Especially with a camera.
My attention snags on a white paper cup left on a covered table. Printed on the side is Lait Noir’s black logo, the café where I found the journal. It isn’t far from here, but it’s not the closest café to this gallery.
Someone picks it up. White-blonde, nude-lipped, and dressed in head-to-toe black, her fingers wrap around the thick middle of the cup. She has short, dark nails and milk-white skin. I study her as she studies one of the photographs.
She’s put together. Classy. Not the torn-up soul I’d pictured with dark hair and eyebrows to hang over her frown. There’s no stoop in her posture from carrying the weight of the world on her shoulders. Maybe it isn’t her. I step closer to the window and try to get a better look at her eyes just as she turns them down from the exhibit. She balances her coffee in the crook of her arm and scribbles on a notepad.
She’swriting.
My body warms, a conditioned response to her pen on paper. I salivate for her words. What about the photograph in front of her is worth noting? Was I wrong to call it bland? I want to know what she thinks.
She travels along the wall, squints, scratches behind her ear. She sips her coffee. People stop her to say something that makes her smile. I don’t want to look at her body—it was her words that got me here—but I can’t help myself. As she talks, she gestures, and her breasts bounce. They’d be big enough for my hands, and I’ve been told I have some serious paws. She’s got a small waist, great legs, blonde hair that hangs long and layered down her back. I lick my lips.
She flips the notebook shut and shoves it in her purse while nodding at the person speaking. When she shifts, I shift. A man shakes her hand, and she excuses herself. She heads outside, toward me, and before I even know what’s happening, she’s pushing out the gallery door and standing two feet away. Inhaling deeply, she leans back against a patch of brick wall between the window and the door, just enough to shade her. She turns her eyes to the stars.
“I already checked,” I say. “It’s too light out.”
She flinches, barely glancing over. “You mean too dark?”
“Mmm, no,” I say. “If it were pitch dark, you’d be able to see them—the stars. But all this light . . .” I nod through the nearby window. “Enjoying the show?”
She doesn’t respond at first, then says, “Yes. Very much. Which one’s yours?”
“I’m not one of the artists. Thankfully.”
“Oh. I saw your camera and assumed . . .” She finally stands up straight and squints at me. “What do you mean ‘thankfully’?”
“I haven’t been inside, but they’re crap from what I can see.”
“Crap? That’s somebody art in there.”
It could easily be my work on those white walls, but if this is my poetess standing in front of me, she writes to move people, and these photos wouldn’t budge a feather. “It’s just my opinion.”
She steps a little closer. “And who are you?”
“Just a passerby,” I murmur, feasting on this hard-earned moment of intimacy. She’s younger than I thought. All that black clothing and studied posture made her look around my age, thirty-three, from a distance, but she’s not even thirty. I try to see her eyes again, but again, she’s not looking at me.
“I should get back inside,” she says.
“No.”
“What?”
Shit. I didn’t mean it to come out like that. Trying to cover up my command, I sniff. “I mean, weren’t you leaving?”
She shakes her head.
“So why’d you come out here?” I ask, hoping conversation is a better tactic for getting her to stay than blurting things out.
“I needed a cigarette.”
I remember the December sketch. Colorless hair. Smoker. I’m getting warmer. She makes no move to get a pack out, so I say, “I’m sorry. I don’t smoke.”
“Me neither.”
A smoker without a cigarette, a seemingly nice girl without her naughty journal. Now that I’m closer, I see her better. Her brand of blonde is stark. It almost matches the color of her eyes, a steely shade of gray that might even be ice blue. It’s hard to tell in the absence of light. In the shadow she’s under, they’re just smooth like glass, the calm before a storm.
I’ve found her. It’s her journal I have, her words I possess. I’m the current owner of her thoughts. But what to do with this information?
