And there—that’s the suave fucker I met at Revel. He quirks up a corner of his lips. “I think we have a solid fifteen minutes before the crowd starts to dwindle. But at that point…absolutely, we can make our daring escape.”
He hesitates a second, that vulnerability creeping back in. “Ely, I really do…I care about you. More than you can imagine. You mean the world to me, and I almost lost you. I never want to make that mistake again. I promise you I won’t.”
He takes a half step closer to me, then another. And then he slides his hand along my cheek and he kisses me—right there, in front of everyone.
I almost drop the Leica, but Wyatt—thank god—is quick enough to slide his hand between us and cup it beneath mine, holding the precious camera bracketed between our bodies as his other hand slips around the small of my back and pulls my hips in toward him.
When the kiss breaks, I’m off-balance, giddy and effervescent, like my whole body is filled with Wyatt’s damn LaCroix.
“I can’t believe you,” I say. “You just did that. In public. At a fancy art show.”
“I did,” he says.
“Hello to you too, Professor.”
He lets out a laugh, low and husky. The thrill that slithers down from my stomach to my thighs at that is nearly enough to make me slip with the camera all over again.
Those next fifteen minutes crawl by, of course. I manage to fumble my way through small talk with the occasional guest or professor, every conversation made about fifty times more interminable by the way I can’t stop sensing Wyatt’s presence. It’s as if some primal part of me knows exactly where he is in the room at any given point in time.
Terrible move, Ely, I want to tell myself.
But terrible move or not, I trust him. And I wouldn’t exactly say I’m a trusting-easily kind of person, so I feel like that has to say something. Right?
Either way, things have changed now. We’re just two people with too much in common, two people who really want to have sex with each other.
Who—god help me—love each other.
Your move, Wyatt Cole.
38
ONE MONTH LATER
I honestly don’t remember any details about my first New York gallery opening.
I guess I can confidently say there were a lot of people there with fancy credentials, and if I think too hard about the specifics, I get a shaky feeling in my gut that could be excitement, anxiety, or an impending stomach flu.
The whole time I kept muttering, “What the fuck? What the fuck? What the fuck?” to Wyatt until he finally detached himself from my parasitic side to make me—his words—“face my admirers.”
I’ve only really resurfaced into coherence now that we’re already back in Brooklyn at Wyatt’s place, in that quiet moment before everyone else arrives, as Wyatt curls his hand around the back of my neck and pulls me in close to bury his face against my hair and whisper, “I’m so proud of you. You were amazing. You’re amazing.”
I take in a deep breath of his smell, pine-fresh men’s deodorant and crisp detergent. My hands fall to his hips: warm, steady, an anchor holding me down.
Every moment with Wyatt is one that I wish I could bottle up and keep forever. I wish I could pull those bottles out when I’m away and release the memories to relive them.
This past month has felt like a dream. The best kind of dream, of course. My portfolio is littered with photos I’ve taken on my new Leica—including several of Wyatt himself, hunched over his negatives or lying in bed with the sheets bundled around his hips and the dawn light silvery on his skin.
Even the boring moments feel effervescent—scrambled eggs in the morning, fighting off Haze as he tries to steal our food, curling up on Wyatt’s tiny couch to watch Nicolas Cage movies. Ophelia and Diego adore him, which is good because if they didn’t, I’d probably have to fight them. Diego even adopted Wyatt as an unofficial test subject for his more adventurous food creations.
I wouldn’t change a thing.
“I love you,” he says, and the words are so soft, so warm in the dim interior of his apartment, words I could curl myself into forever.
I tighten my fingers at his sides. I almost don’t want to breathe too heavy, like existing in awareness of my body might make the moment tremble and break.
Every moment we share now feels so precious and hard-won.
“I love you too.” I tilt my head to kiss his neck, right over his pulse point. “So much.”
He pulls back and looks me in the eye, traces his thumb along my cheekbone. When his lips meet mine, I forget we’re expecting company, at least until the infuriatingly loud buzzer screeches to herald Michal and Shoshana’s arrival.
“You killed it,” Michal says, clinking her glass of seltzer against mine. “I feel like I know a celebrity.”
I can’t help rolling my eyes. “Oh, please. Says the girl who just had her work featured in a Vogue editorial. Sharing an MFA program with you is gonna be intimidating as fuck next year. I’m glad I don’t have to do it.”
“It’s not too late to come back to Parker! I need someone to suffer through deadlines with me.”
“Well, I personally welcome you to the grown-up world,” Shoshana says. “Before you know it, you’ll be buying blazers and debating which washing machine to buy with the rest of us.”
“I’m a grown-up!” Michal pokes her wife in the side with her elbow. “I have very serious opinions about washing machines.”
The buzzer blares again, and I nearly trip over Haze on my way to let the next round of people in. I rescue the black cat from getting trapped underfoot by carrying him around for the next twenty minutes, at least until he decides he’s sick of me and launches out of my arms to go hide on top of his cat tree. Shannon texts me at some point to make sure I’m still sober. I finally made myself message her again after the summer program ended, resurrecting our friendship from the graveyard of all the ones I’d abandoned or trashed. I’ll never stop being proud to text back 100% well and with it.
There are enough people here that I don’t even hear the bell ring for Ophelia and Diego’s arrival. Someone else must let them in, because out of nowhere Diego barrels into me and flings both arms around my neck.
“My dear,” he says, “you were phenomenal.”
“Sorry we’re late,” adds Ophelia.
“Fashionably!” Diego says, rolling his eyes. “Anyway, it was mostly Ophelia’s fault. This is what happens when you go cheap on glitter eyeliner, dear; you have to redo your makeup about fifteen hundred times to make it look right.”