21. Skylar #2
His brow furrowed and the corners of his mouth pulled downward.
His eyes went distant. “I got hurt. A bad concussion when I was eight.” He turned the phone over in his hands.
“My mom wanted me to quit but my father insisted I had to continue. He played in high school and college. Almost went pro. He said football would toughen me up.” The light behind his expression dimmed by degrees.
“They fought. I heard the whole thing from the top of the stairs. I understood, at eight, that I was the reason.”
Skylar lowered the camera an inch.
“My mom told me I didn’t have to play if I didn’t want to.
I could see the anxiety on her face. So I told her I wanted to keep playing.
” Everything about him went still. “Anything to make him stop yelling at her. I played every game after that for her. To keep my father calm so she stayed safe. Football stopped being a game.”
The shutter stayed silent. Her ribs ached. She breathed through her mouth and pressed her tongue against the roof of her palate to keep her face neutral. “Do you want to stop?”
“No.” He cleared his throat. “Let’s keep going. I have an idea I want to write down.”
She raised the camera. For ten more minutes she watched him through the glass, the lens a bridge and a barrier. He picked up the phone and began to tap on the keyboard, and the transition happened so gradually, she almost missed the moment the mask dissolved.
His thumb paused on the screen. His brow smoothed. The corner of his mouth lifted, just one side, almost shy.
She knew that smile.
The expression was nothing like the wide, bright, symmetrical version she’d seen at every promotional event, in every staged photo. This was the man she’d first seen at the fair, crouching beside a lost child in the crowd, and the smile he gave the boy’s mother when she came running.
She’d tracked the difference without naming it. Back in Ironwood, when Grams cupped his face and his whole expression surrendered. At the sponsors’ tent when she defended him and the performance version split wide open. In the motel room, when it had been the two of them. In private.
She lowered the camera. “You have two different smiles.”
Charlie looked up, his face wiping clean. “What?”
“Two smiles.” She took a step closer. “There’s the one you wear for cameras and donors and your father. Wide. Symmetrical. Perfect.” Another step. “Then there’s the one I caught through the viewfinder a moment ago. Your actual smile that only shows up when you forget anyone is looking.”
He stared at her. The afternoon light caught the side of his face. His jaw tightened. The wide symmetrical version flickered into place, held for half a second, and collapsed. “How…”
She shrugged. “It caught my eye at the fair. You helped a little boy find his mom, and you smiled at her, and the expression was nothing like the one you aimed at Poppy ten minutes later. I didn’t understand what I was seeing. I just knew I had to photograph it.”
The color left his face. His eyes went bright and glassy and the muscle at his temple pulsed. His lips parted, and for a moment the man behind the facade sat fully visible, unshielded. “Which one do you prefer?”
“The real one.” She set the camera on the desk.
He looked away. Looked back. He curled inward as though the observation reached past the muscle and bone and found his soft, unprotected center.
She crossed the room and knelt in front of the couch, taking his hands in her own. His fingers were warm and they closed around hers without hesitation.
“You don’t have to perform for me.” The words scraped out of her. “I know you do it for everyone. But not for me. Ever.”
His hands tightened and pressure built behind her eyes. The tiny tilt of his chin in acceptance made her throat go dry.
After a final squeeze, she released his hands, lifted the camera and raised the viewfinder to her eye. “The light’s shifting. Let me grab a few more before I lose the angle.”
He nodded and picked up his phone. But his thumb didn’t move on the screen, and his stance was stiff again. She pressed the shutter on three frames she already knew she wouldn’t use.
“Do you have what you need?”
Skylar offered her own smile. “I’ve got everything I need.”
Back at her apartment, she scrolled through the first batch and deleted them without hesitation. That Charlie was documented in articles and on billboards. She flagged three frames of the football conversation where the light caught the shift mid-sentence, one expression dissolving into another.
Then what she sought filled her screen. She selected the image, cropped the frame to center his face against the window light, and adjusted the exposure until the warmth in his skin matched what she’d seen through the viewfinder. She saved the file.
She unplugged the camera and set it on her desk, beside the two framed photographs her mother had taken. The Nikon settled between them as though the space had been waiting for it. She picked up the empty box and placed it on the top shelf of her closet.
The box could go. The camera stayed.