“Thank you,” I whisper.
“Now I need you to pose for me, or we will never get this photoshoot started.”
“Got it.”
I watch him move around the space from corner to corner. Some of his normal scatterbrained self is on display even now, but he seems to know this room better than anywhere else I’ve ever seen him. He moves gigantic canvases around like they’re nothing. He picks up a camera that looks like it weighs a ton, hoisting it up and propping it into a different corner.
I don’t know exactly what he means when he says he wants me to pose.
I start to unbutton my shirt and for some reason, my heart starts pounding like a mallet hitting my chest. I’ve always known that if a show or movie needed me to do a nude scene, I wouldn’t hesitate for a second. The human body is beautiful to me, and I’ve never felt a need to be nervous about it.
But it’s going to beChasetaking my photos, so of course it has to feel different now.
Everything with him isn’t simple. Not for me, at least.
Chase looks over and sees me undoing my buttons, and he shakes his head. “Oh, no, no. I meant we can do some test shots with you fully clothed.”
I exhale and puff out a laugh, feeling my cheeks heat. “Sorry. I’m a little out of it.”
“Don’t apologize,” he says.
He’s being so accommodating.
Authoritative, but also formal in a way I’ve never seen before.
I expect him to crack a joke or come over and rip the shirt off of me, but he’s in photographer mode, still roaming around the room and rearranging things.
Fuck, I can’t handle him wearing those glasses.
They look so sexy on him, as if the shape of them only serves to highlight his cheekbone structure even more than usual.
“Do you wear glasses sometimes when you paint?”
“Not for painting. But for photography sometimes. It doesn’t make a lot of sense, but having slightly blurry vision almost helps for painting sometimes.” He glances up at me. “Not for pictures, though. I want to see everything today.”
He instructs me on where to stand, leaning my arm up against the edge of the window pane, and then he proceeds to try out an enormous number of different cameras. One of them I recognize as a Polaroid, at least. Some of the others are tiny, and others are big, clunky and heavy. He even brings out an ancient-looking thing where he has to tuck his head underneath a blanket to look in the viewfinder, taking a test shot of me.
When he settles on which cameras he wants to use, he then instructs me into different positions.
First I’m standing, then sitting with my knees bunched, then lying down on my elbows on the floor, staring into the camera lens.
The sound of the city comes in through the windows. Cars move through the still-wet streets outside, and soon the light goes from patchy clouds into continuous sun.
“Okay,” Chase announces after a while, nodding at me. “Let’s fucking do this.”
He walks over to a pair of speakers on the table and fiddles with his phone until music starts coming out.
“Right. What should I do first?”
His eyes land on mine, and for a moment I feel the same intensity radiating from them that I felt on the first night we spent on the rooftop last year.
“Take off your clothes, Logan.”
He stands there watching me with a camera slung around his shoulder, making no attempt to hide that he’s going to have his eyes on me the entire time I strip.
That nervous feeling rears its head in me again as I start undoing my shirt buttons for real this time, one by one.
I fumble with one of them.
