spite of her outward contrition, she didn’t feel a bit embarrassed by her behavior, a breakthrough in and of itself. She’d spent years being a grownup, worrying about acting her age, but it turned out the definition of mature was a lot more malleable that she’d thought.
It had been almost a year since her divorce from Peter was finalized. A year since she’d abandoned the suburbs for the city, since she’d left behind everyone else’s expectations — and her own. She’d stopped ordering her usual food, had stopped wearing the clothes she’d once justified as comfortable, had stopped worrying about what everyone else thought about her choices.
Ending her relationships with Liam and Jack had been a crucial step in the process, something she’d known intuitively at the time that had only become more apparent during the past months. She’d gone from thinking about what Peter wanted to thinking about what Liam and Jack wanted, when what she’d really needed was to get rid of all the distractions until all that was left was what she wanted.
She still had to remind herself to ask the questions.
Do you want this, Nina?
What do you want to do?
To order? To wear? To say?
Sometimes the answers didn’t come easily, but last Saturday night, she’d known for sure she wanted to demolish four bottles of wine and laugh and dance with her girlfriends.
She opened the door to her apartment on the second floor and closed it quickly behind her, then looked around for Virginia — so named for Virginia Woolf — while she crossed to the kitchen.
The cat was sitting in her favorite sunny windowsill. She eyed Nina with a moment’s curiosity, then lowered her head to resume what had obviously been an interrupted nap.
“Guess I’m old hat now, huh?” Nina said, setting the groceries on the counter.
For the first two months after she’d brought Virginia home from the shelter, the cat had darted for the door every time Nina had opened it. It had only been in the last few weeks that she’d become accustomed to Nina’s comings and goings and her own place in the apartment.
Nina unpacked the groceries and filled Virginia’s bowl with fresh water before crossing the living room to scratch behind the cat’s ears. She briefly opened her eyes, then closed them as if pretending to ignore Nina’s affections. A moment later, she was purring.
Nina smiled. “Don’t worry. I won’t tell anyone you’re starting to like me.”
She took off her coat and hung it on one of the hooks by the door, then shot off a quick text to Karen.
What’s shakin?
She sat on the couch with a sigh and pulled her feet up under her body.
Crazy day. Getting ready to leave. You?
Just got home. What are you up to tonight?
Hot date with Jude.
A second later Karen added the fire emoji.
Nina smiled. Jude was their code name for Niall Belanger, a thirty-five-year-old British author that Karen had been seeing for the past six months whenever he was in town.
<
br /> Nice.
Nina added the eggplant emoji to be funny, since they’d laughingly looked it up together during last weekend’s dance party. The discovery had led to a series of other lookups that had left them howling with laughter. They’d been punchy and boozy and Nina had laughed so hard her stomach hurt.
Karen responded with the laughing emoji.
See you at yoga tomorrow?
Nina gave her a thumbs up and set her phone on the coffee table, then lay her head on the edge of the couch. The apartment was quiet except for the muffled sound of traffic and the footsteps of her upstairs neighbor.
Her breathing deepened and slowed, sleep tugging at her eyelids now that she was home.
Home. What a strange word. If anyone had told her a year earlier that she would feel safe in the tiny apartment in Brooklyn, no Peter to take care of her, not a soul in the world to rescue her if she got into trouble, she wouldn’t have believed them. The city had been noisy and frightening, full of dress codes and customs that had made her feel like a tourist in a strange land.
Now she looked around the apartment and felt a rush of contentment. She’d started with only the sofa in the living room, but over the past year she’d slowly added to the decor by wandering flea markets and thrift stores.
The worn Turkish rug had been listed in the local classifieds, and she’d half dragged it home in the heat of summer. She’d spent a week washing it with a damp towel and a special kind of laundry soap used for babies, then vacuumed it until it was pristine.
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