Shuttergirl Page 21

  I looked down. His eyes watched me over the horizon of my body, protecting me, making sure I was with him. He brushed a finger over my nipple as he sucked on me gently, and he stretched his arm until he cupped my chin in his palm. I turned my head and took his fingers in my mouth. He groaned into me, vibrating, sucking harder, and the impossible seemed possible.

  I was five, running the length Venice Beach with Sunshine and Rover. We went every early morning, the night rain over and leaving the air thick with salt water. I tasted those mornings on Michael’s fingers. His tongue was more than a surface but the promise of a mounting wave that rose higher and higher, curling into foam at the top.

  I remembered the seagulls on the wet sand, a clustered pool of rippling white feathers, and I remembered running into it as if I would splash in a puddle. When I got to them, they broke apart, flying upward in a squawking cacophony, and me in the center of it, the space around me no more than the beat of wings, splitting upward to the grey sky; the disordered but peaceful pool of birds I’d intended to wade among, gone, dynamic, and purposeful.

  I broke apart like those seagulls when I came, losing all sense of place and time, overtaken with kinetic blackness, breaking apart into his mouth, lying flat on the sand in a carpet of foam, slowly forward then back into the vibrating stillness of the sea.

  I opened my eyes. The white ceiling looked back at me, crackling with the last of my orgasm. “Jesus, Michael.” My eyes fluttered closed again.

  “You were saying something about me being disappointed?” He crawled up the bed until his lips were right above mine.

  I smelled myself on his face, and I kissed him. “I forgot everything I was trying to say about anything.”

  “Good.”

  I wedged my finger between the placket of the next shirt button and slipped it through. He got up on his knees above me and undid his cuffs, tossing the cufflinks onto the night table. I yanked his belt free of the buckle as he pulled his shirt over his head.

  I’d seen his body on film, flat and huge like some fake, painted shape and blowing through the frame like an icon of perfection. I was glad he had to stand to get his pants off, because it gave me a second to connect what I’d seen already with the reality of what was before me, which was just as perfect but real.

  He wasn’t a big guy but taut and toned, every bow and bend a piece of a flawless whole. And, of course, the part of him I’d never seen, which was erect, sent a new shudder of anticipation through me.

  I covered my face. I heard him rip open a condom wrapper.

  “What?” he said.

  “You’re so perfect, I can’t even look at you.”

  He laughed and fell on me, pulling my arms away and pinning them over my head. “Look at me, please. I love it when you do.”

  I did, but all I could see was his face, the stubble on his cheeks, and the blue flecks in his green eyes. I relaxed my legs, and they opened for him. He shifted until his shaft was against me, sliding as we kissed and frictionless against my arousal. I wanted him as I’d never wanted anyone.

  “Please,” I moaned. “Let’s go. Let’s do it.”

  “So impatient.” He let my hands go and reached between us to run his fingers over me.

  My back arched.

  “And wet. Very wet.” He got on his knees and looked me up and down, then he put his hand over my face, moving it over my lips. I kissed his hand, but he kept moving it down, over my neck, my breasts, my belly, watching me squirm as he put it between my legs. He put his dick against me. “You ready?”

  “Yes.”

  He entered me with purpose and strength but not any faster than necessary, stretching what hadn’t been touched in so long. I thought he was going to break me, and I thought when I cracked, pleasure would fill the fissures. I pulled him on top of me, wrapping my arms and legs around him.

  His weight on my body, the pressure of his arms around me, trapped me in a cocoon of his flesh and surrounded me with his scent of cinnamon. Even when we rolled and changed, he enfolded me, and I felt safe. I just lived that security, that release of anxiety, pushing against him because I wanted to crawl inside him.

  I didn’t expect to come—I only expected to enjoy his body—but I felt as though I might. He must have felt it in the way I tensed and gripped his back.

  “Laine,” he whispered, looking me in the eye, “come for me.”

  “Oh, Michael. I…”

  “Yes,” he said, continuing the affirmations until everything went black and electric, and I said his name.

  He groaned and sped up his strokes, his face tightening. I put my hand on his cheek, feeling his tension and release, and realized I didn’t just want him but loved him.

  I loved him. Without regret, washed in the unguarded moment of our ultimate pleasure, I loved him.

  Chapter 30

  Michael

  We’d spent the night bound together like matching shapes. I’d sensed nothing but the sound of her voice and the scent of her skin, thought about nothing but how to please her. I didn’t want to leave an inch of her body untasted or a thought unexpressed. I didn’t know her, but I did. In a way that was bigger than a simple life’s narrative, more important than the facts and figures of what had happened, I knew her. The planes of her face, the curl of her lashes, the line of her lips, I could memorize the beauty of them, but the expressions that flashed across her face were a surprise to my mind at the same time as they were familiar to my heart.

  For the first time in my life, I felt three-dimensional. For a man whose life and work depended on feeling every part of his body from his fingertips to his heartbeat, the feeling was new and worth defining.

  I’d spent half of my first year in the Yale drama department learning how to pour a cup of tea. It was insulting. I’d already worked with the best director in the business the summer before. The picture was in theaters with my name blazing across the top, yet there I was, getting berated daily because I couldn’t pour a cup of tea without looking as if I was “acting” as though I was pouring a cup of tea. Brad nailed it on day one and was on to bigger and better things in the first week. I had to work at it and get frustrated, hate tea, love tea, learn to not think about the tea then to think about it, and fill my head with anything but the muscle memory of pouring.

  I had been the worst actor in the department. I aced math, history, every core course, but at my chosen field, I was a bust. My father thought it was hilarious and the reason I should do something else. My mother thought I was wasting my time in school at all, since I could just land parts based on my name. But what Yale taught me was that I needed training if I wanted to be any more than a hack.

  But I’d been a hack. I’d made stuff up, invented a reality from a fantasy life. But there I was with this sleeping woman in my arms, not thinking about what I was feeling while closely observing the three-dimensionality of it.

  My life had been written at birth, a list of opportunities read out loud to the world. Beginning, middle, and end. I had found security in that room to make decisions, yet the safety of limits. Laine had come and folded the paper, creasing my expectations in high school with her life story. Now, with her breath on my shoulder, she folded my life into an airplane and shot it out the window. The writing was the same, but the choices had changed, become wider and yet more limited. I’d gone from fake to real. From painting to sculpture. From acting as if I was living to actually being alive.

  Every explanation fell short. Maybe some things weren’t meant to be captured and acted out later. Maybe some things were just meant to be lived. And lying next to this woman, I was living.

  Laine took a sharp little breath that meant she was waking up. I wanted her to, because I wanted to spend time with her, but I didn’t want her to, because she was comfortable on me. Her eyes opened. She hitched herself up on her elbow and looked at the clock then fell back down with her head on my chest.

  “Got a date?” I asked, moving her hair from her face.

  �
��I dreamed about you in Big Girls.”

  “Was I still scary?”

  “Yeah. But then I woke up and it was you,” she said.

  “Do you want breakfast?”

  “I want to sleep.”

  “How late do you usually sleep?”

  She didn’t answer right away but stared doe-eyed out the window, her cheek pressed against my body. Then she got onto her hands and looked at me from above. “I’m not rich. I do well, but… the reason I sleep late is because I work late.”

  A paper airplane, once folded, is always creased. The perfection of its beginning, its pure potential, can never be regained. When she reminded me of what I already knew, she’d picked up the plane and tried to flatten it, but it was changed forever. I could see it, but I didn’t know what she saw.

  “This wasn’t a casual thing,” I said.

  “I know,” she said, looking away from me.

  “Things have changed.”

  “For you? What’s changed for you?”

  “I’m with you. That’s what’s changed. And I’m serious about that.”

  She slid away until she knelt between my legs with her hands in her lap. Her nipples were hard in the cool morning air, peeking through the curtain of her hair. I wanted her again.

  “I don’t know how to do anything else,” she said.

  I didn’t know what to say. What would I want to hear if I suddenly couldn’t act? It was the only thing I knew how to do except rip up my elbow playing tennis. It was the only thing my father had known how to do before he dug himself a hole of drunken inactivity, and I didn’t know what to say to him either.

  “Maybe,” she said, “when I’m working, I can shoot anyone else. None of your pack. There are enough celebrities in this town.”

  “I don’t know if that’ll work.”

  “No,” she said, staring into the middle distance, her limbs twisted and taut around each other. She was a ball of elbows and knees under a curtain of dark hair. “You’re right. It won’t. I took a picture of Brad the other day, and he knew me, and it just didn’t look right.” She scratched her head and rested her cheek on her knee. “I think I kind of screwed myself.”

  “You can lean on me until you figure it out.”

  “Are you offering me money?”

  “You make it sound like something it’s not,” I said.

  “What is it then?”

  “A bridge to whatever comes next for you.”

  She sighed and gave the middle distance her attention again. “I thought this might happen, but now that it’s here, it’s kind of, well… it’s still scary.”

  She seemed so frail, a balls-to-the-wall street kid with sharp wit and a twisted posture. I’d put her in the exact position that terrified me. I’d taken from her the one thing she depended on. I was the one with the privilege. The pedigree. The one with his future written on a creased paper. I could find her a way out of it somehow.

  I took her by the back of her neck and pulled her to me. “I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t be. After all this, having these guys outside my house and being followed and everything, I don’t think I could go back to it anyway. I know it’s legal and I know it’s a business, but I don’t know if I could go on knowing I made people feel like that.”

  “Even A-listers?” I asked.

  “Especially A-listers. You’re a bunch of pussycats.”

  “You won’t starve, Laine. You won’t be alone.”

  “I’ve survived worse calamities than you,” she said. “But you? I don’t know if you can handle me.”

  “You’re Calamity Laine.”

  She smiled and kissed me as if she liked the name.

  “You know what would make me happy?” I rolled on top of her, pinning her wrists. “Fucking you again.”

  “That’s it?”

  I wedged myself between her legs and kissed her. “I’m going to miss you taking pictures of me.”

  “I can take them, I just can’t sell them.”

  “Why not? Because you like me now?”

  “Because it’s not the same. The pictures I took in the loft upstairs? Remember those?”

  I put my lips on her breast, sweet with sleep and the previous night’s indulgence. “I remember.”

  “You should see them. They’re not the same. They’re intimate. Even the way they’re framed, and the light is so soft on them. No one wants that. At least no acquisitions person I know would want them. And besides, I wouldn’t sell them without your permission. I couldn’t…”

  I looked up at her. She stared at the ceiling, and though her thumb stroked my shoulder, she went far away.

  “Earth to Laine.”

  “Let me show you them.”

  I took my mouth off her body and rolled over. “Go, before I change my mind and take you again.”

  “Empty threats,” she said when she was out of reach, looking over her shoulder and smiling.

  As if on cue, my phone rang as soon as she was out of sight.

  Chapter 31

  Laine

  I loved him. The thought of selling his image, even with his permission, seemed like a violation of our intimacy, of us. It would be willingly letting everyone into my life. Not just leaving the door open but putting a big “Open for Business” sign out front.

  I should have been able to sell the pictures from the loft without his permission or anything else. I should have been perfectly comfortable shipping the digitals off to YOU mag, collecting coin, and seeing him the next day. He’d asked for his life a hundred times over, and I was just harvesting the leftovers of his fame.

  But I’d changed. I’d had more than a few intellectual runarounds about why I should continue to be who I was and do what I wanted, but all the usual arguments fell flat against the texture of who I was becoming.

  And who would that be?

  I’d resisted it as long as I could, but looking at him, with his hair flattened on one side and a touch of sleep lingering in his eyes, I couldn’t imagine being a paparazza. I’d heard how deeply he groaned when he came and felt his touch in the middle of the night. He was just a man and a better man than most. I hadn’t captured that betterness until the pictures in the loft upstairs, and those were mine alone. They were private.

  I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t know how I would figure out who I would be, but in the moments before I had to worry about money or identity, while he was still with me, I let myself get excited at the prospect of reinventing myself.

  His phone rang from somewhere in the bedroom, probably inside a pocket. He reached for me, and I taunted him with a laugh, running naked to the living room to get my bag. I grabbed it from the guest house door, taking a second to admire the view. I pulled the pictures off my server and put them onto my phone. They were film, so they had defined grains that looked tactile, even on digital.

  He was already on the phone when I got back to the bedroom. He stood naked against the door to the patio, his body as flawless from the back as the front. I crouched on the bed, my back to the headboard. Michael didn’t look happy with what he was hearing.

  “Okay, I’ll be right there. Thanks for letting me know.” He tapped off and stared at his phone for a second before looking at me. He tossed the phone on the bed. “Last night, I sent Carlos to take the money and get the pictures. He did, but he got stopped at a DUI checkpoint. He had to tell them he was carrying a weapon, and so, because it was Tuesday or for whatever reason, they checked the car and arrested him for possession of child pornography.”

  I covered my face with my hands. “Oh, God. What should we do?”

  “You shouldn’t do anything. You’re the victim. You don’t need to show your face anywhere, and you shouldn’t. But I need to go take care of this.”

  “I’m so sorry. Can you tell Carlos I’m sorry?”

  He was already getting dressed. “You didn’t do anything, Laine.”

  I didn’t do anything. Nothing but get Carlos arrested because I hadn’t take
n responsibility for Jake earlier. I should have gone to give him his money and been done with it. Now Michael had to go explain that he had wanted the pictures, all because I couldn’t see what I’d been given when I was fostered by Orry and Mildred Hatch. I only saw that the sweet boy I liked left me. Now that sweet man had to step in front of his bodyguard to get him off the hook.

  “You’re going to have to say you were the one who wanted them,” I said.

  “Yep.” He buttoned his pants with a faraway look. “I don’t know if there’s a way to keep your name out of it. They’re going to ask me why I wanted them.”

  “What if I say I was eighteen when they were taken?”

  “Lying will only make it worse, and I don’t want you involved.”

  “Michael, really? I couldn’t be more involved.”

  He crawled onto the bed, shirt half buttoned, until he was close enough to kiss me. “Really. You’re protected until you speak. So just hush until someone with a badge asks you a question.”

  “I hate this. I hate that I caused you trouble.”

  “I knew you were trouble when I saw you on that balcony at NV. I wanted you then, and I want you now.”

  He had so much to lose, and I was poised to take it all away. He kissed me tenderly, and I wondered who he cared for: the screwed-up paparazza who was nothing but trouble or some fantasy of a woman he was going to save from her past?

  I wasn’t comfortable with either option, but I didn’t know what I wanted to be loved for either. What was it about me that I wanted to hold up and say “love me for this and not that?” Nothing I could think of. I had nice hair. I could run in heels. I took a good picture quickly.

  “Laine?”

  Michael snapped me out of my trance.

  “Sorry. I should go. They’re going to come find me and ask me questions.” I gathered up my things. “I had this friend. Sister. Whatever. The cops found out about some shit her dad had done. Her fosters opted her into notifications, and the rest of her life, the phone rings every time he has a probation hearing or her picture shows up somewhere.” I gave a fake little laugh that sounded hollow and nervous. It seemed to echo off the walls and unfamiliar corners. Not my bed, not my pillows, not my pictures, not my view.