One suit. One pair of jeans. One pair of Chuck Taylors. Two t-shirts. Three pairs of boxers. Three pairs of socks. Everything else is camera gear—my Leica, and my lenses. My tripod, and my cleaning kit. Batteries. Filters. Extra lens caps.
The Leica’s an old film camera. I use a digital Canon for work, purely because clients want to see the end product before they leave the building, and that’s impossible when you have to go home and develop the shots. When I’m shooting for me, though, I’ll always use the Leica. It’s so old. It was the very first camera I ever bought, back when I was just a kid. I saved for two years solid, driving my mom around and running errands before I had enough money to pick it up second hand. I dropped it back in college and my heart nearly exploded out of my chest. Thankfully it survived. Mostly. Now it has beautiful, strange light leaks that color and distort the pictures I take. It’s like it’s haunted or something. Ghosts and obscure shadows hover in the backgrounds of the self-portraits and urban landscapes I develop.
Rae turns onto her back, breasts exposed, pussy exposed, and takes another long drag from her joint. Her auburn hair spills out on the mattress around her head like a pool of blood. “Will you bring me back a souvenir?” she asks. “Something really cheesy and lame. Something I can put on my keychain maybe.” Her face is suddenly hidden behind a veil of smoke.
“Probably not. Port Royal isn’t a souvenir kind of place. And I’ll forget.”
“Fair enough.”
This is the dynamic of our arrangement: Rae asks me something, I’m brutally honest in response, and she doesn’t get mad. Perfect. It works both ways, too. She doesn’t lie to me. Doesn’t play any weird head games. We tell each other exactly what we’re thinking, and most of the time it helps keep things ticking over smoothly. No hurt feelings. No unmet expectations.
“Are you going to hook up with your old high school sweetheart when you’re in town? That’s what happens when people go home for funerals, isn’t it?” Rae asks. She pouts, but she’s not angry with me. She’s undoubtedly sad that she won’t be able to join in. She doesn’t realize that what she’s said has made me angry, though. I turn my back on her, snatching up my t-shirt from the floor and pulling it on. I grab a fresh pair of boxers and pull those on too, my skin feeling hot and prickly.
“No. No high school sweetheart fucking for me.”
“Did she move away? Did you guys have a raging fight before you broke up? What was her name?”
“I didn’t have a high school sweetheart. I was a virgin until I was eighteen.” I grit out the words, hoping Rae will hear how clipped and pissed off I sound so she won’t probe any deeper into the matter, but she can be a little oblivious sometimes. Either that, or she hears how pissed off I am just fine and that only makes her more curious.
“But you loved someone through high school, right? You must have. Everyone had a crush on someone in high school.”
“Nope. Not me.”
“Liar.” She gets up off the bed and pads naked out onto the balcony. She flicks the butt of her joint over the side of the building and then leans against the wall, watching me. She crosses her arms underneath her breasts—the breasts I came all over about twenty minutes ago—and raises an eyebrow at me. “I was fucking my high school gym teacher when I was sixteen. He was my high school crush.”
“Somehow, that information does not surprise me, Rae.”
“He was married. Had three kids. I was fascinated by the fact that he had back hair. All of the shitty little punks in my year were still trying to grow pubes on their balls and Mike was just covered in all this hair.”
“That’s very disturbing information.”
“That I used to be into hairy guys?”
I throw a bunch of magazines onto the mattress—plane reading material—and then I duck down to cast an eye underneath the bed. My dress shoes are around here somewhere, I know they are. “No. The fact that you were fucking a married man with three children and you don’t seem all that bothered about it. That’s disturbing.” Damn. No shoes. Fuck.
“He was the one who was cheating, Callan. He was the one lying to his wife and kids when he snuck out at night. He told them he was going bowling with friends from work when really he was meeting me in a motel so he could fuck my little sixteen-year-old pussy.”
“So, he was a liar and a pedophile. Wonderful. Have you seen a pair of black leather shoes anywhere around here?”
“He wasn’t a pedophile. Age of consent in Maryland is sixteen. I was legal.”
I stand up straight and look at her. “That makes it totally okay then.”
“Why are you so pissed off, babe?” Rae pushes away from the balcony wall and comes back inside. She places her hands on my chest and makes the same soft purring sound she makes when I go down on her. “Are you mad that I was fucking an older guy in school and you weren’t fucking anybody at all?”