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My lungs inflate. No shit. I’m the first? Not even her boyfriend? I’ve built the journal up so much in my mind, this is like . . . like watching a flower open or witnessing her first orgasm. It’s getting to see something nobody else has, bringing down a wall, and now I want it even more. “Try. Please.”
She looks at the coffee in my hand like I’m holding it hostage. I don’t give it to her.
Dropping her eyes again, she scans the page a few times and begins. “‘Rough me up, dark as . . .’” She reads slowly, her voice raspy. With a short shake of her head, she tries to pass the journal back to me. “I can’t. You do it.”
I walk by her to the other side of the room. If I stand still, she’ll notice how much a single sentence, not even a sentence, affects me. I could’ve guessed listening to her read would be sexy, but her bashfulness about it is making my pants uncomfortably tight. The girl who wrote these things was supposed to be bold. Daring. Walking sex. Halston is subtle, nuanced. Beautiful, but in a quiet way that draws me in.
“Keep reading,” I say, pacing.
She sighs. “‘Rough me up, dark as coffee. Burrow deep, make me drip with it, get me so high, I forget how it feels to . . . crash.’”
Neither of us speaks.
“There,” she says finally. “Happy?”
Happy? I could eat the words like candy, right off her tongue.
“What’s wrong?” she asks. “Did I do it wrong?”
Words aren’t my strong suit, and I can’t describe how hers make me feel. That’s why I have the camera. The mug burns my palm. I offer it to her. “Hold it in your lap.”
She looks from me to the coffee, obviously wary. She takes it, lowering it like I told her to, and shifts against the cushion. “It’s hot.”
I have to bite my tongue to keep from asking how that intense heat feels against the tops of her thighs. I shouldn’t be so turned on by someone I can’t have, but it’s the first time in a year I’ve needed something more than air. I pick up my camera.
“What do you want me to do?” she asks when I aim it at her.
“Nothing.” I study her through the lens a few seconds. I desperately want to capture her confused, timid, curious expression, but I promised—not her face. “Show me your palm, just the right.”
She balances the mug with one hand and opens the other.
I slide the coffee table back a few feet to squat in front of her. I fold all her fingers into a fist except for the index and middle ones, and that alone sends my mind to the gutter. They’re my two favorite fingers, the same ones I’d use to see how wet she was before I fucked her.
I breathe through my nose to calm myself. This isn’t just about me. She has to trust me for this to work. I step back a few paces and perch on the edge of the table. With the camera over one eye, I cut off anything above her lips and say, “Put your fingers in the coffee.”
“They’ll burn.”
“You don’t have to keep them there.”
She curves both fingers and dips them into the mug, wincing from the sting of heat just as I snap the photo. She pulls them out and sticks them in her mouth but not before a stream of coffee spirals down her forearm.
I capture it all and lower the camera. Normally, it’d take several shots to satisfy me, but that was it. That was the moment.
“That’s it?” she asks.
I lean my elbows on my knees and view the first photo. Her fingers are thrust into the mug in her lap like she’s going for climax, and one side of her mouth is curled in an ambiguous snarl. It could be pleasure. It could be pain. I show it to her.
She nearly gasps. “It looks like I’m . . .”
“Masturbating.”
“But it’s a mug of coffee.”
“Burrow deep.”
We meet eyes, and it clicks for her. “Like what I wrote,” she says. “It’s just a cup of coffee, but . . .”
“It feels like fucking.” I put it out there. “That’s your talent. I want to do that too, make people feel like that.”
“You do,” she says, her gaze drifting back to the camera.
Do I? I didn’t before, according to her. But her breasts rise and fall a little faster. Her cheeks are still flushed. Is she aroused? I’m tempted to check for myself, test her nipple with the pad of my thumb to see if it’s hard.
Swallowing, I go to the next photo. Again, the frame spans mouth to lap. She’s sucking her fingers, her lips pink and plump. Coffee drips down the meat of her palm and over her wrist.
She shakes her head. “You made me sexy.”
“All I told you to do was put your fingers in the coffee.”
“Have you done this before?” she asks. “For your own . . . not for work?”
My mind flashes to Sadie, who, in this same apartment, played for my camera. Different couch, different situation. Since her, it’s been nothing but meaningless shit. Until now. “No,” I say.
She glances at me from under her lashes, her bottom lip hanging, almost in a pout. “Really? Or are you just saying that?”
“Yes, really.” I’m about to ask why she thinks I’d lie, but the hope in her eyes answers the question. She wants to be special. Maybe she doesn’t know she already is. Maybe she thinks I do this all the time. Her sudden doubt is stark against the lens-sharpened sensuality I just saw.
“Halston. Look.” I move next to her on the couch and flip to the last of the three pictures—the tip of her tongue, pressed to her wrist bone as she catches a drop of coffee. I got her eyes in that one by accident. “You’re better than anything I’ve shot, but you know that.”
Almost imperceptibly, her body softens, and she tucks her hair behind her ear. She isn’t spice-scented today, more girlish, like a flower. Not as strong as roses. I can’t really place it since most flowers smell the same to me. “What are you going to do with them?” she asks.
“Nothing.” I flip between the photos. Fuck, they’re good. With some editing, they could be great. The composition isn’t perfect, but that makes them more real. The day’s end offers just enough natural light, and some darkness too. If I faded them with a filter, turned them gray, they’d be eerie, and sexy. “Or, I could post them.”
“You think they’re good enough?”
“You’re the expert,” I point out.
“Not when it comes to myself. I think they’re, you know . . . I love them. But I’m biased.”
“They need . . .”
“What?” She looks me full in the face, and it suddenly occurs to me how close we are. Our outer thighs are pressed together. Lips within kissing distance. Her white skin is pink and patchy from the way we’ve been talking, and I think I could smooth it all away with my touch. I lean in. I need to take her mouth for my own. Dive into its heat, own her in seconds, claim what I should’ve days ago.
She exhales a breath I can practically see, and I stop an inch from her mouth.
“What’s wrong?” she asks.
So much. So much is wrong with this. Cheating is the one thing I can’t do again. I’ve been scalded, and I’m still one giant scar. I’m vulnerable as fuck to Halston’s spell, but I knew that before she walked in the door. I have only myself to blame for feeling helpless. “Nothing,” I say, easing back. “It’s my issue. Not yours.”
“What issue?”
I shouldn’t have to tell her she has a fucking boyfriend. Isn’t that enough to explain why I won’t touch what doesn’t belong to me? “What was I saying?”
Her shoulders fall. “That the photos need something. They’re not right?”
“Yeah. No. They’re right.” I rub my jaw. I shaved for her. Did she notice? “I want your words.”
She blinks a few times. “My words?”
“As the caption.”
“No.” Her eyebrows draw in. “No, you can’t.”
“Why not?”
“I told you, I didn’t write that for anyone but myself.”
“And I told you, you should. You have a gift. Don’t waste
it.”
“But it’s no good. I went to business school.” She shifts forward, away from me. “I look at art, I don’t create it.”
“Then why do you write?”
“To get it out. To feel something.”
“Why do you have to write to feel?”
She looks away. “I have a good life. Simple. My dad is conservative, and so are our clients. He’d be embarrassed if anyone in the industry found out. I would be embarrassed. I’m past the stage of my life where I need to shock people.”
