No sooner had I made it home and parked my car when my phone started ringing. I grabbed my purse, fished it out, and smiled at what I saw.
I answered the call and said, “You’re just the person I wanted to talk to.”
“You saw them, didn’t you?” Kacey replied, her voice sounding excited.
“What? Saw who?”
“The pictures,” she answered. “Isn’t that why you wanted to talk to me?”
The pictures.
I’d totally forgotten all about the pictures.
Technically, I hadn’t totally forgotten about them. I’d just been a bit preoccupied this week with the whole starving children issue. Though, to be fair, it wasn’t the pictures that I’d really been thinking about anyway. Thoughts of Riggs had crossed my mind all week long.
“No, I haven’t seen the pictures,” I admitted. “Are they online? When did they go up?”
“Are you kidding?” Kacey returned. “Adele, you need to get to a computer now. I’d tell you to look on your phone, but these need to be seen on a big screen. They were just put up today. Sometime within the last hour.”
I wondered how it was possible that she knew they’d just gone up. My guess was that she’d been stalking Anna’s website ever since Sunday night.
“I just got home,” I started, resisting the urge to ask her how many times she’d checked Anna’s website. “Give me a minute to get inside.”
“Okay. Hurry up,” she ordered.
I didn’t bother wasting time responding, which would have delayed me further and irritated Kacey. She wasn’t exactly the most patient person I’d ever met. So, I just gathered up my things and got out of the car.
By the time I closed the door, Kacey asked, “Wait. If you didn’t want to talk to me about the pictures, what did you want to talk to me about?”
“I have an idea,” I began. “But I’m going to need your help to make it happen.”
“Does it have to do with you going on a date with Riggs?” she asked, her voice littered with hope. “Because if that’s the case, there’s no need to ask. I’m all in.”
“Sorry to disappoint you but no. Do you remember how I told you about the boy in my class who was caught stealing snacks earlier this week?”
“Yeah. I was really troubled by that. It actually made me start paying more attention to my kids’ lunches. What about him?” she questioned me.
Kacey was also an elementary school teacher, but she worked in a neighboring district. Part of me thought that her reaction to me telling her the story was a good indicator of not only what her answer would be when I asked for her help but also how others would respond when we started putting out the word.
I slipped my key into the front door and answered, “Well, I was so upset about the whole thing when it happened that I wasn’t thinking clearly. After giving myself a night to sleep on it, I realized there had to be more than just that one kid in the same situation. I mean, the lunch lady told me there were others, but I guess it didn’t sink in enough right then and there. And as it turns out, just my school alone has over sixty-four hundred dollars of unpaid school meal debt.”
Kacey gasped. “Really?”
“Yes,” I confirmed, closing and locking my door behind me. “And as bad as that sounds, it’s not even the worst of it. I started digging deeper. The entire district has accumulated over eighty-three thousand dollars of school meal debt.”
“That’s insanity!” she cried. “Are you sure that’s right?”
Moving to my bedroom where I left my laptop sitting on the bed, I said, “I was in just as much disbelief about it as you are.”
“If it’s that bad at Grouse Area School District, I can’t imagine what it is at mine,” she returned.
“You’ve got more kids in your district. I wouldn’t be surprised if the number was even higher,” I reasoned as I sat down on my bed and opened my laptop. “Which is why I need your help. We’ve got to do something.”
I hoped the tone of my voice indicated just how serious this issue was and how important it was to me.
“I’m all for doing something to help, Adele, but what can we do? I don’t have that kind of money,” she told me.
Unfortunately, I couldn’t answer her question.
Because I opened my laptop and typed in the website address on Anna’s business card.
And now I was staring at the most heart-stopping photos I’d ever seen. I scrolled down and saw so much on the screen that I couldn’t begin to comprehend.
Is this what we looked like?
How did she capture this?
I knew how I felt in those moments with Riggs, but I never imagined Anna would be able to capture those feelings.
The progression was unbelievable.
She’d caught everything from my nervousness in the beginning, the friendliness and laughter in the middle, and the playfulness at the end. Throughout the entire shoot, though, one thing was prevalent.
Attraction and sexual tension.
On both parts.
It was in the way Riggs and I looked at one another.
And in the placement of our hands on each other’s bodies.
The feeling I got seeing the way Riggs’ large hand cupped my ass in one photo and held my face in another was indescribable. I never knew a hand could be so sexy.
“Adele?” Kacey called.
“Yeah?” I rasped.
“I thought I lost you,” she said.
I stayed silent.
Kacey must have figured out what was going on. “Are you looking at the pictures?” she asked.
“Oh my God, Kacey,” I murmured.
“They’re amazing, aren’t they?”
I scrolled down to the bottom and stared at the last picture. It was one I hadn’t realized Anna had taken. Riggs had just pulled his lips from mine after he’d rolled me to my back and kissed me. It was immediately after I’d moaned into his mouth.
The look in both of our eyes was unmistakable.
Desire.
Nothing but burning-hot desire.
“Is it possible to fall in love with a man from just one photo?” I whispered my question.
“Oh dear,” she replied.
Of course, I wasn’t being serious. I wasn’t in love with Riggs. I barely knew him.
But I knew right then and there that I’d give anything to have a man all to myself that would look at me like that for the rest of my life.
“What do I do with this?” I asked her, hoping she had some sound advice.
“What do you want to do?” she retorted.
“What I want and what is possible are two very different things,” I noted. “I am about to embark on a very long, very time-consuming project. Something I’m hoping you’ll help with. I’m not sure how I could manage that, my job as a teacher, and pursuing someone that looks at me like that.”
“I’m not sure you should just let someone who looks at you like Riggs does walk away from you without at least trying to figure it out,” she countered.
I couldn’t stop staring at the picture. It was too beautiful. It was perfect.
As much as I didn’t want to miss the shot with Riggs if he was as interested as this photo told me he was, I honestly didn’t know how I’d make it work.