“Let’s start with props,” Eva said, rummaging through her suitcase on its stand. She traded out her club shoes and earrings for the things she wore every day— her classic black stilettos and her pearls. To someone else, they would seem like a boring part of her professional wardrobe. To her, they were a symbol of the status and power she was trying to stake out for herself in her community. The things that made her powerful were also the things that made her feel sexual.
Discipline. Control. Poise.
In the closet, she slid her favorite cardigan off of a wooden rack.
“At the risk of inserting myself where I said I wouldn’t, boudoir is also about showing more. Not less,” Candace said, nodding at the cashmere.
“You’ll see,” Eva said.
She disappeared into the bathroom. First, she removed her arm brace, hoping an hour or so wouldn’t make much of a difference if she was gentle. Then she slid her sequined club top over her head and assessed herself in the mirror. Her black lace balconette bra made for fitting lingerie for a sexy photo shoot, gently lifting and separating her breasts. Coupled with the leather, she looked like all she was missing was a whip.
Eva slid the blush-pink cashmere on over her skin and left the cardigan unbuttoned. Now she looked softer and more feminine. More like herself.
Her eye makeup was a little smudged from the heat of the club and her hair was mussed, but both of those things seemed appropriate. She recalled looking about the same when she studied herself, post-coital, the night she and Taylor slept together the first time.
When she opened the door to the bedroom, Candace let out a low whistle. “Wow,” she said, drinking in every inch of exposed skin. “I stand corrected about the cardigan, you clever tease.”
Eva felt her whole body blush when Candace’s eyes continued to linger on her chest. Something told Eva that it wasn’t the pearl buttons or lace detail on her sweater that Candace was admiring.
She didn’t remember feeling quite this vulnerable in front of Taylor, but they had been in familiar territory and Taylor hadn’t been wielding a camera. That night, Eva had known what it meant for her to be seen. In this context, she was less sure.
This could be the prequel to physical and emotional intimacy, it could be a quick vacation flirtation, or it could be simple photography practice.
While Eva had been primping, Candace had prepared the room. The overhead light had been dimmed. Both bedside table lamps were covered in pink scarves, creating a tinted glow. On the bureau, a tiny flame danced atop a travel candle.
“Soft lighting tends to make models a little more comfortable,” Candace explained, watching Eva take in the room.
“It definitely helps. That, and all the rum and Cokes I consumed.”
Candace helped position Eva for her first couple of shots to help her get into the swing of things. Each time her touch on Eva’s skin was firm, professional. It was as though Eva was a marionette that Candace was puppeteering.
Eva stood with her front facing the open window, one hand on the curtain, the other hand hung at her waist and clutching a bunch of flowers. She twisted her head back so that she was looking at the camera as though turning to greet a lover as they approached from behind.
In the next, she sat at the desk, pretending to pen a love letter on hotel stationery. She thought back to the bridal portrait of the woman reading her vows and tried to summon a similar expression.
It wasn’t long before the poses started to feel more brazen. In one, she laid half-on, half-off the bed, flipped upside down so that her hair cascaded toward the floor like a waterfall. Her knee was bent and one hand rested on her breast as she stared upwards at the camera.
She’d done too many crunches before the hotel’s buffet breakfast that morning for her abs to cooperate when she tried to sit up from that position. She used her good arm to slide the rest of the way off of the bed without hurting herself.
“I feel ridiculous,” she admitted, scrambling to stand. “Something tells me these pictures aren’t going to turn out quite how you envisioned.”
Candace shook her head and crossed the room to Eva. “Tell me this doesn’t scream sex kitten,” she said, scrolling through the shots on her camera so that Eva could see them.
Candace wasn’t wrong. Each image was artful, clearly taken by someone with an eye for this kind of work. The ones Eva liked best were captured in black and white.
“What I can tell from these is how talented you are as a photographer.”
Candace studied her for a long moment. “We can stop any time you want. Just say the word, and I’ll erase every last one of these in front of you. That, or we can figure out how to make you more comfortable.”
“I want to get comfortable, but that’s hard to do on demand.”
“Fair. I have an idea.”
“Oh?” Eva said. A million things flashed through her mind, then. Namely, what it would be like for Candace’s touches to become less professional and more personal. What it would feel like for Candace’s teeth to tug at her bottom lip while she unzipped her leather skirt and wiggled it off of her hips. What the frigid hotel AC would feel like against her exposed nipples when her bra eventually came off and whether or not Candace might warm them with her mouth.
She was still discovering what she liked, but slow circles and consistent pressure from someone’s tongue seemed to work on most of her erogenous regions.
Instead, Candace told her to get out her phone. “You didn’t seem to mesh with the music at the club. Put on a song that makes you feel sexy.”
Despite the fact that she’d only recently lost her virginity, Eva had an extensive collection of baby making music at the ready. She had a mortifying habit of playing it in the background while she worked her way through romance novels. It went from Sade to Maxwell to Kings of Leon all the way back to classic Motown and provided a song for every possible sultry scenario the heroines in her smut might encounter.
She turned on her phone for the first time all day and clicked around until she landed on Wicked Games by Chris Isaac.
“The music video for this is iconic,” Candace said appreciatively. “Just channel the energy of the woman on the beach that’s rolling around with the singer. She exuded sexuality.”
Trying to do as she was told, she looked up from under her eyelashes at the woman before her with the best fuck me face that she could muster and licked her lips while slowly pulling down one of her bra straps, letting it fall down her shoulder. Then she did the same with the opposite strap, barely registering the sounds of the camera’s shutter.
She turned to face the opposite wall, reached behind her, and unclasped her bra. She lightly tossed it onto the bed, then cupped her breasts in her hands and turned back around to face the camera.
“Damn,” Candace said, momentarily forgetting she was supposed to be capturing the moment. Realizing the hold she had over Candace made Eva’s pulse pick up, this time because she was aroused instead of because she was nervous.
After an extended pause, Candace resumed taking photographs.
Things were awkward for a moment when the song ended and the room went quiet. Eva wanted more music but wasn’t ready to fully expose her breasts for the sake of being able to handle her cell phone.
“Everything you’ve suggested so far has worked. Play me a song worthy of me taking off the rest of my clothing,” Eva dared her.
Candace picked up Eva’s cell phone and pawed at it while Eva bit her lip in anticipation.
The heat pulsing between her legs nearly kept her from realizing that Candace’s face had gone white. Something told Eva it wasn’t from her taste in music.
“I didn’t sign up for this,” Candace said, thrusting the phone at Eva so that she had no choice but to expose herself to take it.
When she looked down at the screen, what she was seeing was a text from Taylor. The Zinnias in the room were your first surprise. The second surprise is in the hotel lobby beside the mantle. If you want to se
e me, that’s where I’ll be waiting.
The feeling that followed was reminiscent of the day she fell while she was running— the brief moment where she was suspended in the air above the rough concrete, the way that her bones braced themselves, the way her skin knew it would tear and her blood knew it would paint the sidewalk.
Eva put her hand down on the bed behind her to steady herself, then sank backwards to sit and collect her thoughts.
“I didn’t know she was here,” Eva managed, not knowing what else to say.
Candace was already throwing her things in her bag. In her effort to pack up as quickly as possible, she was no longer as delicate with her expensive equipment as she had been before. “I thought, worst case scenario, you’re another tourist using Asheville as a safe space to figure out your sexuality. Best case scenario, you were actually into me. I never would have thought you were using your conference as an opportunity to cheat on somebody,” Candace said, eyes glaring.
Eva knew she could defend herself on technicalities, but she also knew that Candace was seconds away from splitting and had no desire to hear her back story.
“What were you going to do, give her the pictures I was taking? Look at them later and laugh at me?”
“I would never.”
Candace left, slamming the door behind her. What was worse is that Eva couldn’t blame her.
She rushed to put her clothing back on, the bra and same sequined shirt she’d worn before. If Taylor had seen her come back to the hotel, it was probably best she go and find her in the same outfit Taylor would be expecting.
The text was hours old, but she tried her luck, running to the lobby barefoot with her stilettos in hand so they wouldn’t slow her.
Taylor was nowhere in sight.
Eva stopped at the front desk and showed the bored concierge Taylor’s picture on her cell phone, feeling desperate. “Have you seen this woman?”
“She was sitting in the lobby for hours but left a while ago.”
“How long ago, exactly?”
“Thirty minutes? Forty-five? I couldn’t say.”
Eva thanked her and stooped down to slide her shoes on before heading outside.
Now that the rum was wearing off, it was too cold for her to be outdoors without her coat. To bite back the chill, she power walked the parking lot, dialing Taylor’s number again and again on her phone.
There was no answer. If she’d seen Eva coming into the hotel on the arm of another woman after bothering to come all this way, she doubted Taylor would ever bother to answer her calls again.
On her second lap around the lot, she saw a white tank of a car she recognized. Taylor’s Buick Century.
Taylor was in the front seat, chest heaving with sobs. Seeing her in that kind of pain made Eva feel as though her body was being scraped raw from the inside out. The sensation was only heightened by her guilt.
32
Taylor
Beyond searching for a cheap motel within a reasonable distance and calling to verify they had vacancies, Taylor hadn’t made much progress. The faster she got on the road, the faster she could be in a warm bed and try to forget the last day.
The problem was that she couldn’t stop crying long enough to feel comfortable driving. Unaccustomed to winding mountain roads, the last thing she needed was to flip off of a guard rail and have her Buick become a projectile object because she was crying too hard to realize a hairpin turn was coming. By the looks of her GPS map, the motel she had in mind would take her about fifteen minutes out of the city and into a more rural area.
In what was barely more than half an hour, she felt like she’d already cycled through half of the seven stages of grief. In her denial stage, she’d questioned if perhaps she had jumped to false assumptions. Maybe she’d just imaged the chemistry between Eva and the blonde woman. The touching could have been platonic. The backpack could have been full of boring conference supplies, not the fancy triangles of milled French lingerie she’d pictured for an overnight stay. Hell, for all she knew, the woman could be a vendor or the IT staff headed to set up something in a meeting room for the next day. The next phase was guilt—that she’d let her hurt pride get in the way of patching things earlier. Then, the bargaining stage. She’d do anything for the opportunity to go back in time, have a do-over.
Taylor slipped the book of Mary Oliver poems that Dalton had gifted her from out of the glove compartment. If the poems were enough to comfort a dying woman, surely, they could offer her nerves some semblance of a salve. Between her tears and having to strain her eyes to read in the dark, it was nearly impossible to see the words.
She nearly jumped out of her skin when she heard the rapping at her passenger side window. When she saw it was Eva, it felt a bit like the universe was listening to her. She’d asked for Eva and it had delivered. Just a little late.
Only hours before, she’d have given anything to see that face. Now, she barely knew what she wanted. She wiped her eyes and leaned over to unlock the passenger door so that Eva could climb in beside her.
“I would have been in the lobby hours ago, but I just got your text.” Eva pursed her lips, and inhaled deeply through her nose. She was clearly just as emotionally unprepared to have the conversation as Taylor was, but at least she’d been brave enough to start it. Given how avoidant Taylor had been, she had to give Eva credit for that much.
“It looked like you were busy with someone else.” Taylor wanted to keep the hurt and accusation out of her voice, but it felt useless when she knew it was already written across her face.
“It’s cold in here. Let’s go inside where it’s warm to talk.”
Taylor considered the alternative until she saw the goosebumps rising up from Eva’s skin. She could feel the hair standing up on her own arms, but couldn’t parse out if it was from being chilled or from being in Eva’s presence.
Eva grabbed Taylor’s bag from the backseat on her way out of the car. Taylor thought it a bit presumptuous but was glad at the thought that maybe the decision about when to leave and where to go had remedied itself for the night.
* * *
The first thing Taylor did when she got in the room was take a scrutinizing look at the bed. She couldn’t help it.
There were no wrinkled sheets and the corners still looked as though they’d been freshly tucked in by housekeeping. She was relieved until she realized there were pink scarves over the lamps and a lit candle. She’d be a fool to believe they were for her.
A fresh bed meant nothing. There were plenty of other surfaces to fuck against. The wall, the desk, the floor. If her tryst with Eva weeks before had been any indicator, the bathroom.
She plopped herself down in an armchair caddy-corner from the bed and stretched her limbs. She was too tired to trust herself not to overreact or spiral if she opened her mouth. Instead, she waited for Eva to speak.
“Nothing happened, if that’s what you’re wondering. I never touched her. The woman you saw, she’s a wedding planner and photographer. When I was tipsy at the bar, she dared me to do a boudoir photo shoot.”
Taylor searched Eva’s face for a lie, then rubbed her eyes as though that could take away her exhaustion and all the emotion she was trying to suppress. There was no amount of rubbing that would sufficiently wipe away the mental image she had of someone else feasting their eyes on Eva’s curves as she disrobed, capturing every stretch of her perfect olive skin on camera.
Daring a woman that had been drinking to strip down to her skivvies seemed like a skeezy thing for a professional to do. All the same, she couldn’t imagine that a woman as headstrong as Eva would go along with something she didn’t want. Eva generally made clear exactly what it was she wanted. That was at least half of how she got it—her ability to assert herself and her confidence.
That’s why it was possible for Taylor to say what she said next, knowing that Eva had chosen to be there with her instead of continuing down whatever road she’d been on with the photographer not long befo
re.
“Technically, you could have been doing anything with her you wanted. I’ve shut you out for weeks and then showed up unannounced and uninvited.”
“I’m glad you did,” Eva said. “The showing up part, I mean.” She reached for Taylor’s hand and pulled her to stand. When Taylor was on her feet, Eva pulled her in for a long, tight hug.
The tension Taylor had been holding in her body began to melt under Eva’s touch, one of Eva’s hands rubbing up and down her back. Taylor closed her eyes and breathed in the familiar scent she’d missed—Lilac, hairspray, dryer sheets.
It was so tempting to stay there locked in that embrace, even more so to lightly push Eva back onto the bed and call it a night, forgetting all that had passed between them so that they could sink into sleep and wake up to a fresh start. Big spoon, little spoon, didn’t matter. All she wanted to do was burrow into Eva, their arms and legs tangling underneath the covers until it was impossible to tell their two bodies apart. She knew, though, that their underlying problems couldn’t be solved by simply sweeping them under a rug and calling it a clean start.
“I would love to stay with you tonight,” Taylor said, pulling away and softly cupping Eva’s face in her hand, “but I don’t think that’s a good idea. We need to talk, but we’re both out of sorts and I’m afraid you might still be a little sloshed.”
Eva bit her lip and nodded, not bothering to deny it.
“I think you’ve already seen firsthand that I’m not a very effective communicator in the heat of the moment. This time, I’m not fleeing like a child. I’m trying to approach this intentionally, like an adult. If we’re going to go about this properly, we should probably call it a night and talk when we’ve had a chance to rest and think things out.” She left the part out about not wanting to say something she knew they’d both regret later. She didn’t have to say it. From the single stubborn tear sliding down Eva’s cheek, it was evident she already knew how delicate things were between them.
“I’d like that,” Eva said before pausing so that Taylor could reach over with a fingertip to gently wipe the tear off her face.. “But where will you stay tonight?”
Forgetting Chuck Taylor Page 13
