22. “You’re fascinating.”
“YOU’RE FASCINATING.”
YASMINE
Isent CeeCee a quick text.
Me: Hey. Staying out tonight. Don’t wait up.
She answered with a single photo, one sad piece of string cheese centered perfectly on the kitchen counter like modern art.
CeeCee wasn’t usually funny like this. A little distance from Shaun was working wonders. I sent back the appropriate eye roll and middle finger, then set my phone facedown.
I was wearing Hale’s shirt. It fell mid-thigh, his scent still in the cotton. And I was in his bed.
We’d been avoiding beds since that first night, for sleep or anything else. So I didn’t have a good explanation for why I was here now, legs bare against his sheets, heart doing something stupid in my chest.
The bathroom door opened. He stepped out wearing soft gray sweatpants and nothing else, water still glistening on his shoulders and chest. Then he crossed to the dresser, picked up a small jar, and started working oil through his locs with careful hands.
He looked like a photograph already.
I reached for my phone before the thought had fully formed, opened the camera, and raised it.
The shutter sound broke the quiet. He froze, eyes flicking to mine in the mirror.
I shifted left. His eyes stayed on mine in the reflection, and I took another, catching the slope of his shoulders and the lean muscle of his back.
“What are you doing?” His voice was low, and there was a new edge under it.
I smiled. “Don’t move.”
“Yasmine Valentine.”
“Don’t move,” I repeated, softer.
Click.
“Thought you only pointed that thing at mountains and dangerous animals,” he said.
“I can dabble.”
He shook his head, but he didn’t stop me.
I didn’t follow him exactly, but I found him wherever he settled—at the window with the dark woods behind him, back at the dresser, balanced on the arm of the chair to reach the ends of a loc near his neck.
He was simply being, doing something he’d probably done hundreds of times with no one watching.
I kept watching.
The bashfulness came on gradually. A shift in his shoulders. The way his movements got a little less fluid, like he’d suddenly remembered he had limbs.
He ran a hand over the back of his neck and looked everywhere except the lens. “I’m getting ready for bed, darlin’. This can’t be worth your film.”
“You’re fascinating.”
If he were a lighter-skinned man, I swear those cheeks would’ve been red.
“Are you shy, Hale?”
“No.” He turned to face me fully, eyebrow arched, chin lifted, defiant about it now, like I’d thrown down a gauntlet and he intended to pick it up.
I raised the phone and shot another.
He immediately looked away and rubbed the back of his neck again. Adorable.
I lowered the phone and looked at him for real this time. Unframed. Not composed.
Just him standing in the middle of his bedroom, dark skin gleaming, caught somewhere between amused and self-conscious.
“You have a beautiful body, Hale.”
He tilted his head. “Isn’t that my line?”
“Says who?”
He didn’t answer.
“I mean it.” I lowered the phone the rest of the way. “Will you let me shoot you? Properly.”
His eyes flicked to the camera bag near the chair, then back to me, then to the phone in my hand like it had become a third presence in the room.
“I’m not a model,” he said carefully. “I don’t know what I’m doing.”
“I do.”
Silence stretched, thick and electric. A single breath moved through the room.
His voice dropped. “What do you want from me, Yaz?”
My pulse kicked.
“Take off your pants.”
He didn’t move for half a second longer. Then his hands went to the string of his sweatpants.
He pulled it loose and let it drop.
I crossed the room and reached for my camera bag.
Hale watched me unzip it without a word, like this was new to him but he’d already decided to lean all the way in.
I took out the Nikon and checked the lens out of habit.
“Okay,” I said. “Lie back on the bed.”
He did. Slowly.
I spent a few minutes arranging things, pulled the sheet low across his hips as he settled, exposing the sharp cut where muscle met bone.
I moved his arm, bent it at the elbow to curl beneath his head. Then I angled the lamp so the light fell across him instead of straight down, smoothed one side of the white sheet and left the other deliberately rumpled.
I wanted the mess left in. That was part of him.
He didn’t stiffen or second-guess or make a joke to fill the space. He watched me with teasing eyes and let me move him however I wanted.
I shifted the lamp again, then his shoulder, then the sheet.
“Hold that,” I said.
He did.
And kept looking at me.
Not the camera.
Me.
It threw me off for a second, enough that I had to check my settings just to have something to do with my hands.
“You good?” he asked.
I didn’t look up. “Yup.”
“You don’t look it.”
“Just… give me a second.”
“Who’s bashful now, Yasmine Valentine?”
“I’m not bashful. You’re just very naked.”
His mouth curved, but he didn’t break the pose.
I stepped back, took a breath to steady myself, then found him through the lens.
He looked strong and still and a little undone, in a way I didn’t think he would have chosen for himself. The lamp found the angle of his jaw, the ridge of his collarbone, the place where the sheet crossed his hip. My pulse jumped.
I shot.
I circled the edge of the bed. Found a lower angle. Came back up.
I wasn’t thinking about him as him, not exactly. I was thinking about light and line and what the frame was doing.
But he kept coming through anyway.
The dry humor that lived in the corner of his mouth. The quick mind he didn’t bother showing off. How decent he was, loyalty built so deep into him it barely looked like a choice.
I saw all of it through the lens, and for once the camera didn’t give me any distance.
I felt him watching me watch him.
My skin felt tight under his shirt, the cotton dragging.
Then I lowered the camera.
The room went quiet enough to hear the trees shifting outside and the old house groaning softly as it settled.
Hale hadn’t moved.
He was still looking at me.
I was looking back.
He sat up slowly, took the camera from my hands, and set it carefully on the nightstand.
I let him.
I moved to the edge of the bed, close enough to feel the heat of him, and his hand came to the back of my thigh, warm and sure, pulling me in.
I bent one knee, then the other, sliding onto his lap, straddling him, chest to chest.
He reached for the hem of my shirt and pulled it up over my head in one smooth motion. Cool air hit my skin, then his gaze, moving over me like he was framing me now.
Then his mouth was on mine, his hands at my waist, my fingers in his hair. The sheet I’d spent ten minutes arranging went off the side of the bed, and neither of us reached for it.
By the time he was inside me, we were both bare, skin to skin. The fit of him stole the air from my lungs. Full, deep, almost too much. He made a rough sound low in his throat, hands gripping my hips as I started to move.
The bed creaked softly beneath us.
The lamp threw warm gold across white sheets and dark wood and the black window beyond.
For a while I stopped thinking in words at all. Just the slick slide of skin, the grip of his hands, the way his breath hitched when I rolled my hips just right.
Afterward, I lay with my cheek against his chest, his arm heavy and warm around me, the sheet tangled somewhere at my waist.
His breathing slowed.
Mine followed.
Outside, the trees shifted in the dark, and somewhere in the house old wood gave a soft settling creak. The camera sat on the nightstand, lens pointed at the ceiling.
His hand moved once, slow, up my spine.
“Hale.”
“Hm.”
“I don’t want you to go on any more blind dates.”
His hand stilled.
A pause.
Then, low and rough with sleep, “Okay.”
I closed my eyes.
And somewhere between the last shift of the sheets and the steady rhythm of his heartbeat under my ear, we fell asleep.