Page 103 of Safe With You

The camera lowered just enough for me to see his eyes over it.

“That’s usually when you look the most like yourself.”

Before I could figure out what to do with that, he lifted the camera again.

“Don’t think about it.”

“Too late.”

His mouth curved.

Click.

I shook my head. “You’re annoying.”

Click.

“See?”

I laughed despite myself.

Click.

“Ellis.”

“What?”

“You’re doing it again.”

“I know.”

I looked away before he could catch whatever that did to my face.

He did anyway.

A few minutes later, he moved us toward the café. He photographed me behind the counter, then sitting at one of the tables with a book and my coffee. When I started posing again, he asked me a question or made some unnecessary comment until I forgot what my face was doing.

It should have annoyed me.

Instead, somewhere along the way, it became easy.

That was the strange part.

I had never liked having my picture taken when I knew it was happening. Candid pictures were different. There was nothing to prepare for. Nothing to fix before someone pressed the button.

But give me a camera pointed directly at my face and suddenly I had too many teeth, nowhere reasonable to put my arms, and no idea what expression I’d been using naturally for the previous thirty-one years.

Ellis didn’t tell me to smile.

Not once.

He didn’t ask me to tilt my chin until my neck felt unnatural or keep shifting my body until I became convinced there was something wrong with the way I’d been standing in the first place.

He just talked to me.

And took pictures in between.

Eventually, he lowered the camera.