by Alice Bello
I felt dirty just thinking about it. My stomach knotted up and bile rose in my throat. How on earth could I even be considering doing what I was considering?
Good people never thought about such things. No, not once, not ever.
I had always thought of myself as a good person.
“Hope!” Janine’s plaintive, disembodied voice came from the phone, as if she were only three inches tall, and a football field away. “Are you still there? I’ve got to have something new to show Olivia by noon or I’ll have to go to another photographer.”
There it was. The ultimatum. Either I pulled a rabbit out of my hat, or they’d move on to another photographer and I’d be out of a job.
Part of me stayed there, holding my head and refusing to do anything—no speaking, no moving, not even breathing.
Then my arms moved, and my hands moved, and I picked up the phone and told Janine to wait just a moment, that I was about to send her something.
I threw Jake’s photo into my GIMP program and a few clicks later I’d cropped it into the desired size, sharpened it a touch, and changed the color of the light just barely—bringing out a more golden tone.
I pulled up the same fonts as before and made a new book cover.
Late in the Game glowed golden against Jake’s chest. “A novel by Olivia Lovelace,” shimmered on the flesh of his hipbone, like a tattoo.
I opened my internet, pulled up my Gmail account, and loaded the new book cover into an email to Janine.
I lost my breath as my hand hovered over the little square mouse pad of my computer. If I did this… if I did this I was going to lose Jake. If I did this, I would be betraying him, and I would deserve to lose Jake.
If you don’t do it you’ll lose your job and maybe this house….
I shook the rational, practical, evil voice out of my head. But it persisted.
Do you really think you’ll last out the summer?
That’s when I felt a crack start in my heart. It hurt, it felt cold and burning at the same time, but it was familiar too.
I’d had a few broken hearts in my life, they had all felt like death coming to party, and they’d all left me exhausted and devastated.
I knew the moment I clicked “send” that whatever might have been starting between Jake and I was going to end soon. Very soon. Like the instant I told him what I’d done.
“Check your email,” I said, my voice hoarse.
I knew the instant Janine downloaded the cover, her breath hissed in an eerily reptilian sound that told me her instant, intense approval.
“Where the hell did you find him?” she said, her usually irritating tone gone softer, deeper.
“Wal-Mart,” I confessed.
She whistled. “You should shop for all your models there. He’s… well, I can’t quite put the right words to it… but damn.”
Damn was right. I was damned and ready to fling myself into the fiery pits of hell: a betrayer. Not that I believed most of the stuff I’d been taught in CCD class as a child but I did believe in irony and karma. And I’d just flicked a finger in both of their faces, all just to keep my job.
I hadn’t burnt down an orphanage, or corrupted a convent full of nuns with reality TV and Krispy Kreme donuts… nor was I cheating the government out of their due taxes. But I felt so bad about hitting that send button that you’d think I’d done all those things and more.
“I’m emailing this to Olivia,” Janine said, and I heard her fingers clicking furiously on her computer’s keyboard. “She’s waiting for a new submission.”
Submission? Since when was a publisher submitting things to their authors? Ah, yes, ever since said author turned into their number one moneymaker, was only contracted for one more novel, and had gotten numerous offers to jump ship.
I let my head fall all the way to the surface of my desk, and closed my eyes. It felt like the world was crashing in around me. This was why I’d spent the last few years cut off from things like handsome men, hot sex and dating. I had the worst history in the romance department—what had I been thinking?
There was a cry of relief usually associated with great, medically induced orgasms, and then Janine started laughing, hooting and hollering. I was pretty sure she was doing some sort of happy dance in her office in downtown Dallas.
“Janine?”
“She loves it!” She cackled again. “Olivia freaking loves it. She wrote: ‘That stunning hunk of male maturity is even better than what I had in my head when I wrote him’.”
I raised my head and peered at the screen of my laptop. Janine had forwarded the email to me. I clicked it open and saw the praise for myself. Olivia Lovelace also wrote, “I would like to work with this photographer on my future titles with Branded Publishing.”
Okay, that perked up my posture and made a swell of pride build in my chest.
Then I thought of how I’d sold out, betrayed the man I was sleeping with… That I had slept with. And truth-be-told, I didn’t even know if I could take another photo like this one. It had been an accident. Though technically it had been my thrashing arm that made the damn camera shoot the image.
I leaned back in my chair, crossing my arms under my breasts, hugging myself as my head fell back. I couldn’t ignore how I felt… I couldn’t rationalize away what I’d done… and I sure as hell couldn’t pretend that something like this was just going to be okay with Jake.
“Hope?” Janine’s voice rose from the where I’d left the phone on my desk. “Hope, are you still there?”
I picked up the phone. “That’s great, just great…”
“It’s fucking fantastic! Olivia just emailed saying she’d like to discuss a new contract. This is the best news I’ve had all year!”
“That’s great,” I tried to brighten my voice to reflect Janine’s happiness, but I knew it sounded fake. “Someone’s at my door. I’ll talk to you soon.” Before she could say another word I hung up.
I stood up and trudged to my bedroom. The sight of all those wonderfully mussed bed linens, and the smooth, hot memories they held, made me recoil.
I padded back into my office and lay down on the sofa I usually used to pose my models on, grabbed the throw blanket I’d draped “artistically” over the back of it, and pulled it over me. I sank into an instant and not very restful state of catatonia. The only plus was that no thoughts were littering my mind.
The bad thing was I didn’t pass out, go to sleep, or die.
Chapter 15
THE SOFA-COMA LASTED about two hours… and since it was the deranged crack of dawn when Jake had left in his old truck, two hours of mindless lying around only took me to about 9:00 a.m., so I had eleven more hours to kill until Jake showed up for our next date.
One would think, in my position, that I’d spend that time coming up with a good reason to have betrayed him. Some slick, elegant plan to dazzle him with the serendipitous good fortune that just happened to let a miraculously sensual photograph fall into my tainted hands just in time to save my own, wretched neck.
No, I started cleaning, and I cleaned for nearly eight hours straight. I dusted, I swept and vacuumed, I scrubbed the tile in my bathroom, the toilet, the sink and the shower. I cleaned my kitchen—always a fright—and scoured my floor on my hands and knees with a scrub brush. I pulled the contents of my kitchen cupboards out, cleaned them and put new contact paper down—something I’d been procrastinating about for two years.
I climbed up on a stepladder to clean the pretty chandelier that hangs in my unused dining room. I went outside and swept the porch, the stairs leading down into the front yard, and then the walk leading to the sidewalk… and then the sidewalk in front of my house, Bette’s, and the newly sold brownstone on the other side of me.
I thought about maybe getting out the lawn mower and taking a whack at the lawn… but then my good sense kicked in and I headed back inside before I either burnt to a crisp under the sun, or suffered a heat stroke.
I ended up standing in the sho
wer until the hot water gave out… and still stood there, letting the cool water numb me. I was shivering and freezing my ass off when I emerged from the shower and wrapped myself in a towel and then pulled on my warmest, fuzziest robe.
I ended up standing before my closet—more out of habit than anything else. I wondered: what should I wear to get dumped?
I decided on a nice silky blouse and a pair of jeans that weren’t completely baggy. I dried my hair, and then pulled it back into a ponytail… and then I sat on my porch for about an hour. The afternoon heat had died, and it smelled like it was going to rain again.
That scent kept pulling me back to the night before, to Jake in my bed, Jake kissing me, Jake touching and kissing and tasting every part of me…
I ended up spending the last hour before eight sitting with my laptop at my kitchen table. I had a file open, and in the file were two JPG files. They were cued up and ready to go.
Part of me wanted to put the computer away, to ignore what I’d done that morning, and to act as if nothing had happened. Yes, that could work for a while. But ultimately, Jake would find out. Someone he knew would recognize him from the book cover.
I closed my eyes and shuddered. Hadn’t he said his sister—the unholy nightmare of my formative years—read Olivia Lovelace? Yes, the bitch was a big fan. She would probably pre-order the damn ebook, and that would be that.
It would be a thousand times worse by then.
No, by then Jake would have let me in, would have allowed me into his heart. And I would be hurting him so much more, so much more deeply.
Just rip a bandage off. It hurts much less in the end.
I heard the engine of Jake’s old truck as it pulled up to my house. I got up and made it to my front screen door just as he jogged up my porch steps.
Good god, he looked good. He’d gone home and showered, shaved, and his eyes were bright and fixed on me as he ascended the steps.
He stopped just in front of the screen door and we stared at each other. He had that excited look kids get on Christmas morning. I gulped and tried to push the feeling of falling off a cliff from my head.
I opened the screen door and invited him in. That’s when he realized I wasn’t smiling back at him. His smile faltered a little, and he seemed to stop himself from coming closer.
“What’s wrong, Hope?”
I thought about saying a thousand things to try and smooth this over, to make what I had to show him, and to tell him, easier to take. Maybe it would have worked too. He was a nice guy. Forgiveness was probably in his nature.
“I have something to show you,” I said, my voice no more than a whisper, and then walked back towards my kitchen. I turned the laptop to face him as he came in, but his eyes didn’t leave me until he was standing right beside me.
“It’s on the screen,” I said, closing my eyes like a child, but then forcing them open again.
He looked down at the screen, and it took a moment before I saw him recognize himself. He laughed.
“When the…”
“Sometime when we were…” I just couldn’t say it. “I remember there being a flash of light, but I thought it was just lightning from the storm.” I stepped back just a bit. I looked right into his eyes as I spoke.
“I found the camera on the floor of the bedroom this morning.”
His lips pursed in thought a moment, and then he shrugged his shoulders. “Your camera made me look better than I do.”
A dry laugh bubbled up my throat as tears started to swell in my eyes.
I reached down and hit the arrow button and the next photograph replaced the old one.
It was the book cover. A slightly different tint to the light, a little sharper, cropped so that it fit as a cover… but not cropped enough you didn’t know who it was.
Jake’s smile dimmed and he shook his head. “What is this?”
I swallowed, my throat dry as sand, the breath I took in burning.
“My boss called after you left. The author hated my newest cover and they wanted something knew right then or I would be replaced.”
Jake didn’t look at me, but I could tell he was watching me in his peripheral vision.
“I saw the camera on the floor, downloaded its pictures and found that one.”
The air that escaped through his nose was a sarcastic laugh. He bent down and looked at the image on my laptop. I was almost certain he was going to swipe it off the table and turn it into so many broken pieces.
Instead he used the arrow button to flick from one image to the other, over and over.
“So I…” I suddenly couldn’t force the words out of my mouth. They were clogged and clotted in my throat.
“So you found this,” he gestured with his hand, “and decided to use it to pacify your boss and the author.” He sounded so damn calm.
He turned and looked me in the eye. His gaze was arctic cold, his melted chocolate eyes now dark, hard holes. Pitiless.
“I take it they liked the cover and your job is now safe.”
I blinked back the tears that wanted so badly to fall. “They were thrilled.”
He nodded, a tight smile making his sensuous mouth look thin and angry.
“I have to sign something, right. One of those releases?” His eyes were now trained on the front door, looking over my head. He wanted away from me, and as fast as he could get that way.
A release… I hadn’t even thought...
I’d been so scared of how he would react, I hadn’t even thought of the legal ramifications.
I opened the drawer where I kept some, just in case I needed to persuade a model over coffee before we started. I pulled a pen out as well.
I placed them both on the kitchen table and then stepped away.
The instant Jake turned and leaned over to sign the paper I wanted to grab the release and tear it to shreds. I wanted to throw myself at his feet and beg him for forgiveness. All I had to do was tell Janine and Olivia they couldn’t use the photo. Without permission—without this cursed release form—the photo could never be used.
But I’d already lost him. I could tell just by the look on his face. I’d hurt him, cut him deeply, deeper than I probably knew… and it wasn’t something to be mended.
We hadn’t had enough time together to have enough between us to help what I’d done heal. We were practically strangers, and now we’d never be anything more.
Jake read the release, told me, “You can keep the two hundred bucks,” and then signed it. He set the pen down carefully, looked at the computer screen once more, and then turned and walked out of my kitchen and out of my life.
The saddest thing in the world is to watch someone walk away who has just left you. You watch as the distance between your body and theirs grows.
The screen door banged when he left my house, and then his truck started, the engine catching with a roar. I heard tires squeal as he raced away, as far as his truck would take him, probably.
I sat down hard on one of my kitchen chairs and stared out the front screen door. Tears started dripping from my eyes, down my nose, and I didn’t do anything to stop them, to wipe them away, I just sat there and wrapped my arms around myself.
It was over. Over before it had really gotten a chance to begin.
And I was going to have to remember the look of betrayal on Jake’s face until the day I died.
*The End*
Thank you for reading my novella. I hope you enjoyed it. If you did, then help others find it. Review it and lend it to others.
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Table of Contents
Copyright
C hapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
