Naomi placed a cup of coffee next to Clara’s elbow. Surely the beverage was a nonverbal gesture of acceptance?
“Thanks.” Clara leaned over the steaming liquid in the hopes of giving herself a caffeine facial. She’d barely gotten four hours of sleep last night. Right now her eyelids weighed twenty pounds each.
“You look like you need it.” Everything Naomi said came out sounding like a threat, but Clara now knew that she meant well. “You two met?”
“Yep. I was just admiring some of Wynn’s work.”
“She’s obnoxiously talented. Practically perfect.” Naomi sighed. “If only she weren’t tragically heterosexual.”
Wynn peppered a kiss on her friend’s cheek. “And on that note, I’m gonna go screw something that’s not one of your performers.”
Naomi turned to Clara. “Why are you making a mess of my studio?” She gathered a handful of the balls of crumpled scrap paper scattered around Clara’s computer.
Oops. Clara hadn’t realized how many doodles of logo designs she’d accumulated while watching the preview clips. It had been years since she’d drawn anything for eyes besides her own. But something about channeling Chagall for Josh last night had released dormant artistic impulses. Among other things. She’d always associated Chagall with love, and not just any love. He painted the romantic love of myths and fairy tales. True love. The kind between soul mates. Love that she and Josh could never have. Except that falling asleep in his arms felt disconcertingly right.
Naomi lingered over one of the first images Clara had sketched, a pair of typefaces that broke down Shameless so that while still written as a single word, it read more like a declarative statement: Shame. Less. “You like it? I thought that—”
“You don’t have to explain it to me.”
“Right.” Should she mention the change in her relationship with Josh? She didn’t want to hide the information from their business partner. Naomi seemed to value honesty above all else. But what if she freaked? Or decided Clara wasn’t good enough for her ex?
“Can I ask you a question?” Clara blurted out the words before she could think better of it.
Naomi looked at her with pursed lips. “One.”
Clara planted her feet and stood up extra straight. “Do you think people can change?” What she meant, but couldn’t bring herself to say, was Do you think someone like me could ever be right for someone like Josh?
Naomi didn’t answer right away. She twisted her hair up into a bun and stuck a pen through it in a way that Clara thought only worked in movies. When she did respond, her voice was thoughtful and her eyes were sharp.
“Can? Yeah. If the circumstances are right. But you have to want to, and most people don’t.” She took a deep breath. “Or something big enough has to happen to you. Something that leaves you with no other options.”
Something—no, someone—big had happened to Clara. But she couldn’t figure out if the effects would last.
Naomi stared at her. “That’s how I got into porn.”
“It was?” Living with Josh and working alongside so many different kinds of performers had significantly opened the aperture on Clara’s definition of a porn performer.
“Believe it or not, I had a pretty perfect high school experience. I wasn’t as much of a brownnoser as you.” Naomi smirked. “But I got good grades and I was captain of the soccer team, class president, the whole thing. I even had the perfect boyfriend.” Naomi’s lips twisted as if she’d sucked on a lemon.
“Life pretty much came crashing down around my ears when said perfect boyfriend shared the private pictures he’d begged for as an eighteenth-birthday present with the Internet. You see, I’d told him I wasn’t ready to sleep with him.” Her voice rang hollow.
Clara wrapped her arms around the other woman’s shoulders without thinking. She expected Naomi to toss off the physical contact, but instead, she leaned her chin on top of Clara’s head and sighed. “If you tell anyone about this, I’ll deny it, and then kill you.”
Eventually, they stepped apart sheepishly. When Naomi spoke next, her voice allowed pain to bleed through.
“I knew that no matter what I did, those images would be out there for people to see without my permission. Knew that no matter how many years passed, no matter what I went on to achieve, some people would always define me based on my body alone. So I came out here. I took my own pictures. I figured if I flooded the market I could decrease the value of those original poses. That I could reclaim my body on my own terms.”
“That’s really—” Clara started to say.
“Impulsive? Juvenile? Stupid?”
“Brave.”
Naomi looked Clara in the eye. “I was terrified and so mad I couldn’t see straight.” She picked up Clara’s coffee and pushed it into her hands.
Clara took an obedient sip. “What about your family? Your friends? Did they support your decision?”
“I didn’t ask for their permission then and I don’t plan on asking forgiveness now. Even Wynn, who understands why I had to leave, can’t comprehend why I’ll never go back.” She held her hands up in front of her chest. “That is not an invitation to hug me again.”
“I wouldn’t dream of it.”
“Most people will do anything to avoid change.” Naomi brushed her flame-colored hair over her shoulder. “Even the ones who try often revert back to old habits as soon as life gets hard. Remember that before you go doing something crazy. Sometimes we think we want something until it’s time to live with the consequences.”
The answer wasn’t pessimistic, just grounded in the firm dose of reality Clara had grown to expect from Naomi.
As the bitter coffee played across her tongue, Clara tried not to close her eyes. She wanted to believe in change. To believe she could leave her old life, her old responsibilities and baggage, behind for Josh, if he’d have her. She wanted people to say, Oh yeah. Clara can always roll with the punches. She takes big honking bites out of life.
But Naomi was right. It was easy to try. To swallow the insecurity triggered by working with so many beautiful women who knew so much more about sex than she could even imagine. To dodge calls from her mother and blame it on the time difference. To fan the fantasy of her and Josh living happily ever after while his performing hiatus helped stall the thousands of obstacles standing in their way.
This was summer vacation from real life, but sooner or later, summer would end. She’d have to face her family, would have to choose between the life she’d been groomed for and the one that hung at the edge of the horizon, outrageously tempting, but with a price tag of all she held dear.