Star Bright (Bright Young Things Book 1)

by Staci Hart

  Click.

  “Dammit,” I said on a chuckle.

  “Take another drink and close your eyes.”

  I hesitated for a second before downing what was left in my glass. Once I set it down, I closed my eyes and folded my hands in my lap, my body turned three-quarters. My heart fluttered, shaken by nerves. Not because I didn’t trust him.

  I wanted to be beautiful for him, and I didn’t know how.

  “Have you been photographed before?”

  I cracked a lid to give him a look. “Picked up an Us Weekly lately?”

  “Close your eyes,” he directed, amused. “Not like that. Not a bastardized, unwanted invasion. I mean like this.”

  “I’ve done a little modeling, but I’ve never been good at it.”

  “No, not like that either. Not a sell, not a gimmick. A truth.”

  “Then no.”

  Click.

  I resisted the urge to open my eyes.

  “Truth can’t be staged, can’t be forced. It happens when it thinks no one’s looking.” Click. “You can’t command something to be truthful, to be real. You can’t even ask it of yourself, because thinking about it sends it burrowing deeper.”

  “Why is that, do you think?” My head bowed.

  “It’s different for everyone. But mostly, it’s because we’re afraid. Truth requires trust, and trust has to be earned. But that’s the problem—trust is also the space where we’re most vulnerable. So how do you give someone that power? How do you give them your truth, knowing they could exploit it?”

  Click.

  “I don’t know,” I answered quietly.

  “I do—they take it without you knowing, and you won’t realize it until it’s theirs.”

  The streak of emotion in my chest was an amalgamation of feeling, of shock and of recognition, of hope that I could find someone worthy of my trust and fear of what would happen when they stole it.

  “Open your eyes.”

  The shutter rapid-fired when I did.

  He rose, stepping around the camera, holding my gaze as he approached. Silently, he smoothed my hair, exposing my shoulder as his eyes charted my face. I wondered what he saw, what he wanted behind torn eyes, his face cut in two. One side planes and angles, the other darkness, shrouded but for the catch of light in his eyes and a glint on his cheekbone. Just a glimpse, a glimmer of his truth. What he showed the world cast in light, what he kept to himself left unseen.

  A breath, and the moment was gone, wiped away by his cavalier smile. “Come with me.”

  I stood on shaky knees, all the blood in my body seeming to have rushed to my chest in a hot bloom of warmth so fast, it left my hands chilled. And I followed.

  He stopped at his camera and fiddled with it before heading away. The darkness swallowed him up, and I hesitated, too unfamiliar with my surroundings to risk breaking an ankle tripping over anything. But with another click, and a slice of crimson appeared before me with Levi’s silhouette cut from it.

  A smile rose on my face, my eyes wide as I stepped into his dark room.

  The room was shades of red and shadows of black cast over the large table in the middle, topped with tubs of developer, and the counters around the walls housed a number of tools I didn’t know the names of. Levi bustled around preparing what I could only figure was a roll of film, and while he was occupied, I came to a stop in front of a wall of black-and-white photos.

  They told a story I couldn’t put into words, a tale of shadows and light. Faces more darkness than highlight, people in places I’d never been, though none of them were foreign. Children with sunken eyes and lips touched with smiles. A den of smoke and pillows and closed eyes. A silhouette of a prostitute smoking a cigarette, a plume of smoke curling toward the sky, leaning against a wall while she waited.

  I felt him behind me before he spoke. “I’m not sure why I’ve never wanted to photograph happy things. It feels … I don’t know. Easy, somehow. But this? This is honest. Even though it hurts, it’s the truth, and there’s something beautiful about that.”

  “But it doesn’t only hurt,” I said. “It’s too beautiful to hurt, but there’s something … something else.” I stared at a shot of a woman, looking into her eyes to find her truth, like he’d said. “It’s longing. Searching. Every one of these people is looking for something they lost, and I don’t know anything more human than that. The desire to find what’s missing. The wish to be whole.”

  I turned to him, finding him once again cast in shadows. And all I wanted to do was ask him what he’d lost, what he was searching for. But instead, I smiled and said, “How’d I do?”

  He pulled me into him by the waist, and I could hear the smile on his lips when he spoke. “You’re something else. Anybody ever tell you that?”

  “Once or twice.”

  His lips brushed mine too briefly for my liking. “Want to see your pictures?”

  “Would it make me a baby if I said not really?”

  “A little,” he answered on a laugh, moving for a projector-looking machine. “Come on, I know you at least trust me for that.”

  After looking at his work, I couldn’t disagree. “You didn’t take very many pictures.”

  He shrugged, messing with the machine’s dials to lower it a little. “Didn’t need very many. I got what I wanted.”

  That warmth slipped over me again. “Do you always shoot film?”

  With a click, the red light went out and the machine lit up, projecting the negative. My brain tried to flip it around and couldn’t.

  “No. I usually bring two cameras. I have a little pocket-sized SLR—it was Billy’s once upon a time—but film is a novelty. A hobby more than a reliable practice.”

  “So tell me—do you bring all the girls here?” I teased, not really wanting to know the answer.

  With a brow up, he smirked. “Only the ones that count.”

  “And how many are nudes?”

  “Why, you offering?”

  The machine light clicked off. “Only if I get to keep the negatives.”

  “That is a deal I’m willing to make.” He kissed me swiftly on his way to the tubs of chemicals, and I followed. When the paper was submerged, he handed me a pair of rubber-tipped tongs and gestured for me to poke at it.

  “Do you leave the baths out all the time?”

  “No, but I was developing before I came to meet you. They’re good for a few hours.” He reached for one of the photos hanging from the string above the table. It was of a homeless shelter in a church, a slash of sunlight beaming in through stained glass to bathe the transients in divinity.

  “They’re beautiful, Levi. All of them.”

  “I’m glad you think so,” he said quietly, earnestly, though his lips slanted. He grabbed the photo with tongs of his own and moved it into the next tub.

  “How do you find these places, these people?”

  “A lot of them are around the East Side, though it’s been so fully gentrified, there aren’t many more slums. But I’ve never had a hard time finding trouble.”

  “I bet you haven’t. Ever gotten hurt? Been in the wrong place at the wrong time?”

  He moved it to the last tub and had me nudge it around. “Plenty. Pimps don’t appreciate you following their girls around with a camera. Drug dealers don’t see the artistic value of me taking photos of their corner boys.”

  “Why do you do it? Put yourself in danger like that?”

  “Because they can’t speak for themselves, and I want the world to know what they have to say.”

  My heart twisted, but before I could speak, he pulled the photo out of the stop bath and clipped it up. And we stepped back to look in heavy silence.

  I was lit from behind by the wall of diffused light, my body little more than a shadow peppered with glimmers of my dress. There were no lines, only curves—shoulder and arms, a long neck I didn’t recognize. Chin and nose and lips, my face angled away from the camera, its features brushed with light.

  But i
t was my eyes that told the story, veiled by darkness, my irises swallowed up by my pupils. Those eyes were bottomless, hungry for something. It was the longing that lived in every one of his photographs.

  It lived in me too.

  “Levi …” I breathed. “How did you …”

  “I stole the truth for a moment—that’s all.”

  I turned to him. “What if I want it back?”

  With a step, our bodies were flush, his face darkness but for the scarlet light.

  He cupped my jaw, lifting it. “You can have the negatives, but you already gave me the moment. Nothing can erase that.”

  And there was nothing left to say.

  His lips captured mine and kept them, stole them like the truth he’d swallowed for safekeeping.

  But he could have them. I didn’t want any of it back.

  You can’t keep him, my mind whispered, but my body didn’t listen, didn’t care. All it cared about was the press of his lips, the sweep of his tongue. The strength of his hands as he lifted me up only to set me on the low counter and fit his hips between my thighs.

  With a tug, he untied the strap of my dress, and the top slid down to the curve of my waist as I clawed at his shirt to get it off of him. With a solid yank, he pulled it off and dropped it, his hands moving for my body as mine fumbled with his belt. He hissed when I had my hands around him, and I hissed back when he stroked me in return.

  “Fuck, don’t you ever wear panties?” he growled, sliding a long, thick finger into my heat.

  “Why, want me to start?”

  “Never,” he said before kissing me long and deep and hard, long enough to leave me panting when he broke away on a new mission.

  Red and black, heat and heartbeats, he moved down my body, flipping the scrap of fabric that constituted my skirt. Without preamble, he latched on to me for a bruising kiss, punishing suck, a dangerously delicious brush of teeth against the aching tip of me. My lungs emptied, fingers in his hair like reins, the tendons in my thighs contracting and releasing with every sweep of his tongue. Seconds, and I was on the edge, my awareness shrinking and dimming and receding to the place his lips fastened to my body.

  The second he knew, he backed off.

  I whimpered, pulling him back to me with his hair knotted in my fingers, but he only closed his lips for a kiss that sent a shock down my thighs.

  “Not yet,” he whispered, breathless as I was as he stood.

  I reached for his shoulders but couldn’t grasp them as he rolled on a condom. And then he leaned in, gave me what I wanted with his salty lips against mine, one hand on my hip and the other on his base as he slid into me.

  Hot and hard, he drove into me, the table banging the wall with every pump of his hips, alternating kisses for air. My arms locked around his neck, my back arching to tilt my hips. A gasp when I got the connection I sought, and my body flexed, neck to toes. He picked up the pace, driving my heart to run too fast, my breath to fail, my vision to dim.

  A flash behind closed lids, and I came with a breathy call to a higher power, hanging on to Levi, who didn’t stop. He leaned in, moaning sweet sounds of satisfaction to the sound of skin against skin. A hard thrust, pinning me still for a beat before he came with a satisfied grunt that sparked a pulse through me and around him, drawing him deeper. He took the invitation, riding it down until we were nothing but the slightest shift of hips, the length of him buried in me.

  I didn’t want him to go. And I knew instantly just how dangerous that was.

  The thought shook me with a resounding no, my arms tightening as if to keep us right there. As if I could hold us in the moment, letting him go only with the promise of collecting more moments just like this.

  The feeling was a sign, one I should have heeded.

  It was just that I didn’t care. I’d collect every moment before I had to let go for good.

  His face was buried in my neck, cradled in my arms, and when he caught his breath, he bowed his head and pressed a kiss to the curve of my shoulder. Then my jaw. Then my lips. And then he was smiling down at me.

  “We always gonna start off this way?” he asked, smoothing my hair.

  “I’m not complaining.”

  With a laugh and a retreat of his hips, he picked me up and turned us around, setting me on the ground. I held up the strings of my straps and eyed them, too lust-drunk to make any sense of it. Levi took the strings from me, but rather than tie me back up, he dropped them, hooked his fingers in my dress hanging around my waist, and pushed it down my thighs. It landed with a whisper in a sparkling pool at my feet.

  “Problem solved,” he said, popping my bare rump with his hand. “Now go get that ass in my bed. I’m not done with it yet.”

  For a second, we smiled at each other playfully, not knowing what the other was going to do. But when I took off running for his room, he chased me the whole way.

  Just like I’d hoped.

  13

  Thieves

  LEVI

  A week and a half passed in a haze of Stella.

  I didn’t know how it’d happened, the insatiable demand for each other’s company, but neither of us cared to fight it, never denying the desire to hang after work or spend the night together. In fact, we’d only been apart one night, and we almost hadn’t made it—at one point, my keys were in my hand before I talked myself down.

  And literally nothing about it was casual, starting with my feelings for her.

  The wall I’d built to keep out my guilt crumbled with every day until it was barely standing, and behind it was the truth. A truth I had to tell her—and soon.

  It might already be too late.

  Last weekend, we’d attended the French Revolution party, where I wore a powdered wig and breeches and stockings and everything, even stupid heeled shoes with a garish buckle. Begrudgingly. But I wore it. I looked ridiculous next to the vision that was Stella in her wig and corset in a dress of silver and white. She’d put a beauty mark on one of her breasts, which spilled from the top of her corset in a most approving way, just another reason I couldn’t take my eyes off of her.

  Admittance to the party was obtained not only with costume and invitation, but with a donation to Together We Rise. Invitations for the party instructed us as to what to bring and how to donate cash, and in the end, we’d collectively filled up a U-haul trailer with duffel bags and suitcases, toiletries and clothes, comfort items like teddy bears and blankets. A couple of people even brought bikes. But the biggest contribution was the money, which was announced as just shy of a million dollars. Betty informed me half of that was Stella.

  As if I didn’t have enough reasons to want her.

  The next morning, the circus article was published, and the gang went postal again while I listened silently, the voice in my head urging me to tell her turning up its volume by the day. The article on the Revolution party was finished—the rich giving back at a French Revolution party an ironic twist that practically wrote itself—but I hadn’t turned it in. Because hurting her had become unbearable.

  I had to tell her.

  I just had to figure out how.

  “You know, this costume thing is way easier for us than it is for you.” I tugged the hem of Stella’s tuxedo shirt as we walked toward Tiffany’s that morning.

  “Lucky you.” She took a bite of her Danish, and I took the opportunity to admire her.

  She was dressed as Holly Golightly when Paul Varjak woke her up after her long night of partying—Tiffany-blue eyelash mask pushed into her hair, tasseled earplugs, and a tuxedo shirt. That was it. I, on the other hand, only had to wear a suit to be considered in costume. If it wasn’t a thousand degrees out, I might not have minded so much.

  Should have just worn a sheet around my waist. Bedroom-eyes Varjak would have been a better option for the weather, even if it meant a sunburn and lack of places to stash my wallet.

  I pulled Billy’s old camera out of my pocket and snapped a picture, earning an amused look of warning. />
  Just ahead of us, a cluster of people in costume stood in front of one of the Tiffany’s windows. A couple of the guys were in suits like me, and a couple more were dressed as Holly Golightly. The girls wore some of the less iconic outfits from the movie, from the dress and gigantic hat she wore to meet Sally Tomato to the sweatshirt, jeans, and hair scarf she wore when she sang “Moon River.” One even had a guitar slung behind her back.

  “Stella,” one of them called, and the rest turned, smiling as we approached.

  “Hey, guys,” she said, making her way through the group greeting them all.

  Some split off right away, heading to the next point on the treasure hunt. The others milled around for a few minutes, eating Danishes and sipping coffee while we all peered into the window at a necklace that had to cost a cool mil, judging by the number and size of the diamonds involved.

  In the bottom corner of the small window was a little window cling with our next stop.

  Place: New York Public Library, Bryant Park

  Thing: Breakfast at Tiffany’s by Truman Capote

  Task: Vandalism in the form of your initials inside the front cover

  Next clue: In the book

  Stella was still talking to everyone as I smirked at the clue. I wondered what the rest of the day would hold. With the sun beating down on me like a baseball bat, I also wondered if my suit would survive.

  The last of the group left, and Stella pulled up next to me and leaned in to read our instructions.

  “Ooh, the library. God, I wish they had a card catalog room like they used to. Of course, it’s easier to find the book this way. Less suspicious.”

  “Wonder how long it will take the librarians to get wise?”

  “I don’t know, but we’d better get there before they do.” She smiled mischievously, one brow arched as she turned to head down Fifth.

  “Are these things always this elaborate?” I asked.

  “What do you think?”

  “Fair enough. It’s just hard to imagine one person doing all this, and this often.”