Naked Read online

The chair creaked.

  My wrist cramped from the camera’s weight, my fingers holding it in a death grip. I eased it free and settled it gently on the end table next to the chair. Then I pulled Alex by the front of his shirt until I could kiss him.

  “What would it take for you to drop that thing?”

  He tasted of me, of my desire. I couldn’t tell if he was hard. I could reach between us, grab his cock and find out, but for now I slid my fingers through his hair.

  “I’d drop a baby before I dropped my camera.”

  He laughed. “That’s what I thought.”

  We kissed, each kiss still new. Each felt it would always be new, after two weeks or two years, or two hundred. I knew it wouldn’t always be like this. Nothing ever was. But that’s how it felt.

  “Does it turn you on?” he asked.

  “What? You going down on me? Umm, hello, yes.”

  Alex laughed again. Pulled away. “Taking pictures.”

  I licked my mouth and tasted myself. I had no easy, ready answer. “Sometimes.”

  His hands slid up my thighs and stayed there. He steadied the chair, kept it from rocking. “That time?”

  I cupped his cheek. “It’s something I do…”

  He shook his head a little. His shaggy bangs fell over an eye. I pushed them away.

  “I mean, did taking those pictures, then, turn you on more than if I’d just been going down on you?”

  I tried to see if he wanted me to say yes or no, but saw only myself reflected in his eyes. If the eyes are the body’s camera, I wondered what pictures Alex was taking of me.

  “I don’t know.”

  “I liked it,” he said.

  “Did you?” I traced his ear, then both his brows. His lips. He opened his mouth to nip at my finger, and I laughed.

  “It was fucking hot.”

  I raised a brow and sat back a little in the creaky chair. “Oh, really?”

  He nodded.

  “Like that day…before. When you came the day Sarah was in my studio.”

  “Yes. That day.”

  “I never would’ve guessed.”

  Alex smirked. “The hard-on didn’t give it away, huh?”

  I kissed him. I wanted every word we ever said to each other to come between kisses. And I wanted not to be afraid of that.

  “Let me take your picture, Alex.”

  “Again?”

  “Sit on that chair, there.” I pointed to a straight-backed chair in better shape than the one he’d been in that other day.

  He looked over his shoulder, but didn’t hesitate. On his feet, on the seat, hand already at the button on his jeans. “Like this?”

  “Just like that.”

  He popped the button and unzipped to free his cock. If he hadn’t been hard when he was making me come with his mouth, he sure as hell was now. He shoved his jeans and his briefs down to his calves. His black T-shirt hugged his chest, and his cock, firmly held in his fist, brushed the hem of it.

  “Push up your shirt.” I already had my camera to my face. “I want to see your belly.”

  I’d used the camera as a barrier before. A shield. Watching him now through the small square of glass, I wasn’t separated from Alex but brought closer. Joined, somehow. A part of what he was doing in a way I hadn’t been when we fucked. Making a picture of him, I almost was him.

  I moved behind him to get a shot of his perspective. “God, that’s fucking gorgeous.”

  He grunted at my words. I took pictures. I moved around him as he fucked his fist.

  It could’ve been porn, what we did. A closeup of his prick imprisoned by his fingers followed a shot of just his face. These pictures told an intimate and private story and yes, it was about sex, but it was about something else, too.

  Trust.

  I set the camera aside to kiss him and put my hand on his to help him along. He came in another minute. I was looking in his eyes when he did, and I had no trouble seeing what was inside them.

  “I need to jump in the shower,” he said.

  The timer on the oven went off. We pulled apart. He grabbed me for one more kiss, then went into my bathroom while I headed for the kitchen. My cell phone rang as I pulled a pan of something cheesy and delicious smelling out of the oven and set it on the stove.

  I grabbed up my phone. “Hello?”

  “Hello, Liv. Did you get the stuff I left for you?”

  Patrick. My appetite fled. I cocked an ear, listening for the sound of the shower running. Alex wouldn’t be in there long.

  “I threw it in the trash,” I said.

  “I can’t believe you.” The coldness in his words seeped all the way through the phone and straight to my heart.

  “Did you call just to bitch me out again?” I leaned against the counter.

  Patrick’s laugh grated into shreds. “You’re fucking Alex Kennedy. Aren’t you?”

  The floor dropped from beneath me. “What?”

  “You are. I told Teddy it couldn’t be true. But it is, isn’t it? You really are. I can’t believe you, Olivia! I told you about him!”

  “You told me he doesn’t like girls,” I hissed. “Well, guess what, Patrick. He does.”

  “I told you he was trouble!”

  “What’s your problem?” I said evenly. “That I’m fucking Alex? Or that I’m fucking anyone?”

  Silence.

  “I like him, Patrick. A lot.”

  “Of course you do.” I could hear the sneer. “Everyone likes him. Everyone wants to get in his pants. He’s a slut. It’s what he does.”

  The phone slipped in my suddenly sweaty palm. “It’s what you do, too.”

  “That’s not the point,” Patrick snapped.

  “What is?” The dinner smells that’d had my stomach rumbling minutes ago now turned it.

  “I just can’t believe you’d go for him,” Patrick said in a low, hard voice. “For fuck’s sake, Liv, haven’t you learned your lesson?”

  “What lesson is that? The one where I don’t fall in love with a gay man?”

  More silence from us both. Patrick’s breathing turned sharp and short. Mine had, too.

  “You don’t love him,” he said finally. “Jesus, Liv. You barely know him.”

  “I’m not saying I do. I’m saying I could. You must think I could, or you wouldn’t be in such a frenzy.”

  “I’m not in a frenzy. I just don’t want to see you making a mistake—”

  “Like the one I made with you?”

  Dead silence.

  I hung up the phone.

  “Babe?”

  It was the first time Alex had used an endearment for me. It cemented how far this had gone. I turned to face him, wet from the shower, his hair rumpled and dripping and a towel hanging low on his hips.

  “We need to talk.”

  He nodded, as if he was expecting this. Every glimpse I’d had of what he was thinking disappeared, locked up tight behind those deep gray eyes. He ran a hand through his hair, slicking it back.

  “Okay.”

  My phone rang again. I turned it off without looking at who was calling. “It’s Patrick. I don’t want to talk to him.”

  “Okay.”

  I put the phone on the counter and crossed my arms over my stomach. That didn’t help the butterflies, but I kept them there anyway. The picture we were making needed a caption: “Argument Waiting” or something artsy like that.

  I could do what Sarah had said. Frame my question like cropping a photo, already knowing the answer the way I knew which piece of the picture I wanted to keep and which to cut.

  Knowing changed things. It had for me, and it would for him. I thought I could deal with knowing my current lover went both ways and had once slept with my ex. I didn’t know if Alex could.

  “Olivia?” He didn’t move closer. Didn’t touch me. His gaze caught and held mine.

  Asking him would show me if he’d lie or tell the truth. I thought of the past few weeks. Sex and movies and dinner and laughter.