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“Ah, yes. Well, I’ve got a brother and I’m certain he wouldn’t have any idea what to do with your tool belt.”
Naomi placed a cup of coffee next to Clara’s elbow. Surely the beverage was a nonverbal gesture of acceptance?
“Thanks.” Clara leaned over the steaming liquid in the hopes of giving herself a caffeine facial. She’d barely gotten four hours of sleep last night. Right now her eyelids weighed twenty pounds each.
“You look like you need it.” Everything Naomi said came out sounding like a threat, but Clara now knew that she meant well. “You two met?”
“Yep. I was just admiring some of Wynn’s work.”
“She’s obnoxiously talented. Practically perfect.” Naomi sighed. “If only she weren’t tragically heterosexual.”
Wynn peppered a kiss on her friend’s cheek. “And on that note, I’m gonna go screw something that’s not one of your performers.”
Naomi turned to Clara. “Why are you making a mess of my studio?” She gathered a handful of the balls of crumpled scrap paper scattered around Clara’s computer.
Oops. Clara hadn’t realized how many doodles of logo designs she’d accumulated while watching the preview clips. It had been years since she’d drawn anything for eyes besides her own. But something about channeling Chagall for Josh last night had released dormant artistic impulses. Among other things. She’d always associated Chagall with love, and not just any love. He painted the romantic love of myths and fairy tales. True love. The kind between soul mates. Love that she and Josh could never have. Except that falling asleep in his arms felt disconcertingly right.
Naomi lingered over one of the first images Clara had sketched, a pair of typefaces that broke down Shameless so that while still written as a single word, it read more like a declarative statement: Shame. Less. “You like it? I thought that—”
“You don’t have to explain it to me.”
“Right.” Should she mention the change in her relationship with Josh? She didn’t want to hide the information from their business partner. Naomi seemed to value honesty above all else. But what if she freaked? Or decided Clara wasn’t good enough for her ex?
“Can I ask you a question?” Clara blurted out the words before she could think better of it.
Naomi looked at her with pursed lips. “One.”
Clara planted her feet and stood up extra straight. “Do you think people can change?” What she meant, but couldn’t bring herself to say, was Do you think someone like me could ever be right for someone like Josh?
Naomi didn’t answer right away. She twisted her hair up into a bun and stuck a pen through it in a way that Clara thought only worked in movies. When she did respond, her voice was thoughtful and her eyes were sharp.
“Can? Yeah. If the circums
tances are right. But you have to want to, and most people don’t.” She took a deep breath. “Or something big enough has to happen to you. Something that leaves you with no other options.”
Something—no, someone—big had happened to Clara. But she couldn’t figure out if the effects would last.
Naomi stared at her. “That’s how I got into porn.”
“It was?” Living with Josh and working alongside so many different kinds of performers had significantly opened the aperture on Clara’s definition of a porn performer.
“Believe it or not, I had a pretty perfect high school experience. I wasn’t as much of a brownnoser as you.” Naomi smirked. “But I got good grades and I was captain of the soccer team, class president, the whole thing. I even had the perfect boyfriend.” Naomi’s lips twisted as if she’d sucked on a lemon.
“Life pretty much came crashing down around my ears when said perfect boyfriend shared the private pictures he’d begged for as an eighteenth-birthday present with the Internet. You see, I’d told him I wasn’t ready to sleep with him.” Her voice rang hollow.
Clara wrapped her arms around the other woman’s shoulders without thinking. She expected Naomi to toss off the physical contact, but instead, she leaned her chin on top of Clara’s head and sighed. “If you tell anyone about this, I’ll deny it, and then kill you.”
Eventually, they stepped apart sheepishly. When Naomi spoke next, her voice allowed pain to bleed through.
“I knew that no matter what I did, those images would be out there for people to see without my permission. Knew that no matter how many years passed, no matter what I went on to achieve, some people would always define me based on my body alone. So I came out here. I took my own pictures. I figured if I flooded the market I could decrease the value of those original poses. That I could reclaim my body on my own terms.”
“That’s really—” Clara started to say.
“Impulsive? Juvenile? Stupid?”
“Brave.”
Naomi looked Clara in the eye. “I was terrified and so mad I couldn’t see straight.” She picked up Clara’s coffee and pushed it into her hands.
