Beauty and the Billionaire

He started to take a few steps up the stairs before I grabbed him.

“Oh no, you don’t. You’re not going up to my bedroom.”

“Why not? You don’t trust me near your bed?”

His eyes burned into me and I couldn’t help but lick my lips. They wanted to feel his again, but I resisted.

“No. You stay here.”

I held my hand out to stop him from coming up the stairs while I went to find his tape. I had been painting in my bedroom last so I quickly grabbed it.

“Hey, did you know this chandelier is about to fall?”

I looked at it as I walked down the stairs. It looked fine to me.

“It’s been there for almost one hundred years and sturdy as could be. I’m sure it’s fine.”

“I can fix it for you if you’d like. Maybe take it down so you can clean it before reattaching it?”

“Alright,” I said as I handed him the tape.

“How old is this house? 1900?”

“Close, 1910. It was built by my grandparents. It was one of the first houses in the city.”

“Any you are restoring it? What else do you do with yourself?”

“Oh nothing, I just stalk my neighbors and sand wood.”

I cringed at the words when they came out. Why did my mouth work so poorly? Certainly that sounded really sexy. Yes, I’m your neighbor and I’m going to stalk you now. Ugh!

“You can play with my wood, no stalking necessary,” he winked.

Geeze what was it with this guy? He seriously could turn anything into sexual innuendo. I rolled my eyes and laughed at his joke.

“Well, what do you do for a living?”

At this question, he instantly clammed up. The sparkle of desire in his eyes disappeared and he turned cold. The change was so abrupt that I was completely thrown for a moment. Nothing about him seemed to even like me anymore, let alone desire me.

“I’m going to get back to my painting. Have a good night,” he said and then swiftly left my house.

I watched through the window as he made it back inside his home and I wondered what it was it that I had said. I just asked what he did for a living. How was that so bad?

Chapter 7

He was so hot and cold. It was hard for me to figure him out. One minute he was seductively kissing me and the next moment he turned cold as ice and walked out of my house. I had never met anyone that could change their personality so quickly. I kept my eye out for Chris each day as I did yardwork or left the house for errands. But I never saw him coming or going. I never saw a car outside, but he certainly could have been parking it in his garage. The old houses in Bain all had detached garages that sat behind our homes, which made it very difficult to see exactly what was going on or if someone was home at all.

Day after day passed and again I didn’t see Chris. It was baffling. What on earth could he do for a living that he could be in Bain anyways? Most of the people who lived here were retired, worked for the local school or were independent like myself. We were over an hour from St. Louis and there were plenty of nicer small towns within a closer distance.

I had to stop letting Chris fill my mind. My photography exhibit was getting close and I still needed to go through my pictures and choose the final set of photos. I knew there was one last photo I wanted to get out in the woods, but I had to wait for the moon to be at just the right location.

I made my way to my garage, where I had made my dark room for developing my pictures. As had become a habit, I glanced over at Chris’s house to see if it looked like he was home. No car outside the garage and no lights on in the house. He certainly did not appear to be home.

Developing my pictures was one of my favorite parts of photography. There was just something wonderful about doing the developing yourself: setting the paper into the chemicals, moving the photo paper from one tub of fluid to the next; I loved it. I ached to get my hands dirty and develop some of the prints for my upcoming show.

Of course, it was faster, and even cheaper, to pay someone else to develop my prints. But it was art to me, even the process of developing had become part of my art. I experimented with overexposing and underexposing my photos until they reached the exact look that I wanted. I darkened the room in my garage and started in on the long night of developing. My dark room wasn’t the best, so I was relegated to developing my pictures at night to ensure the least amount of exposure possible.

Slowly and methodically I worked through my pictures. Soon it was after four o’clock in the morning and I hadn’t even realized where all the time had gone. Suddenly there was a bright light from Chris’s house. I quickly blocked the leak of light with a black towel and hoped my pictures would be alright. I closed the black curtain and snuck out the door to my garage quietly.