Chapter 3
Holly
The eyeliner pencil slips and the wing on my left eye smudges into a comma. I curse under my breath and grab a tissue.
It's the second time I've ruined it tonight.
My elbow braces against the cold edge of the sink and I start the wing over, slower this time, trying to remember whether my hand's shaking because I haven't eaten since lunch or because I'm about to walk downstairs and let a man buy me dinner who isn't the one I've been sleeping with for six months.
The bathroom light buzzes overhead, a low industrial hum that's been driving me insane since I moved in.
The mirror is unkind and honest, every cheap rental bathroom mirror ever made.
Short dark hair I cut myself in this same sink last spring with kitchen scissors and a bottle of wine for courage.
The violet streak I touched up this morning, which is going to bleed onto my pillowcase tonight no matter what I do.
Four piercings climbing the curve of my left ear, silver, silver, gold, silver, every one of them a small private rebellion against a woman three thousand miles away who used to lecture me about ladylike presentation.
The sleeve tattoo crawls down my right arm.
Black ink and grey shading, sea creatures and storm clouds and the bones of an old ship.
I started it at nineteen, the year I dropped out of Wellesley.
I called my mother from the parlor with the cling film still on my forearm, just to hear her voice break.
She didn't speak to me for a year after, and by the time she tried again I'd stopped answering.
I get the wing right on the third try.
The black halter dress fits the way it's supposed to. It clings where it should and skims where it shouldn't, and the boots make my legs look longer than they are. I look good. I look like a woman about to be taken out for dinner by a man who is, by every sensible measure, the better choice.
I look good but I feel like a fraud.
The clock above the cabinet says ten past seven. Tyler will be downstairs any minute, and I'm stalling because I know what I'm about to do is a bad idea, and I'm going to do it anyway.
My phone buzzes on the cabinet. Tyler: I'm out front. No rush.
I drop the eyeliner in the drawer, grab my coat off the hook, and head down before I can think any harder.
Tyler waits at the curb in front of the Anchor, hands in his pockets, breath visible in the cold.
He's dressed up: dark jeans, a charcoal jacket I haven't seen before, a fresh haircut.
He smiles when he sees me come down the side stairs, and the smile is so open and uncomplicated it makes my stomach turn over.
"Hi."
"Hi yourself."
"You look incredible."
"Don't make a thing of it."
He laughs and opens the passenger door of his car.
I duck inside and try not to think about the last time a man I slept with opened a door for me, which has never happened, because Rex doesn't do doors.
Rex does shoulders and walls and the curve of my hip pressed against my kitchen counter at one in the morning.
The car smells of new upholstery and Tyler's cologne, something he doesn't wear at the bar.
We drive the four blocks to Morretti's in companionable silence, and that small mercy's the first thing he's done all evening that makes me like him.
Morretti's is the place at the end of the harbor pier the tourists go to when they want to feel like they've eaten somewhere with a view.
White tablecloths, real candles, a wine list bound in leather.
A guy in a vest folding napkins behind a cherrywood host stand.
It opens for the season and closes the day after the last cruise ship leaves in October.
Locals don't come here because the menu costs three times what it should and the chef doesn't know how to handle Dungeness crab.
Sal'd rather drink turpentine than eat at Morretti's. The thought makes me want to laugh.
The hostess walks us to a window table. Tyler pulls my chair out before the waiter can, and I sit and let him, because that's what tonight's supposed to be: letting things happen, letting a nice man do nice things, letting myself be the kind of woman who gets taken to dinner instead of the kind who gets fucked against her kitchen wall and left in bed before dawn.
Tyler shakes a napkin onto his lap and looks across the table at me with that easy, open smile.
"So. How does it feel to be on the other side of the bar for once?"
"Strange."
"Strange how?"
"I don't know what to do with my hands."
He laughs. "Drink something. That's what I do."
The waiter arrives. Tyler orders a bottle of Sancerre when I tell him I'd rather a white than a red and doesn't make a thing of the price. He raises his glass.
"To your night off."
"To not pulling pints."
We touch glasses. The wine's good, bright and a little flinty, a wine that tastes like a coastline. I let myself enjoy it.
Tyler's the kind of man my mother would have approved of, and that's how I know I'm in trouble.
He's also the kind of man who's going to want the whole thing one day.
Wife. House. Kids. Three weeks in and I can see it on him, the way he asks about my work, the way he looks at me like I'm a future he's started sketching.
I can give him most of what he wants. I can't give him the third one on that list, and he doesn't know it yet, I'm not the woman he should be sitting across from if that's what he's after.
He leans forward on his forearms. His eyes don't leave mine.
When the waiter comes back with specials, he waits for me to order first.
"So." He sets his glass down. "You take photographs."
"Sometimes."
"More than sometimes. You've got your camera out every time I see you outside the bar. Why haven't you shown me any, or told me much about it?"
"You haven't asked."
"Well, I'm asking now. Tell me about it."
I should change the subject but I take a long swallow of wine instead, and what comes out of my mouth surprises me.
"I like shooting the harbor. The docks at three in the morning when the boats come in.
The waitresses at Betty's on the four-to-twelve shift.
The MC, when they let me. I shot the Toy Run in December, Knox and Finn and the rest of them riding in with kids' toys piled three deep in the trucks behind.
Nightfall Cove things. Things people who only come here in summer don't see. "
"Can I see some?"
"Maybe another night. I haven't shown anyone in two years."
He nods, accepts it and doesn't push. Another point in his favour, and I'm starting to think the points are stacking up in a way I'm going to have to do something about.
I haven't shown my photographs to anyone in two years except Sal, who grunts and pours me a shot, and Sarah, who saw three prints I'd taped to my kitchen wall and asked if she could buy one for Knox's office.
I never offered them to Rex. Not once. Six months of Rex's hands on my body and I never showed him a single frame, because handing Rex a piece of me always felt like loading a gun and giving it to a man who couldn't promise he wouldn't fire.
Tyler's sitting across from me asking the question Rex never asked. The fact that I almost want to answer should tell me something.
I drink more wine.
The food comes. Risotto for me, scallops for him, plates arranged like the chef thinks he's being painted by a Dutch master.
I pick at the rice and watch the candle throw warm light across Tyler's cheekbones, and the photographer in me clocks the composition before the rest of me catches up.
Soft top light, candle as a kicker on his jaw, dark window swallowing the background. A nice composition.
The shot's over his shoulder.
The harbor through the window: pier lights stringing across the black water in long broken trails.
A fishing boat rocking at the end of the dock, the outrigger swinging through a thirty-degree arc with each swell.
A man in oilskins working the deck under a halogen lamp, a silhouette inside a halo.
I'd shoot it at f/4, slow shutter, blur the boat, keep the dock lights sharp.
Two colours in the whole frame: sodium yellow and the deep cold black of the January water.
"Holly?"
I drag my eyes back. Tyler watches me with an amused half-smile, fork suspended over the scallops.
He asks me about lenses and shutter speeds and admits he wouldn't know an aperture if it bit him, and somewhere between the second glass of wine and the breadbasket I realise I've talked more about my photography in twenty minutes than I have in the last two years combined.
Then, over Tyler's shoulder, I see them.
Two tables back: an orc woman and her human husband.
She's broad-shouldered, tusks bare without caps, a small gold hoop through her right earlobe and a boatneck sweater.
Her husband's human, smaller than her by a head, his arm draped along the back of her chair.
Their daughter's maybe four. Dark hair, the bud of a tusk pushing up through her bottom gum, tongue tip poking out at the corner of her mouth while she colours a placemat in bright green.
The mother says something low and the kid laughs, a high full-bellied laugh, and the father leans across the table and puts the green crayon back in the cup. He kisses his wife on the temple.
That's the shot.
Not the harbor. Not Tyler. That family.
My fingers itch for my camera with a physical ache.
"Hey." Tyler's voice is gentle. "Where'd you go?"
"Sorry. I'm bad at this. I keep seeing things I want to photograph and forgetting I'm at dinner."
He glances over his shoulder, sees them, gets it. Doesn't tease me about it.
"You're a hard woman to keep at the table, Holly Summers. But I love that you're so into your photography."
"Thank you. That's a nice thing to say."
I mean it more than I want to. Tyler smiles and waves the waiter for the bill.