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The lights were too bright, the voices too loud.
“Sorry I’m late. The shoot ran over.”
He blinked as Mac slid into the chair across from him. “What?”
“You must’ve really been into your book.” She angled her head to read the title. “Lawrence Block? Shouldn’t you be reading Hemingway or Trollope?”
“Popular fiction’s a strong and viable force in literature.
That’s why it’s popular. Reading for nothing more than pleasure is . . . another lecture coming on. Sorry.”
“Teacher mode suits you.”
“I suppose that’s a good thing, in the classroom. I didn’t realize you were working when you stopped by. We could’ve made it later.”
“Just a couple of client meetings, and a shoot. I have a bride who for some reason wants every moment of her plans photo-documented professionally. Okay with me, as it’s money in the bank. I documented her fitting—wedding dress—with her mother in weeping attendance. The weeping added a little more time than I’d scheduled.”
She pulled off her cap, finger fluffed her hair as she gazed around the shop. “I haven’t stopped in here before. Nice energy.” She notched up the smile for the girl who came over to take her order.
“I’m Dee. What can I get you?”
“I think we’ll have some fun. How about a tall latte macchiato, double shot, squirt of vanilla.”
“Coming up. Another green tea for you, Dr. Maguire?”
“No, I’m good, Dee. Thanks.”
“Not a fancy coffee fan?” Mac asked as Dee went to put in the order.
“Just not this late in the day. But it’s good here—the coffee. I usually stop in for a cappuccino in the morning before work. They sell the beans, too, so if you like the coffee . . . I have to get this out of the way. I can’t think. And not being able to think, my inane conversation’s going to put you to sleep despite the double shot.”
“Okay.” Mac propped her chin on her fist. “Get whatever out of the way.”
“I had a crush on you in high school.”
Her eyebrows shot up as she straightened. “On me? Seriously?”
“Yes, well, yes, for me. And it’s mortifying to bring this up, a dozen years or so after the fact, but it’s coloring the current situation. From my side, that is.”
“But . . . I barely remember you ever actually speaking to me.”
“I didn’t. I couldn’t. I was painfully shy back then, especially in any kind of social situation. Anything, particularly that involved girls. Girls I was attracted to, that is. And you were so . . .”
“Tall latte mach, double with vanilla.” Dee set the oversized cup on the table, added a couple of mini crescents of biscotti on a saucer. “Enjoy!”
“Don’t stop now,” Mac insisted. “I was so what?”
“Ah, you. The hair, the dimples, the everything.”
Mac picked up the biscotti, leaning back to nibble on the end as she studied him. “Carter, I looked like a beanpole with carrots growing out of my head in high school. I have pictures to prove it.”
“Not to me. You were bright, vivid, confident.” Still are, he thought. Just look at you. “I feel like an idiot telling you this, but I keep tripping over it. I’m clumsy enough without putting up my own stumbling blocks. So, well. There.”
“Would the kiss the other night be the result of that old crush?”
“I’d have to say it played a part. It was all so surreal.”
She scooted forward again to pick up her coffee. “Neither one of us are who we were in high school.”
“God, I hope not. I was a mess back then.”
“Who wasn’t? You know, Carter, most guys would’ve used that high-school crush bit as a pickup ploy, or kept it locked away. It interests me, you interest me, because you did neither. Are you always so forthright over coffee dates?”
“I don’t know. You’re the only one I ever had a crush on.”
“Oh boy.”
“And that was stupid.” Flustered again, he raked his fingers through his hair. “Now I’ve scared you. That sounded scary and obsessive, like I have an altar somewhere with your pictures over it where I light candles and chant your name. Jesus, that’s even scarier. Run now. I won’t hold it against you.”
She burst out laughing, had to set her coffee back down before she sloshed it over the rim. “I’ll stay if you swear you don’t have the altar.”
“I don’t.” He swiped his finger in an X over his heart. “If you’re staying because you pity me, or because you really like the coffee, it works.”
“It is really good coffee.” She drank again. “It’s not pity, but I’m not sure what it is. You’re an interesting man, and you helped me out when I needed it. You give really good kiss. Why not have coffee? Since we are, tell me why someone who was painfully shy went into teaching?”
“I had to get over it. I wanted to teach.”
“Always?”
“Practically. I did want to be a superhero previous to that. Possibly one of the X-Men.”
“Supermutant teacher. You could’ve been Educator.”
He grinned at her. “Now you’ve unmasked my secret identity.”
“So how did Shy Guy become the mighty Educator?”
“Study, practice. And some practicalities. I panic-sweated my way through the first couple weeks of a public-speaking course I took in college. But it helped. And I worked as a TA for several classes, as a kind of transition. I TA’d one of Delaney’s classes our sophomore year. Ah . . .”
He turned his cup in circles. “In case it ever comes up, I did—occasionally—ask him about you. All of you, so you weren’t singled out. ‘The Quartet’ as he called you.”
“Still does now and then. He’s our lawyer now. The business’s.”
“I hear he’s a good one.”
“He is. Del set everything up—the legal stuff. When their parents died, the estate went to Parker and Del. He didn’t want to live there. He had his own place by then. Parker couldn’t have maintained it as a house, I mean just a house. Just her home. Or even if she could, I don’t think she could’ve stood it, living there alone. The big house, the memories. Not alone.”
“No, it would be hard, and lonely. It changes that with all of you there. Living and working together.”
“Changed everything for everyone. She had the idea for the business cooking already, had all of us talking about it. Then she went to Del about using the estate for it. He was great about that. His inheritance, too, so he took a hell of a chance on us.”
“It looks like he made the right choice. According to my mother and Sherry, Vows is
the place for weddings in Greenwich.”
“We’ve come a long way. The first year was touch and go, and pretty scary because we’d all put our savings and whatever we could beg, borrow, or steal into it. The start-up costs, licenses, stock, equipment. The expense of turning the pool house into my place, the guest house into Emma’s. Jack did the designs for free. Jack Cooke? Do you know him? He and Del met in college.”
“Yeah, a little. I remember they were tight.”
“The small town that is Yale,” Mac commented. “He’s an architect. He put a lot of time into the transformation. And saved us God knows how much in fees and false starts. The second year we were barely treading water, with all of us still having to take side jobs to get by. But, by the third, we eased around the first corner. I understand working through the panic sweat to get what you want.”
“Why wedding photography? Specifically, I mean, for you. It doesn’t feel as if it’s only because it fit the bigger picture of the partnership.”
“No, not just that. Not even that first, I guess. I like taking photographs of people. The faces, the bodies, the expressions, the dynamics. Before we opened Vows I worked in a photography studio. You know the sort where people come for pictures of their kids, or a publicity shot. It paid the bills, but . . .”
“Didn’t satisfy.”
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“It really didn’t. I like taking photographs of people in what I think of as moments. The defining moment? That’s the killer, that’s the top of the mountain. But there are lots of other moments. Weddings, the ritual of them and how those inside them tilt and angle the ritual to suit them personally—that’s a big moment.”
Smiling, she lifted her cup with both hands. “Drama, pathos, theater, grief, joy, romance, passion, humor. It’s got it all. And I can give them all that through photographs. Show them the journey of the day—and if I’m lucky, that one defining moment that lifts it out of the ordinary into the unique. Which is the really long way of saying I just like my work.”
“I get that, and what you mean by the moment. The satisfaction of it. It’s like when I can
see even one student’s mind open up and suck in what I’ve been trying to feed them. It makes the hours when it feels like routine all worth it.”
“I probably didn’t give my teachers many of those moments. I just wanted to get through it and out where I could do what I wanted. I never saw them as creative entities. More like wardens. I was a crappy student.”
“You were smart. Which cycles back to teenage obsession. But I’ll just say I noticed you were smart.”
“We didn’t have any classes together. You were a couple years ahead of me, right? Oh, wait! You were student teacher in one of my English classes, weren’t you?”
“Mr. Lowen’s fifth period American Literature. Now please forget I said that.”
“Not a chance. Now, I’m not running away, but I have to go. I have another shoot. Your sister’s engagement portrait, in fact.”
“I didn’t realize you were getting to that so quickly.”
“The doctor has the evening free, so we worked it out. But I need to go, get a sense of their place and the two of them together.”
“I’ll walk you to your car.” He took out bills, tucked the ends under the saucer of his cup.
Before she could shrug into her jacket, he’d taken it to help her into it. He opened the door for her, stepped out with her into the breathless cold.
“I’m a block and a half down,” she told him. “You don’t have to walk me to my car. It’s freezing out here.”
“It’s fine. I walked from my place anyway.”
“You walked?”
