Dancing Away With My Heart (Wishful 12)

It was a casual and obvious question to ask, but he was oddly relieved to admit, “Nah. The dating pool here is shallow, as you well remember. I’m enjoying my life exactly as it is.” And if he’d been feeling the pinch a bit with his friends starting to get married, that was natural. Wanting to change the subject, he slid off the desk. “So show me what you’ve been working on.”

She logged into her online portfolio and they traded places. Where his stock-in-trade was traditional weddings, family shoots, and senior portraits, her work was far more artistic and varied. He clicked open a folder titled “Home.” The gallery loaded, one image after another showing the coast in miniature. Zach opened the first thumbnail, a sunset shot of the iconic Biloxi lighthouse that had miraculously survived Hurricane Katrina.

“You went back.”

“It was time,” she said softly. “I went back on the ten-year anniversary.”

The anniversary of when her family had lost everything. Their home in Bay Saint Louis had been entirely washed away. Without the money or will to rebuild, they’d relocated to Houston, Texas, crammed into a little apartment for a few years, before her parents split, and she and her mom had moved to Wishful. All these years later, few people outside Mississippi remembered that New Orleans hadn’t been the only city hit. Even when it had happened, The Weather Channel had referred to the space between New Orleans and Mobile as “a land mass” rather than an actual state, for which they’d been mercilessly mocked by other networks. The fact of it was, the Mississippi Gulf Coast had been obliterated. Lexi clearly remembered. And yet the photographs she’d taken chronicled the things that had survived, what had been rebuilt.

He understood what that trip had meant to her. Facing that loss. “I’d have gone with you.”

Her hand squeezed his shoulder before falling away again. “I know. I needed to do it alone.”

Once they’d done everything together. Zach didn’t understand where or why things had changed.

Not trusting himself to bring it up, he kept scrolling, admiring the breadth and scope of her talent. He was impressed, and a bit envious. “I’m a little jealous of all this.”

“Why?”

“I’m good at what I do, and I enjoy it, but there’s a sameness and expectation to traditional photography. What you’ve done here? This is art.”

“I’m going to disagree that your traditional photography isn’t art, but there’s nothing stopping you from exploring other things, too.”

“There’s not much time for that with everything else on my plate. Bills to pay, and all that.”

“Art doesn’t always pay. Or hasn’t yet, for me. Not a living wage, anyway. That’s part of why I started my own studio. I have do the one to enable the other.”

“I’m hoping I can do a little branching out and experimenting with you here.”

Her lips curved. “Still into weather photography?”

Before Zach could reply, her phone rang. “Excuse me.” Stepping back she answered, “Hey Mom,” and wandered out of the room.

Zach kept clicking through her galleries. She’d done everything from landscapes to abstract macro studies and everything in between. And then he hit on the folder of boudoir shoots. It was a style of photography he’d never thought of doing. There was an unavoidable intimacy between subject and photographer, and he couldn’t fathom it not being awkward with his friends and neighbors. But Lexi clearly had no issues on that front. The pictures were sexy and tasteful.

One particular sequence of black-and-white images captured his imagination. The model was clearly nude, but nothing could actually be seen. It was all sensual curves, the suggestion of intimacy. Tastefully erotic. He could almost feel the softness of that skin beneath his palms. The next shot captured the same model from behind, rising from tangled sheets. There was no lover in view, but her mussed hair implied a night of passion. The angle showed only her back and the top curve of her hip. In the next one she slipped on a cardigan long enough to cover the essentials. He could practically hear the whisper of fabric as it settled over her. The one after that, she stood at a window, her face turned away, but every line of her lovely body suggesting wistfulness, as if she were waiting for that imagined lover to come back. He clicked to the next, a waist-up shot where she was turned partly toward the camera, the gap in the sweater showing a tantalizing suggestion of breast as she glanced back over her shoulder. And his breath backed up in his lungs.

It was Lexi.

Had she done these herself? Or had that mystery lover implied by the composition been responsible? Why did the idea of that squeeze a fist in his chest? She was an adult. A single, incredibly attractive adult. Of course she’d had lovers.

“Sorry about that.”

By some miracle, Zach managed not to fall out of his chair. But he didn’t manage to school his face.

“What’s wrong?”

I’ve just been perving on my best friend.

“Nothing.” Before she could circle the desk, he closed out of the folder and randomly selected something else. “Just admiring your work. You’re really versatile.”

You’re really beautiful. How did I never really notice that before? Those semi-erotic images of her were etched into his brain now. He couldn’t unsee that, couldn’t go back to seeing her as just Lexi.

She frowned at him as she crossed over, so he tried to change the subject and mentally started reciting the focal lengths of his entire collection of lenses to get his arousal under control. “Was everything okay with your mom?”

“Oh, yeah. She was just letting me know that Babette dropped over with dinner. I think she wanted me to know I don’t have to be on duty for a while.”

He closed the browser entirely and stood. “Does that mean you’re free for the night?”