He was still hard against my backside, but his peacoat covered him so that he wasn’t just strolling around the market with a raging boner.
We stepped outside, the lights feeling duller than they had just moments ago.
He directed me so that I was leaning against the outside of the photo booth, him crowding me a little as we waited for the photos to print like he didn’t want anyone else to see me like this. Only him.
I didn’t know what to say. He wanted me every morning and every night... He’d just said so. But I’d said plenty of meaningless things in the throes of lust. Love. Need. Want. It didn’t actually mean anything. It couldn’t.
The photo booth spat out our last photo strip and for a brief moment I felt a little embarrassed, which was ridiculous. I didn’t have a following like Bee or nearly as much on-screen experience, because the behind the scenes of it all was really what excited me about porn and film. But still, I’d done my share of performing. Compared to the everyday person, I was more of a porn star than I wasn’t.
And yet the thought of Isaac seeing what he’d done to me right there in black and white on that little strip of photo paper made me feel exposed.
Isaac studied the photos, his tongue grazing his bottom lip, and then he put both photo strips in his pocket right alongside the ornament I’d bought him.
“Mine,” he said with a slight grin.
And then he took my hand and walked me back to the car, where it still sat in its crooked-ass parking spot with a pink parking ticket tucked under the windshield wiper.
The chilly air on my bare leg was a constant reminder of the hole he’d torn in my tights. They were ruined, but I didn’t think I’d ever be able to bring myself to throw them away.
Chapter Eight
Isaac
Sunny parked at the back of the mansion, near the door that led to (what used to be) the servants’ staircase. She didn’t readjust her skirt from climbing out of the car, and as we walked inside, I could see the bottom edge of the hole in her tights. And oh my God,who caredthat fucking around with the best friend of my best friend’s wife was a bad idea, or that she didn’t want to be my muse?
She was adorable and ridiculous, and her mouth tasted like cinnamon and sugar from the hot nuts, and the way her cunt had felt in the photo booth, the hottest thing in a cold world, tight and clutching and silky around my fingers...
I mean, did it really count as a bad idea if we’d already crossed the line? Maybe we could just write off tonight as a Bad Idea Night and start fresh tomorrow—
But as I was about to pin her against the wall and suggest this very thing, her phone chimed. She pulled it from her pocket as she toed the door shut behind her, and then she made a face thatwas completely indecipherable to me. It looked almost like... guilt?
“I, um. I think I have to make a call,” she said. She was avoiding my gaze in a way that made me feel like someone had pulled a bathtub plug loose at the bottom of my chest. But also it was late, and we weren’t together, and she didn’t owe me not making any phone calls, or even telling me who’d texted and needed her so urgently.
But.
Was it such a crime to want Sunny Palmer all to myself? Just for another hour or two? I’d buy her all the hot nuts she wanted. I’d even stop hissing back at her cat.
“I’ll catch up with you later,” Sunny said, waggling the phone in the air and then dropping it quickly again, like she didn’t want me to see the screen. Maybe she was just trying to make her escape after we’d tumbled frombad ideatoamateur photo booth pornin the middle of a Vermont town square.
Which was probably smart. Probably for the best.
“Right,” I said as I watched her walk half-backward on the stairs, eyeing me like I was a teacher giving her a hall pass. “I can take a hint,” I added. “I totally understand. See you around.”
Her eyebrows pinched together, but then her phone chimed again and she groaned. “We’ll do a photo booth postmortem tomorrow, I promise.”
And then she fled up the stairs.
The next day as I watched Mr. Tumnus sniff and then stalk away from some painfully expensive cat food I’d ordered on the counsel of the Cat Advisory Text Thread, an idea came to me. I hopped up onto my built-in laundry folding table and texted the thread.
Me:I have something that’s almost a cold case, but not quite. It’s happy? Sort of?
Dee:Well, does anyone die *at all*?
Betty:I like happy things!
Me:Someone does die in a war. And I guess since the story happens in 1944... everyone else is dead... now? Does that count?
Dee:Just give us the rundown, son. The Crime Time server has been quiet this week anyway.
