Megan Hart - Tear You Apart

“Book covers? You do book covers?”

“When they hire me.” Will grins and taps the picture. “Love this one. Supersexy, don’t you think?”

It is a sexy picture, I have to admit that, though honestly, it’s the sort of cover my eyes would skate over in a store. Like whiskey, when’s the last time I picked up a romance novel? Have I ever?

He pulls another shot from the pile. This one’s darker. A woman in black leather holds a gun, her long hair in a braid over her shoulder. I covet her boots. It’s a night for envy, I think, moving closer to him without thinking, so that I can get a better look at the print.

“I’ve seen that one,” I say. “Science fiction, right? They just made a movie out of the book.”

“Yep.” He sounds proud. “It was a bestseller.”

We are standing very close. I could turn an inch in one direction and we’ll no longer touch. An inch in the other and I’ll be pressed up against him. I imagine the push and pull of the muscles in his arms if I were to put my hands on them. I do not move.

“Let me take your picture,” Will says.

That’s it. I back up one step, two, my head shaking. “No. No way.”

My reaction’s too strong for such a simple request, and I feel instantly stupid. I force myself not to turn tail and run. I lift my chin, square my shoulders. I meet his gaze.

He isn’t smiling. Not laughing. Will’s studying me with a serious look I can’t interpret, and can’t match.

“Why not?”

“Why would you want to?” I let out a slow but shaky breath.

“I like to take portraits. It’s my favorite thing.”

“You don’t want a picture of me.”

Will looks at the chair, pinned by that bright light. If I sit there, in that chair, that light will be all over me. I’ll be all light, no dark. Nothing hidden. No secrets. He’ll see all of me, every wrinkle and crevice, every line, every stray and unplucked hair. There is no fucking way I’m sitting in that chair.

Will says nothing.

“I don’t want a picture of me,” I tell him.

He picks up his camera. I know the finished product of art. The canvases, the matted prints. But I know nothing of the tools used to create it. Paints and brushes, f-stops and apertures, lenses, film speed, clay and glaze. I can tell you what it’s worth when it’s finished, but I have no idea about its creation.

He holds it carefully in one palm, the size of it impressive. I used to have a point-and-shoot until I lost the charger. Now I use my phone to take snapshots, when and if I feel the need to capture the moment. Mostly, I take pictures and forget about them until it’s time to update my phone’s software, when I upload them to my computer’s hard drive and then forget them there.

Will lifts the camera to one eye and points it at the chair. He snaps a shot. Looks at the view screen. He makes some adjustment to something. Takes another picture.

I haven’t moved. He hasn’t asked again. He just takes another picture of the chair, which also hasn’t moved and doesn’t speak. One more. Again, he checks the view screen. Fiddles with some settings.

Then I’m sitting in that chair, my heart in my throat and the light so bright it seems as though it ought to make me squint, but I don’t have that as an excuse to close my eyes. I see everything. The rest of the room seems cast in shadow, everything but this circle of light in which I sit, my knees pressed tight together, my hands linked just as tightly in my lap. Everything about me is stiff and tense and awkward. I try to breathe, and the air smells metallic. I taste roses.

If he tells me to relax, I will bolt up from this chair and out the door. If he touches me, I will explode. As it is, everything inside me has gone tight and coiled. I want to shake and can’t.

It’s just a picture.

But he doesn’t take it. Will puts the camera to his eye, but nothing snaps. He just looks. Then he puts the camera on the desk and steps back.

“Another time,” he tells me.

I blink and blink again. “What?”

Will hands me my mug of coffee as I get up from the chair. “Let me show you something else, okay?”

“Okay.” The liquid in the mug should be sloshing, but I guess my hands aren’t as shaky as they feel. I sip. It’s lukewarm, the whiskey more potent in it.

He sees me make a face, and laughs, takes the mug and sets it back on the desk. “You don’t have to drink it. But here, look at this. Tell me what you think. And, Elisabeth...”

“Yes?”

“Be honest.”

I understand what he means as soon as he pulls the sheet off the framed print leaning against the wall below the window. There are others in that stack, half a dozen at least, with a few more dozen smaller frames next to it. The black-and-white shot is of a tree, bare branches like spreading fingers against the cloudless sky. The photographer caught the shadows at such an angle that it looks as if the tree’s spindling branches are its roots. It’s impossible to tell that sky’s color. In the print it’s pure, pure white. I imagine it must’ve been a clear, pale blue.

There should be nothing special about the shot. Ansel Adams took thousands of nature shots, and he’s considered a master. This picture has nothing of Adams’s vast scale. It’s one tree, one sky. It’s beautiful. It makes me want to cry.

“Would you hang it in your house?” Will asks. “Would you put it in your foyer to impress people?”

“No.” I haven’t gone to my knees in front of it, though the picture makes me want to. “If I bought this, I would hang it in a place only I could ever see.”

He smiles. I’ve said the right thing. This is it, I think, when he takes my hand and tugs me a step closer. This is when he kisses me.

Of course he doesn’t. Why should he? We’ve only just met. I’m no cover model. I’m bedraggled and unkempt and old enough to know better. His fingers stroke my wedding band.

And oh, there’s that.

He has a cuckoo clock I didn’t see when I came in, and now it whirs into life at the half hour. Two men saw busily at a log while a waterwheel spins. A bird pops out to chirp once before retreating.

“Shit,” I say, and recover my hand as if he’d never taken it. “It’s late. I have to catch the train—”

“You won’t make it.”

I knew that when I’d agreed to come here, didn’t I? Traffic, distance, the rain. The timing. I could pretend to be upset and surprised, but the truth is I’m only a little upset and not at all shocked.

“Stay here. I have a guest room.” He points to the loft. “You can get up early. Catch the first train home. I’ll make you eggs in the morning, if you want.”

It sounds like a come-on, but I pretend I don’t notice. “Oh...I couldn’t. I’ll go find a hotel room.”

“Uh-uh. No way. I’m not letting you wander around in the dark, in the rain, trying to find a place to stay. That would be ridiculous.” Will shakes his head. “I have a pair of pajamas that will fit you.”

“I really...” I want to say can’t. I want to say shouldn’t. The words clog up my throat. Won’t come out.

“Do you need to call someone? Tell them you’ll be home tomorrow?”

There is nobody at home. The girls are off at college, probably still out at a party or tucked into their boyfriends’ beds—not that I like to dwell on that, but I’m not stupid. Ross is out of town. I should know where he is, what he’s doing, but though he told me, I didn’t pay attention. It didn’t matter, beyond knowing he would be gone.

“No. I don’t have to call home.”

Will smiles. “Okay.”

He gives me a pair of pajamas that belong to him, not a pair inherited from an ex-wife, as I feared. Faded flannel pants, an oversize white T-shirt soft and worn from the wash. I should feel awkward wearing his clothes, but he handed them to me so matter-of-factly, along with a toothbrush still in the package, that feeling odd would only make it so, and clearly it doesn’t have to be. The bed in the loft is soft, the pillows fluffy. He doesn’t follow me up the stairs to tuck me in, so it’s definitely not weird.