Long Exposure (Arts and Lovers #3)

1. Kristie’s Party, 2006

Sarah had only been asleep for a few minutes when she was awoken by a soft knock on the door.

She could barely hear it over the distant bass music from the party.

Clearly, Kristie was in charge of the iPod, because Kristie liked to play things at top volume, and her musical preference right now was for mystical trip-hop by sad Brits.

Sarah could picture her roommate Kristie vividly, drifting around the living room in the silvery tank top she reserved for parties, her long black hair swaying as she topped off people’s drinks from the monogrammed cocktail shaker that she had just received for her twenty-first birthday.

Sarah felt too tired for any of it, even though tonight’s festivities had started out as a celebration in her honor.

Officially, her roommates were hosting this soiree to toast the fact that, after almost two years, Sarah had finally broken up with her toxic boyfriend, Ivan.

But no party at their apartment, even one celebrating Sarah’s romantic liberation, felt like her own for very long.

The pretty people had arrived, the hook-ups had started, and Sarah was alone in bed by midnight.

“Yes?” Sarah said as she awkwardly pushed herself up onto her elbows, her tank top falling slightly askew.

Ren stuck his head in the door, which was how Sarah discovered that she’d forgotten to lock it. The seductive bassline became temporarily louder. “Hey, Sarah?”

“Ren?” She blinked in the half-darkness.

Her room was lit only by the thin slash of light from the doorway, some glow-in-the-dark stars, and her Miyazaki-themed nightlight.

She had lived here for most of her time at university, first with her high school friend Ellen and now with her classmates Anya and Kristie, and her décor remained largely the same as it had when she arrived: a black and white poster of Paris, some CDs stacked in a pile, and a couple of film cameras lined up atop her dresser, their lenses flickering like cat eyes.

Ren slipped into the room. “Can we talk for a second?” His voice was unexpectedly tentative.

“Sure,” she said warily.

She knew Rene Durand pretty well, so she didn’t feel especially nervous that there was a young man in her bedroom.

A couple of years ago, Sarah would have been thrilled to find him there.

Ren was startlingly handsome. He had beautiful pale green eyes that he had inherited from his mother, an Afghani professor who taught feminist history at the nearby University of Montreal, and thick dark hair from his father, a handsome French-Tunisian man who taught philosophy at McGill.

Ren’s cheekbones had been gifted by some vengeful god who had it in for the young women of Montreal.

In the half-light, his beauty looked a little unreal, like he was an elven prince from a fairy tale who had made a quick stop at the Levi’s store.

“Were you sleeping?” he asked, closing the door behind him.

“Not really. What’s up?”

She had first met Ren during their freshman year at McGill in an Intro to Photography class, and she had immediately become enamored with him, not only for his good looks but for his capacity to hold interesting debates about lens choice and the political underpinnings of documentary photography.

Sarah had been a novice photographer, Ren a budding journalist, and their discussions had often continued long after class as they leaned against a wall and argued the merits of Stanley Kubrick’s street photography or the CBC’s coverage of the Iraq War.

His recommendations for books and movies were solid, if sometimes irritatingly pretentious, and he seemed to enjoy taking polar opposite positions from hers on topics ranging from citizen journalism to the films of Gaspar Noé.

Sarah could admit that she had swooned over him for a good three months; he was exactly the sort of man that she had dreamed of meeting at university but didn’t believe actually existed.

It was like someone had ripped him from the pages of an existentialist novel, shoved a copy of Bukowski in his hands, and dropped him in front of earnest young women, custom-built to break their hearts.

Then a little over two years ago, as a gift to herself on her nineteenth birthday, Sarah had finally roused her courage to invite him to her birthday party.

Ren had arrived with a bottle of cheap wine, chatted with her for twenty minutes about their philosophies of love, and then zeroed in on her willowy, blond friend Anya, flirting with Anya for the rest of the night and going home with her as soon as the wine ran out.

Sarah had been devastated but unsurprised; she had always suspected that two people with unearthly cheekbones would gravitate inevitably toward each other’s superior genetics.

Sarah herself had a chesty figure that she feared made her look heavier than she was, with a round-as-a-moon face and ash-blond curly hair.

She wasn’t unattractive, but she had the kind of comfortable cuteness that men seemed to associate with girls who worked behind the counter at ice cream shops.

Compared to Anya’s ethereal beauty, Sarah felt thoroughly put in her place.

Somehow, Ren had insinuated his way into Sarah’s friend group after that, seeing Anya for a few weeks and then hooking up with Sarah’s friend Kristie when Anya went home for the holiday break.

There didn’t seem to be any hard feelings among the women involved when Ren shifted his attention; part of Ren’s magic was that he found ways to irritate his romantic partners enough so that they were glad to be rid of him when he moved on.

By the time Ren was sleeping with her high school friend Ellen a few months later, Sarah was deep into her fraught relationship with Ivan, a Polish international student with a history of depression, and she had learned to tolerate Ren as an intermittently amusing lothario who was best appreciated from the other end of the sofa.

He was fun to debate about astrophysics or the problematic love lives of Byron or Rilke.

But Ren was like a black hole; you could orbit him safely from a distance, but it wasn’t wise to get pulled into his gravitational well of moody song quotes and indirect flattery.

She watched him now as he picked his way across her dark bedroom.

“We’re going to have to revoke Kristie’s right to choose the music if she keeps playing her three favorite albums in rotation.

You know that, right?” Ren had a tendency to announce his preferences as if they should become universal rules.

“Okay?” Sarah blinked in the darkness as he moved closer.

When he got to her bed, he turned and sat across it sideways with his back against the wall and his long legs stretched out so that Sarah had to bend her knees slightly to make room for him.

“So, question for you,” he said briskly, “you know how you hate me?”

“I don’t hate you. I tolerate you,” Sarah replied in the world-weary voice that she had adopted with him years ago to cover her hurt feelings. Her cool detachment was more sincere now than it had been when she was nineteen and desperately in love with him.

“I’m just wondering if that tension might be because there’s something going on between us.” He waved a hand loosely between his chest and hers, clearly hoping she’d interpret the gesture without him needing to provide any specificity.

“Something like…?”

He shrugged. “I don’t know. Sexual tension? I wasn’t going to say anything while you were with Ivan, obviously.”

“Good of you,” Sarah said dryly.

Seriously? He was going to do this now?

He gave her a little smile, or what seemed like a smile in the near total darkness. “For the record, I’m glad you broke up with him. He wasn’t good to you.”

“Oh, thanks.” Ivan had dumped her, but Sarah wasn’t sharing that information widely.

It made her look too pathetic. When Ivan had announced one day that they should break up before he headed to grad school in California, she had felt a shattering sense of loss and an equally deep sense of reprieve.

She was hurt, of course, because she’d thrown so much effort into trying to please him, but she wouldn’t miss the fights, the brooding, his constant insistence that Sarah would never love him enough.

“Didn’t you ever wonder,” Ren continued quietly, “about us? I feel like we have better conversations than we do with other people.”

Did Sarah ever wonder about Ren? There hadn’t been much else she had wondered about for a while. “Well, the fact that you hooked up with most of my friends means that I was pretty low on your priority list. So any wondering I may have done is in the past.”

“But you know why I went out with them and not you, right?”

Her heart froze in place. She did not know, and she didn’t know if she wanted to. “Why?”

He sighed, looking up at the plastic stars that were scattered on her ceiling, his elegant jawline lit blue from below.

Her nightlight was a still frame from Howl’s Moving Castle that she’d found at a street fair after falling in love with the film the year before.

At the time, she had profoundly related to the lonely heroine and her passion for a handsome, emotionally unavailable blond sorcerer.

It had seemed to represent her relationship with Ivan perfectly, which in retrospect was definitely a warning sign.

Now the soft light made Ren’s eyes look like they were filled with blue fire.

To her surprise, he shifted his entire body so that he was right next to her and then slid downwards, adjusting himself so that his head was near hers on the pillow.

She was a little shocked but too bemused to be angry.

She could always shove him onto the floor if he tried anything… which sounded fun, come to think of it.