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Grown man Ryan lives with his mother.
Which goes some way to explaining things, I think. One photo, partly obscured by a split-leaf philodendron, catches my eye. I reach for it, and a rush of something like anger, or fear, erupts inside me. I have to pick it up, to look closer, to make sure I’m not mistaken. Blood is pulsing in my ears as I study the group photo, close to twenty people maybe, all gathered around Ryan’s mother, who is seated in the center. Most people are standing, some of the younger children are sitting crossed-legged on the floor. Ryan is standing next to his mother, his hand loosely resting on the back of her chair. I peer even closer but there’s no mistake. In the next row, to the left, plainly visible…
“Here we are,” she says behind me. I’m still holding the photo when I turn around. Ryan is standing next to her, staring at me, an astonished look on his face. His gaze drops to the photo in my hand, and a patch of crimson grows up his neck and spreads across his cheeks.
“What’s this?” I ask him, holding the photo, my mouth trembling.
His mother frowns, looks from me to him. “It’s from my birthday,” she replies. “If you must know.” She tilts her head slightly, one hand tapping lightly on her sternum. “What was your name again?”
“Anna. Ryan, can I have a word?” I can feel my nostrils flaring.
“Is everything all right?” his mother asks.
My eyes won’t leave his face and without answering her, he says, “Yeah, sure, it’s this way.”
I put the photo back on the shelf and follow him down to the back of the house.
Ryan has the run of the basement, a large room divided loosely into sections.
“How did you find me?” he asks. I close the door of his room and he looks nervous suddenly. Good. I think back to the day I met him at the party. I can still see him pointing to Geoff on the opposite side of the room.Is he your boyfriend? Your husband, then?
“You want to tell me what’s going on here, Ryan?”
He sits down on a beanbag, doesn’t offer me a seat—not that I want one. I’m standing, my fists on my hips, so angry I’m vibrating.
“How do you know Geoff?”
He looks down at his hands. “He’s my uncle.”
“Oh my god!” I have to sit down after all. I pull out the chair from the front of his desk. “Your uncle?” I have a headache. It’s knocking at the back of my skull. “So why did you pretend not to know him when I met you that day?”
“Because he asked me to.”
“Why?”
“He wanted me to take a photo of you.”
“He wanted a photo of me? You’re going to have to do better than that, Ryan. What the hell is going on?”
He looks at me, cheeks burning with embarrassment. “He wanted a naked selfie of you.”
I could tell him, technically, if he takes the photo it’s not a selfie, but I don’t. I listen, my head in my hands, while Ryan explains our almost-tryst was a set-up. He was supposed to approach me as soon as Geoff left me alone, and lure me into that empty office and somehow get a photo of me naked.
“I was amazed you went along with it,” he says, watching me from under hooded eyelids, but there’s a trace of manly pride dancing on his lips and I am nanoseconds away from smashing something into that face.
I take a breath. “That makes two of us,” I say. But a wave of shame ripples through me as I remember how jealous I felt that day. How I suspected Geoff was turning his charms towards Mila, and how hurt I was that he had asked me to the party, and immediately left me alone, like he had more interesting people to talk to. And in the end, it was because of Geoff that I went along with Ryan’s attentions. I wanted him towatch.
See? I’ve still got it. You might be losing interest, but just watch. He’s younger than you too, and much, much more attractive.
“And that’s it? He wanted a photo of me naked?”
He nods. “He says one time in Chicago on a trip you led him on and then rejected him. He wanted to get you back. I don’t know what he was going to do with it exactly, he never said.”
Oh, but I know. He was biding his time. Sending it to me during the lecture was just a taste of things to come. He was going to tease me with it occasionally, keep me on tenterhooks with fear and shame, probably wait until I’d officially received the prize and only when the release of the photo could most humiliate me would it find its way into some public forum on the internet.
All because I almost had sex with him one night, but saw sense at the last minute.
“What about my car, did you do that too? Scratch it?”
