Page 35 of Hell and Halos

Good. You should be stressed by me.

But I shut down the relief I want to feel and push it away.

The last thing I need right now is for Marcus to see me as a threat. So I cower a little. Sinking into the wingbacks of the chair. I pull my now bare legs up to my chest. And I know exactly what I'm doing because Marcus's eyes dart between my legs and linger on my pussy. My underwear the only thing between him and his desires right now.

He actually exhales, his words low and breathy. "Hold that pose, darling. Let me grab the camera."

I hold it. Only my eyes move, tracking him as he scans the room.

He's lookin' for a camera, and I realize that the one he dropped is still on the floor where it fell, the lens cracked, a spiderweb of fractured glass catchin' the light like something delicate that got exactly what it deserved.

Marcus is walking toward the shelves where Eleanor kept her equipment.

There are six cameras in view and I know every single one of them intimately—not just their names but their personalities, the way each one sits in the hand, the particular resistance of their shutters, the smell of the oil in their mechanisms on a warm afternoon.

I know what they do, and what they refuse to do, and how to coax the best out of them under bad light. I know this not because Eleanor ever let me touch one, but because after we were done shootin' she would turn me into her scribe. Her little secretary. Her penmanship project in a prairie dress.

She would dictate settings, and lenses, and aperture readings, and the precise angle of diffused light, and every other granular, technical thing about each shot while I sat across from her with her leather notebook open on my lap and a fountain pen in my hand, tryin' to keep up.

"Every polished lady has a signature style, Savannah," she told me, not once but a hundred times, referring to my handwriting. "You must make your mark in every way possible."

And then she would talk for ten or twenty minutes straight, barely pausin' for breath, her vocabulary shifting gears without warning from the poetic to the purely technical, and I would write in the curling, deliberate cursive she'd drilled into me at eight years old, my hand crampin', my loops going soft at the edges, tryin' to keep every word of her exactly as she said it.

So I can name every single camera as Marcus browses the shelves in search of an accomplice for his photog debut.

The Hasselblad 500C/M. Square format, waist-level finder, the one Eleanor used for all the ranch exteriors.

The Mamiya RZ67. Her workhorse. She used it for the cattle portraits, believe it or not. The ones that sold for twelve thousand dollars apiece at auction because rich people will pay anything for a cow that looks like it has a soul.

The Leica M6. Rangefinder. 35mm.

The Contax 645. Autofocus medium format. Weddings. Events.

The Linhof Technika. 4x5 large format. Landscapes only. Too slow for people.

And the Phase One. Modern, technical. It's a squared-off black box with a thick handgrip down the right side, and a fat cylinder of a lens sticking straight out the front.

Marcus has no idea what he's looking at. Not a single clue. He reaches for the Leica M6. It's small, looks simple, something he could work.

"Not that one," I say sweetly.

He turns to me. "Why not?"

"Because, Marcus," I force civility. "The Leica is a camera for ordinary things. The kind of camera you aim out a car window as you're traveling across the desert. It's not for studio work."

He squints his eyes as he stares at the Leica. Looks at the shelf, then turns to me. "Which one, then, darling? Which one should we use to commemorate this special occasion? Hmm? Which one do you want me to point at your pussy?"

I don't react. Simply give him exactly what he asked for. "The Phase One." I nod my head at the shelf. "That one to your left."

Marcus, like a true art luddite, reaches for the one next to it—the Contax 645—its name spelled out in silver capital letters right across the top of the lens, bold as a billboard, CONTAX, which is absolutely, unambiguously, not Phase One.

"The one next to it," I say. "The big one. The Contax is manual focus. The Phase One is point and shoot."

A lie.

But he has no idea.

"If we're going to do this, Marcus, let's at least do it right."