They told a story I couldn’t put into words, a tale of shadows and light. Faces more darkness than highlight, people in places I’d never been, though none of them were foreign. Children with sunken eyes and lips touched with smiles. A den of smoke and pillows and closed eyes. A silhouette of a prostitute smoking a cigarette, a plume of smoke curling toward the sky, leaning against a wall while she waited.
I felt him behind me before he spoke. “I’m not sure why I’ve never wanted to photograph happy things. It feels … I don’t know. Easy, somehow. But this? This is honest. Even though it hurts, it’s the truth, and there’s something beautiful about that.”
“But it doesn’t only hurt,” I said. “It’s too beautiful to hurt, but there’s something … something else.” I stared at a shot of a woman, looking into her eyes to find her truth, like he’d said. “It’s longing. Searching. Every one of these people is looking for something they lost, and I don’t know anything more human than that. The desire to find what’s missing. The wish to be whole.”
I turned to him, finding him once again cast in shadows. And all I wanted to do was ask him what he’d lost, what he was searching for. But instead, I smiled and said, “How’d I do?”
He pulled me into him by the waist, and I could hear the smile on his lips when he spoke. “You’re something else. Anybody ever tell you that?”
“Once or twice.”
His lips brushed mine too briefly for my liking. “Want to see your pictures?”
“Would it make me a baby if I said not really?”
“A little,” he answered on a laugh, moving for a projector-looking machine. “Come on, I know you at least trust me for that.”
After looking at his work, I couldn’t disagree. “You didn’t take very many pictures.”
He shrugged, messing with the machine’s dials to lower it a little. “Didn’t need very many. I got what I wanted.”
That warmth slipped over me again. “Do you always shoot film?”
With a click, the red light went out and the machine lit up, projecting the negative. My brain tried to flip it around and couldn’t.
“No. I usually bring two cameras. I have a little pocket-sized SLR—it was Billy’s once upon a time—but film is a novelty. A hobby more than a reliable practice.”
“So tell me—do you bring all the girls here?” I teased, not really wanting to know the answer.
With a brow up, he smirked. “Only the ones that count.”
“And how many are nudes?”
“Why, you offering?”
The machine light clicked off. “Only if I get to keep the negatives.”
“That is a deal I’m willing to make.” He kissed me swiftly on his way to the tubs of chemicals, and I followed. When the paper was submerged, he handed me a pair of rubber-tipped tongs and gestured for me to poke at it.
“Do you leave the baths out all the time?”
“No, but I was developing before I came to meet you. They’re good for a few hours.” He reached for one of the photos hanging from the string above the table. It was of a homeless shelter in a church, a slash of sunlight beaming in through stained glass to bathe the transients in divinity.
“They’re beautiful, Levi. All of them.”
“I’m glad you think so,” he said quietly, earnestly, though his lips slanted. He grabbed the photo with tongs of his own and moved it into the next tub.
“How do you find these places, these people?”
“A lot of them are around the East Side, though it’s been so fully gentrified, there aren’t many more slums. But I’ve never had a hard time finding trouble.”
“I bet you haven’t. Ever gotten hurt? Been in the wrong place at the wrong time?”
He moved it to the last tub and had me nudge it around. “Plenty. Pimps don’t appreciate you following their girls around with a camera. Drug dealers don’t see the artistic value of me taking photos of their corner boys.”
“Why do you do it? Put yourself in danger like that?”
“Because they can’t speak for themselves, and I want the world to know what they have to say.”
My heart twisted, but before I could speak, he pulled the photo out of the stop bath and clipped it up. And we stepped back to look in heavy silence.
I was lit from behind by the wall of diffused light, my body little more than a shadow peppered with glimmers of my dress. There were no lines, only curves—shoulder and arms, a long neck I didn’t recognize. Chin and nose and lips, my face angled away from the camera, its features brushed with light.
But it was my eyes that told the story, veiled by darkness, my irises swallowed up by my pupils. Those eyes were bottomless, hungry for something. It was the longing that lived in every one of his photographs.
It lived in me too.
“Levi …” I breathed. “How did you …”
“I stole the truth for a moment—that’s all.”
I turned to him. “What if I want it back?”
With a step, our bodies were flush, his face darkness but for the scarlet light.
He cupped my jaw, lifting it. “You can have the negatives, but you already gave me the moment. Nothing can erase that.”
And there was nothing left to say.
His lips captured mine and kept them, stole them like the truth he’d swallowed for safekeeping.
But he could have them. I didn’t want any of it back.
You can’t keep him, my mind whispered, but my body didn’t listen, didn’t care. All it cared about was the press of his lips, the sweep of his tongue. The strength of his hands as he lifted me up only to set me on the low counter and fit his hips between my thighs.
With a tug, he untied the strap of my dress, and the top slid down to the curve of my waist as I clawed at his shirt to get it off of him. With a solid yank, he pulled it off and dropped it, his hands moving for my body as mine fumbled with his belt. He hissed when I had my hands around him, and I hissed back when he stroked me in return.
“Fuck, don’t you ever wear panties?” he growled, sliding a long, thick finger into my heat.
“Why, want me to start?”
“Never,” he said before kissing me long and deep and hard, long enough to leave me panting when he broke away on a new mission.
Red and black, heat and heartbeats, he moved down my body, flipping the scrap of fabric that constituted my skirt. Without preamble, he latched on to me for a bruising kiss, punishing suck, a dangerously delicious brush of teeth against the aching tip of me. My lungs emptied, fingers in his hair like reins, the tendons in my thighs contracting and releasing with every sweep of his tongue. Seconds, and I was on the edge, my awareness shrinking and dimming and receding to the place his lips fastened to my body.
The second he knew, he backed off.
I whimpered, pulling him back to me with his hair knotted in my fingers, but he only closed his lips for a kiss that sent a shock down my thighs.
“Not yet,” he whispered, breathless as I was as he stood.
I reached for his shoulders but couldn’t grasp them as he rolled on a condom. And then he leaned in, gave me what I wanted with his salty lips against mine, one hand on my hip and the other on his base as he slid into me.