We’ve chosen a spot on the edges of the carefully planned garden, where there are a few long, narrow, weathered-wood boxes filled with dark soil. Set inside are conical, silver-wire towers, like bare Christmas trees, but at their bases there’s abundant, early summer growth—mounding plants with leaves flat and round, little botanical dinner plates.Nasturtium, the placard tells us. There’s only a few flowering blooms—cheery red and orange and yellow—but by the end of the summer, they’ll have taken over this metal cone. They’ll be people-tall and fully alive, ornamented all over with flowers.
“Here’s one.” I nod my chin in the direction of the plant in front of me, where a ladybug has just landed on a leaf that’s tipped slightly up and to the left, so from where I’m sitting—butt in the grass, legs crisscrossed and back curved slightly to get me closer—I’m looking mostly at her back end.
“Try it,” Alex says, his voice encouraging—but knowing too.
“No. I’mgoing to wait.”
This little exchange happens almost without any movement at all, and that’s how it’s been for the last ten minutes or so—we’ve got to be still and quiet, and even though I’ll pay for sitting in this position later, I have the strangest sense that I’m in my natural state out here. Still and quiet, and for once, that’s the exact right thing to be.
“We’re close, though.” His voice is so low, almost a whisper. I don’t think I imagine feeling that whisper alight on the skin of my neck. My palms suddenly feel sweaty on my camera. Weareclose—he sits beside but slightly farther back than me, so his knee is centimeters away from my hip, and whenever I speak—whenever I notice something new about what’s in my line of sight—he leans silently to the left so he’s more directly behind me, so he cansee what I see.
The ladybug’s tiny red shell lifts minutely, and I have a split-second feeling of disappointment, thinking she’ll fly away, but she settles again, turning her shiny, speckleddome of a body.
“Elbows on your knees,” Alex says from behind me, and I follow his directions, a shiver going up my spine. Silently, he moves—it’s some kind of magic, the way he must use his hands to lift the weight of his body from the ground and reposition himself. He’s behind me now, and I’m trying to stay focused, to keep my eyes on the ladybug’s cheerful march around the edge of this leaf. But I’m using all my other senses to determine the shape of him back there—how his body must be bracketing mine, how he’s near enough that I can smell his skin, how when he speaks again, I feel that whisper in a way so real that I know Iwasimagining it before.
“Make yourself the tripod. Your professor would tell you someone taking a shot this close would need one, because it’s hard to keep your hands steady when you do work this fine.”
I nod, not wanting to answer—part because I don’t want any movement of mine to disturb my subject, part because I want Alex to whisper to me like this forever. “But remember what I said. Don’t worry about your equipment.” I suppress another shudder of shameful delight. I’m not thinking about camera equipment atall.
The ladybug has turned again; she’s moving up the center of the leaf so that her whole body is on display for me. My fingers twitch on the sides of my camera, and I slowly—so slowly that it’s almost painful—lift my hands, pressing my elbows more firmlyinto my knees.
“Wait,” Alex says, and I stop with the camera half raised to my eye. “Tell me again what you’re using. Aperture.”
“F 5.6,” I breathe. “Shutterspeed, 1/500.”
“Good.”
Like she’s heard us talking about her, the ladybug stills in place. Her tiny body covers the creamy white blot in the center of the leaf, where all the planty veins coalesce. I’ve got the camera up to my eye, my finger on the shutter release. I think I’ve stopped breathing.
“Go,” he says, a single word that brings me to life, and for what must be only a few seconds all I hear is the click of the camera, all I see is my leaf, my little ladybug good luck charm posing for me, giving me permission, telling me that Professor Hiltunen’s doubts,mydoubts, were all wrong. Inside my chest there’s a rising tide of excitement—I’mgettingit.Every single one of these pictures is going to be sogood.In my head I’m halfway across a stage, my hand reached out to take my diploma.
But right as I’m thinking it, something changes in the air behind me, and Alex says, “Keep going, okay? Keep shooting.” All of a sudden, I feel a warm hand settle on my lower back, placed vertically—I can feel two of Alex’s fingers on each side of my spine, strong and purposeful, and maybe it should feel strange, this unexpected touch, right in a place where I’ve spent my life collecting tension. But it doesn’t feel strange at all, not really. He’s become part of the tripod I’ve made. He’s keeping me steadier.
Until he does it. Until he presses me forward.
It’s a slight push, hardly a fraction of pressure. When he does it, he repeats himself: “Keep going.” He’s leaning me closer to the leaf, to the ladybug, and as I shoot, my cover is blown—she sees me, hears me, feels me, whichever, and all at once her candy red shell spreads wide, a blurring, black-gray movement beneath. I can’t make my eyes work fast enough to see her take flight, and then the moment’s gone.She’sgone. All I can see in my field of vision is the leaf, plain and empty and maybe trembling, ever so slightly, from itsrunaway guest.
Alex drops his hand, and I try to remember how to breathe normally.
It the quiet I feel as though I’m coming out of a spell—the way Alex had talked to me, those gentle orders. The way he’d touched me too—a different kind of order. The way I’dlikedit.
“I guess I got enough before she took off.” My voice sounds terse, distant. It’s suspended animation, again—I’m caught. Part of me wants to stand and stretch, stalk away and look down at the view screen to see if I managed to get something before we lost—before heruined—the moment. But another part of me wants to lean back, see if that hand is still there—to push back into it until it gives, to let all my bones and muscles fold into whatever shape Alex’s body has made behind mine.
“You want to get out of here?”
I turn my body without thinking, feel an answering twinge in my neck, and suppress a wince. I hold my camera in one hand, plant the other in the soft, slightly overlong grass, feel it tickle between my fingers as I adjust to face him. And—yeah. I could’ve folded right into that space. He’s got both feet planted on the ground, his knees spread wide, his elbows resting atop them. He uses his right hand to hold his left wrist. I picture him unlocking that gate andletting me in.
“What about the pictures?” I ask.
“I think you got them. If you didn’t, wecan come back.”
“Shouldn’t we—” I tip the camera forward, gesture vaguely at the viewfinder. My mouth resets, and I feel the tension there. I don’t want to look down yet. I don’t want to see the pictures of that empty leaf.
“Better to see these on a big screen, the first time. Trust me.”
He moves quickly, almost as though he’s trying to keep me on the move too, keep me distracted. He separates his hands, holds one out toward mine, where I’m keeping my camera in my grip, and without thinking, I pass it to him. He stands smoothly, his once-huddled body now a long column, and somehow he’s also managed to grab my bag from where I’d rested it beside us on the ground. He’s tall and lean, backlit by the hazy summer sun, as relaxed as I’ve seen him since he came here, strong and flexible and—free. Like he could walk right back out of those gates and never come back.
Trust him?
