Chapter 2
CHAPTER TWO
The shirt situation had gotten out of hand.
Tyler stood in front of the bathroom mirror holding two options—the blue linen he wore to photography client meetings and a grey henley that Stella had once described as “sort of fine”—and he had been standing there long enough that the coffee he’d set on the dresser was no longer worth drinking.
“The blue one,” Stella said from the doorway.
He hadn’t heard her get up. She was leaning against the doorframe in her Sydney FC shirt and bare feet, arms crossed, studying him with the calm scientific interest she usually reserved for subjects she was about to photograph.
“I haven’t asked for your opinion.”
“You’ve been standing there for eleven minutes. You’ve asked for someone’s opinion.” She pushed off the doorframe and dropped onto the edge of his bed, tucking one foot under her. “Blue. The grey makes you look like you’re going to a dentist appointment.”
“The grey is casual. Casual is good for a second date.”
“Casual is good. That grey is sad.” She held out her hand. He gave her the henley. She examined it, turned it over, handed it back. “Wear the blue.”
Tyler put the grey back in the closet and reached for the blue linen.
“So,” she said.
“No.”
“I haven’t said anything.”
“You were about to say something.”
“I was going to ask how the first one went.” She pulled at a loose thread on his duvet. “Since you’ve told me nothing, which is technically fine, but also means I’ve had to piece it together from available evidence.”
“What available evidence.”
“You smiled at your phone three times on Sunday. Bea saw you when she came by with Anna.” Stella looked up. “Also you whistled while you were making eggs on Saturday morning, and you only do that when you’re in an annoyingly good mood.”
Tyler checked his collar in the mirror. “I whistle sometimes.”
“You whistle when your photos come out well and apparently when a date goes well. Those are your two whistling occasions.” She tilted her head. “So it went well.”
“It went fine.”
“The whistling suggests otherwise.”
He picked up his coffee, remembered it was cold, set it back down.
“She’s easy to talk to,” he said to the window.
“You mentioned that before.”
“It’s still true.” He turned back to the mirror, smoothed the collar. “We talked for two hours. I didn’t notice.”
Stella absorbed this. “What did you talk about?”
“Her mother. My photography.”
“And?”
He found he was smiling at the mirror and stopped. “She asked good questions. About the photography. Not polite questions—actual ones. She wanted to know how you decide what’s worth shooting.”
“What did you say?”
“I said you know it when the frame feels finished.” He shrugged. “She said that’s how she knows when a student’s ready to leave her office. When they stop asking permission to feel what they feel.”
Stella was quiet for a moment. “Okay. That’s actually good.”
“Yeah.”
“I like that.” She stood and came to stand beside him in the mirror, examining their reflections—him in the blue linen with the untameable morning hair, her in the Sydney FC shirt looking like she’d never once been anxious about anything. “The blue is right. You look like yourself.”
“I always look like myself.”
“You look like a more intentional version.” She nudged his arm with her shoulder, brief and easy. “She’s going to like it.”
Tyler picked up his keys from the dresser. Checked the time. He had forty minutes before he was supposed to meet Lindsey at the place on Forest Avenue—for a five minute drive—with the good pastries and no teenagers, which was a description he had now said in his head approximately thirty times.
“You’ll be okay?” he said. “Anna’s got the Shack covered, I can ask her to—”
“Dad.” Stella gave him a look. “I’m sixteen. I have homework, a camera, and a grandmother who will feed me if I appear near her kitchen. Go.”
He went.
He was gone two and a half hours.
Stella had finished her calc homework, developed two rolls from the week’s shots at the Shack, eaten half a pack of Tim Tams she’d been saving for an occasion that apparently this qualified as, and was onto the second chapter of her English reading when she heard the door.
She didn’t look up. “How were the pastries?”
“Good.” He set his keys on the hook. She heard him go to the kitchen, run water, fill the coffee maker.
“Good like the tomatoes were good,” she said, “or—”
“The tomatoes were terrible. The pastries were genuinely good.” He leaned in the kitchen doorway. His collar was still right. There was color in his face that hadn’t been there this morning. “She had the almond croissant. She broke it in half and gave me the larger piece without asking.”
Stella looked up from her book. “She did?”
“Just—reached over and handed it to me.” He lifted one shoulder. “I don’t know. It felt like something a person does when they’re comfortable.”
“It is.” Stella closed the book. “Did you make plans?”
“Dinner. Next Friday.” He crossed to the armchair and sat. “She wants to try that place on Coast Highway with the fish tacos.”
“Good choice.”
“Luke recommended it.”
Tyler leaned back and stretched his arms over his head, the armchair creaking under him. A man unwinding from something good. “She asked about you, actually. How you were settling in. If the photography series was going well.”
“What did you tell her?”
“That you were doing something Mr. Reeves called ‘significant’ and that you were going to be irritatingly gifted and I was going to have to figure out how to be normal about it.”
Stella pressed her lips together. “You said that?”
“She laughed. Then she said she’d noticed in your file that you’d been placed in the advanced class after one conversation, and that Reeves only does that once every few years.” Tyler looked at her steadily. “She sees it too. Just so you know.”
The Tim Tam packet crinkled in Stella’s hands. She looked down at it, then out the window, where the afternoon was doing its golden September thing over the rooftops.
“Okay,” she said. “Good.”
“Yeah.” He stood, stretched again, headed for the kitchen. “I’m making a decent coffee. You want one?”
“I’m sixteen.”
“Half and half, mostly milk, approximately three sugars. That’s not coffee, that’s a dessert.”
“I’ll have a dessert then.”
The coffee maker started up, and Stella pulled her knees to her chest in the corner of the sofa, Tim Tams in her lap, listening to the ordinary sounds of the bungalow on a Saturday afternoon.
The hiss of steam. The creak of the third floorboard near the window.
The way the light came in at this hour and made everything look like something worth keeping.
She’d texted Bea from the darkroom that morning just he’s nervous, it’s very funny, and Bea had sent back a string of laughing emojis followed by tell me everything later.
Later being now, she supposed. She picked up her phone.
Went well. Croissant-sharing level well.
Bea’s response came in forty seconds.
What does that mean?
It means she gave him the bigger half without being asked.
Oh. That’s actually quite something.
Right?
Stella looked at the kitchen doorway, where Tyler was doing something unnecessarily involved with the coffee and humming something off-key and apparently entirely unaware that he was humming.
She watched the three dots appear and disappear one more time, but nothing followed. She set the phone down and looked at it for a moment, then looked at the kitchen doorway again.
Tyler emerged with two mugs and set the one that was approximately three sugars and mostly milk in front of her without comment, which was its own kind of language.
“Bea says hi,” Stella said, which wasn’t entirely true but wasn’t entirely false either.
“Tell her hi back.” He settled into the armchair with his coffee and reached for the remote. “What are we watching?”
“You pick.”
“You always say that and then have opinions.”
“I have input, not opinions. There’s a difference.”
“There is genuinely not.” He put on something about the ocean—a documentary, waves and light and the kind of underwater footage that made the world look like a different planet—and Stella pulled the blanket off the back of the sofa and tucked it around her knees.
Outside, the afternoon light moved across the wall. The coffee was too sweet and exactly right. Somewhere down the street, someone was grilling something that smelled like the end of summer.
She picked up her phone one more time and noticed one more message from Bea.
I think I’d find it weird.
She thought about that for a moment—about what weird meant, and who it was really about then set the phone face-down on the cushion beside her and watched the ocean on the screen.