$2.99
Available Light
by Star Again
Language: English
Categories: Fiction » Romance » Erotic
Content Rating: Older than 17
Evan Reed can see what a room is hiding.
The father's hand that hesitates on the back of a chair. The bride gripping her bouquet too tight. The grief tucked inside a laugh. He was a medical researcher once. Now he photographs weddings, and he is good enough at reading people to be frightened by it.
Nobody has ever looked back.
He under-charges. He over-edits. He leaves every room the second someone might actually see him. Then a conference in Prague puts him on a stage he never wanted, in front of the one audience trained to look as hard as he does.
Her name is Sofia Duarte.
She listens to the most honest talk he has ever given, and afterward she hands him the word he spent forty slides trying not to say.
"You said the edit makes the photographer less visible."
"It does."
"No." A pause. "Protected."
He never said protected. He hates how fast the word finds a chair in the room.
Three days. A styled shoot where he turns his lens away from the beautiful thing everyone else is chasing. A stolen lunch on a low wall. A cellar party that reaches his body before his mind can object.
And at that party, one photograph he was never given permission to take.
He shows it to her himself. That is the part that costs him.
"That was not a portrait." She does not soften it. "That was a moment. You are very good at moments."
Then a hotel room with the curtains half open to the rooftops.
She does not want him careful.
When he slows, she tells him no. When he tries to be gentle out of fear instead of want, she tightens her legs and pulls him back. She has spent three days watching him leave rooms he was standing in, and she is finished allowing it.
"I'm protected," she says. "Are you safe?"
"Yes."
"Then stop leaving the room."
He stays. All night. Twice. And in the morning she is at the window in his white shirt, hair badly slept on, face unarranged, and he reaches for the camera to take the third photograph, because for once he does not need to disappear before someone looks at him.
Colleague. Desire. Morning.
Heat: explicit throughout, start to finish. Two long scenes plus the morning. Mouths, hands, and two adults who keep choosing each other out loud. Nothing fades to black.
POV: first person, male. Close, dry, honest.
Length: a novella. One long evening's read, complete and self-contained.
Ending: hopeful, and not quite clean.
Content note: explicit sexual content, consenting adults (18+).