He breathes heavily onto my forehead, into my hair, then he plants a chaste kiss on my head.
I don’t bother getting up to get a towel. I just wrap myself around him, messy and sweaty until he does the same. We stay that way for a while. Long enough for a couple of commercial breaks and for our breathing to even out. I’m kind of afraid to look him in the face, but he’s the first one to move, unwrapping himself from around me, and giving me a gentle kiss.
He gets out of the bed and comes back with a towel, my cigarettes, and an ashtray. There’s a familiar flutter in my stomach as I remember him this way—kind and thoughtful Shane.
At least until he ditched me.
I light a cigarette and find the envelope of pictures on the corner of the bed. I balance the ashtray on my chest as I sift through the pictures again.
Some of them I’ve seen and some of them I haven’t. I would go into the darkroom with Shane while he was developing some ofthem. But I’ve never seen the ones of Everett running track. Or the ones of Shane and me, especially by the river.
I take a drag and hold the photo up. Shane, lying beside me, looks up at it too.
“I forgot about this,” I say.
“I didn’t,” Shane says.
“Well, you got to keep the pictures.”
He grabs the cigarette from my fingers and takes a drag. “I kept them in a shoebox under my bed. I know that’s shitty, but I didn’t really know what else to do with them.”
“You could’ve entered them in that contest.”
He takes another drag and hands the cigarette back to me. “By then, I found out Gina was pregnant.”
There’s a little bit of a sting at the mentioning of his kid. I don’t begrudge him his daughter, honestly any kid would be lucky to have a dad like Shane, but it’s a reminder of this new life he started. And waiting for him in Port Leyden.
And I’ve got one waiting for me in the city.
“They’re good,” I say, flipping through the pictures. “Really good.”
“Well, it was you that was really good.”
I look over at him.
He smiles sadly. “You were my muse.”
Five years ago, I was so insanely in love with this asshole, I couldn’t have been cured even if I’d been institutionalized for it. I would have done anything for him. I was pathetic. And I swore I wouldn’t be that way again. I swore I wouldn’t let him back into my life. I swore I would just tolerate him this one last time, then be done with him forever.
But I was never really done with him, and I sure as shit won’t be now.
Good going, I tell myself.
Shane’s brown eyes search my own. “What?”
I hadn’t realized I was staring at him. I shuffle through a couple more photos. “You’re not in very many of these.” I hold up the one of us on the rocks again. “You’re only in this one.”
“Because I was taking them.”
I stub out my cigarette, set the ashtray on the nightstand, and sit up. In a lot of these pics, I can sort of remember Shane behind the lens, directing me, telling me what light to stand in, telling me to move or not move. Then he’d have to go home to a pile of trash and fix dinner for his grandparents.
“You always took care of everybody else,” I say to him softly. “You had to take care of your grandparents. And now your little girl.” Then I look over my shoulder at him. “But who takes care of you?”
He blinks at me a couple of times, a sadness settling in his eyes. He looks over at the TV where Homer Simpson is scratching his beer belly. “Nobody, I guess.”
I set the photos down and get up off the bed. I look for a towel and head toward the bathroom, then I stop and turn to look at him. “I would have,” I tell Shane Carraway with all the sincerity that I have left in me. “I would have taken care of you, if you’d given me the chance.”
I go into the bathroom. I shut the door. I turn the water on.
