Especially with a camera.
My attention snags on a white paper cup left on a covered table. Printed on the side is Lait Noir’s black logo, the café where I found the journal. It isn’t far from here, but it’s not the closest café to this gallery.
Someone picks it up. White-blonde, nude-lipped, and dressed in head-to-toe black, her fingers wrap around the thick middle of the cup. She has short, dark nails and milk-white skin. I study her as she studies one of the photographs.
She’s put together. Classy. Not the torn-up soul I’d pictured with dark hair and eyebrows to hang over her frown. There’s no stoop in her posture from carrying the weight of the world on her shoulders. Maybe it isn’t her. I step closer to the window and try to get a better look at her eyes just as she turns them down from the exhibit. She balances her coffee in the crook of her arm and scribbles on a notepad.
She’s writing.
My body warms, a conditioned response to her pen on paper. I salivate for her words. What about the photograph in front of her is worth noting? Was I wrong to call it bland? I want to know what she thinks.
She travels along the wall, squints, scratches behind her ear. She sips her coffee. People stop her to say something that makes her smile. I don’t want to look at her body—it was her words that got me here—but I can’t help myself. As she talks, she gestures, and her breasts bounce. They’d be big enough for my hands, and I’ve been told I have some serious paws. She’s got a small waist, great legs, blonde hair that hangs long and layered down her back. I lick my lips.
She flips the notebook shut and shoves it in her purse while nodding at the person speaking. When she shifts, I shift. A man shakes her hand, and she excuses herself. She heads outside, toward me, and before I even know what’s happening, she’s pushing out the gallery door and standing two feet away. Inhaling deeply, she leans back against a patch of brick wall between the window and the door, just enough to shade her. She turns her eyes to the stars.
“I already checked,” I say. “It’s too light out.”
She flinches, barely glancing over. “You mean too dark?”
“Mmm, no,” I say. “If it were pitch dark, you’d be able to see them—the stars. But all this light . . .” I nod through the nearby window. “Enjoying the show?”
She doesn’t respond at first, then says, “Yes. Very much. Which one’s yours?”
“I’m not one of the artists. Thankfully.”
“Oh. I saw your camera and assumed . . .” She finally stands up straight and squints at me. “What do you mean ‘thankfully’?”
“I haven’t been inside, but they’re crap from what I can see.”
“Crap? That’s somebody art in there.”
It could easily be my work on those white walls, but if this is my poetess standing in front of me, she writes to move people, and these photos wouldn’t budge a feather. “It’s just my opinion.”
She steps a little closer. “And who are you?”
“Just a passerby,” I murmur, feasting on this hard-earned moment of intimacy. She’s younger than I thought. All that black clothing and studied posture made her look around my age, thirty-three, from a distance, but she’s not even thirty. I try to see her eyes again, but again, she’s not looking at me.
“I should get back inside,” she says.
“No.”
“What?”
Shit. I didn’t mean it to come out like that. Trying to cover up my command, I sniff. “I mean, weren’t you leaving?”
She shakes her head.
“So why’d you come out here?” I ask, hoping conversation is a better tactic for getting her to stay than blurting things out.
“I needed a cigarette.”
I remember the December sketch. Colorless hair. Smoker. I’m getting warmer. She makes no move to get a pack out, so I say, “I’m sorry. I don’t smoke.”
“Me neither.”
A smoker without a cigarette, a seemingly nice girl without her naughty journal. Now that I’m closer, I see her better. Her brand of blonde is stark. It almost matches the color of her eyes, a steely shade of gray that might even be ice blue. It’s hard to tell in the absence of light. In the shadow she’s under, they’re just smooth like glass, the calm before a storm.
I’ve found her. It’s her journal I have, her words I possess. I’m the current owner of her thoughts. But what to do with this information?
“So, you’re obviously a photographer,” she says, glancing at the camera around my neck, which I’ve taken to keeping close like a security blanket. “Have I seen your work?”
“No. I’ve never shown anywhere.”
“Is it any good?”
I don’t know what to say. If you want to be a successful artist, especially in this city, you’d better believe your shit is good. I spent ten months after graduating from NYU trying to make it before my father-in-law shipped me off to business school. That, plus this past year, is the whole of my struggling-artist experience. I haven’t managed even a rejection letter from the major galleries. So far, it’s been jobs like senior class photos, real estate listings, and Upper East Side dog photography.
Yes, I took headshots of a poodle.
I shrug. “It’s my work.”
She hands me her coffee and sets her purse on the ground with a thump. When she bends over to rummage through it, I look right down her blouse. Her bra is fire-engine red, and a siren call to my dick. That’s more what I expected to find in her, some attitude.
It hits me that she’s getting out a business card. Good. That’s a socially acceptable way to learn more about her.
But when she stands back up, she just has her notepad in hand again. She hoists her bag over her shoulder. “Nice to meet you.”
I’m not ready for goodbye—I haven’t even said hello. “Wait,” I say, but she hasn’t made a move to leave. “Can we exchange cards?”
She scratches her elbow. “Um.”
No response? I’ll take that as a yes. I pull out my card, a little miffed I haven’t updated it as I’ve been meaning to. I don’t care about finding work right now, I just want her to reciprocate. I hold it out. “Finn Cohen.”
She glances at it before sliding it from my hand. In the next few seconds, she studies my face. “Thanks. I left mine at home. On purpose. Sorry.”
Damn. I rub my chin. “How come?”
“People are always trying to use me at these things. Maybe that’s what you’re doing—”
Use her? I don’t even know her. “I’m not.”
She pauses. “I believe you. Anyway.”
“I didn’t catch your name.”
“I didn’t throw it.”
I try to figure out if she’s joking or serious. We smile at the same moment. She opens her mouth, but I never get to hear what she says.
“There you are,” a man says from the doorway.
She glances over. He’s shadowed, but he wears a suit and looks around our age.
“I have to go,” she says without looking at me. “Good luck with your stuff.”
I go to call her back. With the kind of heart she poured into the pages of her journal, she must miss it. The journal, maybe the heart too. But the man puts his arm around her and takes her back inside.
Forget her, she’s not yours, you’re not enough.
She isn’t who I’d pictured. She’s too put together—composed, without scars or mascara streaks or coal-colored hair. I expected storm clouds overhead, fidgeting fingers, lyrics in her movements.
Then again, what the fuck do I know?
I once expected an audible click when fate kicked in.
Sparks.
Ignition.