I nod. It’s working. “She belongs with him—Nathan—her husband. He’s right for her, I guess. I think I would’ve realized after it was too late, that I wasn’t.”
“Is that how you saw me?” she asks. “Unhappy? Cold? Someone to be rescued?”
“Oh, God. No.” I squat and take her face in my hands. “You’re the warmest, most loving girl. You know that? You have so much to give, and I just take and take. I’m not even sorry about it.”
The corner of her mouth twitches. “I wasn’t like that with Rich. Or anyone really. Just you.”
“Good. That makes me happy.” When she smiles, my heart melts. I never want her to feel inferior or question my feelings for her. I hope her insecurity is only because we’re still new, and that one day soon, she’ll hear me when I tell her how wonderful she is and stop needing reminders. I lean over her, blocking her view, as I trash the photos. She lets me. Seeing them again makes me feel many things, but mostly just sick to my stomach. I’m not sorry about erasing them for good.
Halston kisses me on the cheek and rolls the chair back to get up. She takes her phone and leaves the room. I think I’ve diffused the situation, but I’m not entirely sure. Because once in a while, rare as it is, it feels as though the more I get to know Halston, the harder she is to read.
26
The afterimage of Sadie’s naked body is still burned into my vision when I walk out of Finn’s studio. If he photographed me that way, face and all, would I come off as confident as her? By Sadie’s expression, she knew she had Finn on the hook. He and I have been together longer than they were. He didn’t love her like he does me. I know that’s true, but sitting there, faced with her beauty and poise, I couldn’t help thinking about all the things I’m not—normal, calm, cheerful, charming. But I am warm, unlike her.
I check my phone. I was only away from it half an hour, but the amount of notifications makes me stop in my tracks. I can’t even scroll to the bottom of the lock screen. I type in my passcode and my mouth falls open. “Finn?Finn. Come here.”
He appears in the hallway. “What?”
I show him the screen. “Look. They keep coming. Like, a lot of them.”
“Why? What happened?”
I wrack my brain. The only explanation is that we’ve been featured by someone big, but when that happens, it’s generallytheiraccount that blows up, not ours. “Did you just post something?” I ask.
“No. I was with you.”
The last photo Finn shared has more likes than usual, which doesn’t make sense. It’s my freshly-manicured, dark-nailed hands cupped together, filled with bobby pins. It was just a filler we threw together since we’ve been hard at work on the lingerie shoot.
But as I look through our notifications, I realize it’s not that one they’re interested in. Users are going back to where it all began. Our coffee series, the first three photos, is getting like after like after like. I open each of them.
Finn sees it at the same time as I do, reading upside down. “Does that one havetwenty-one-hundred?”
I stumble back into the studio and sit on the sofa. Comments are coming in faster than I can track. “Check your e-mail,” I tell him as I look through everything we’ve been tagged in recently. There are more than usual today, a few feature accounts included, each with thousands of followers. Still, I’m not sure why they all chose the same photo. “I can’t figure it out,” I say. “It’s not Butter Boudoir; they don’t even have many more followers than we do. I have no idea where this is coming from.”
Finn’s leather chair creaks when he sits back. “I do.”
“You do? Where?”
He massages his jaw, looking at the computer screen. “It’s dumb.”
“What is it?” I get up and read over his shoulder. “A Buzzfeed article?”
“Yeah. ‘Twelve sexy photographers to follow now.’”
“Holy shit. Why is that dumb? Our stuffissexy.”
“No. They don’t mean it like that. Here’s the subtitle: ‘These photographers are even sexier than the photos they take.’” He scrolls down to number one on the list, and it’s Finn’s face. His sun-kissed skin. His butterscotch hair and mossy-green eyes. The photo from the bio section of his website.
Underneath it is the photo of me licking coffee off my forearm and a caption that reads,We’d be drooling too.
“Sexy photographers,” he explains. “As in, every photographer in the article is—well, according tothem. . .”
“Sexy,” I finish.
He moves down the list. A couple other men are included, but most of the accounts featured are women shooting female boudoir—pretty pouts, big eyes, delicate bralettes, smooth-skinned, toned asses. All the images are embedded on the site, so people can follow with one click. They don’t even have to leave the page.
“Someone e-mailed me about this a couple days ago,” Finn says, rubbing his temples. “She asked if she could feature us. I didn’t think it was a big deal.”
