Four
Lincoln
Two weeks later
A cold breeze skates over the back of my neck, and I adjust my grip on my camera. Gravel crunches as I shift my weight, and I stare through the viewfinder at the abandoned rail yard. Old train carriages lie scattered across the landscape, some on rails, some listing to the side on the pockmarked ground; some barely scratched and others burned-out husks.
Bright graffiti covers every inch of metal, and tangled weeds burst through the stony ground, climbing the carriages and strangling the rails. I wouldn’t be shocked to feel a vine twining around my ankle.
It’s evocative. Brutal. The perfect addition to this city series. And this is the ideal light for this shoot—bright but overcast—and yet I can’t focus. Again.
I twist the camera lens a fraction, jaw clenched and chest tight.
Why can’t I fucking focus?
It’s that feeling. That prickle of nerves; that endless whisper in my brain that there’s something important in this city, something I need to find. And it’s been worse for these last two weeks than ever before, the urgent feeling so relentless that I’ve only slept a few hours each night.
Jenny must think I’m out of my damn mind. She keeps finding me crashed out at the kitchen table at the break of dawn, my face buried in my arms, my camera abandoned on the scratched wood.
Jenny.
Swallowing hard, I push all thoughts of my shy, awkward roommate away. Quiet girls like that aren’t for guys like me, and that’s without the fact that we live together; that I’m leaving soon; that it’s all a bad, bad idea.
Doesn’t matter that her face floats across my brain whenever I close my eyes. That I hear her husky voice in my sleep. That every molecule of my body, every instinct in my skull is screaming to go to her, to find her and corner her in that cramped little apartment and flatten her body with my own, to press her against the nearest flat surface and lick her neck.
“Asshole,” I mutter, fingers numb from the cold as I take a series of photos, shutter clicking. “She doesn’t want you.”
In fact, Jenny is scared shitless of me.
It’s humbling. You can spend your whole adult life thinking of yourself as a decent man, a bit rough around the edges, maybe, but basically fine. Certainly not someone any girl should worry about. And then your shy, sweet roommate flinches every time you enter the room, and it all comes crumbling down, and you feel like the worst piece of shit after all.
Did I do something, since I moved in?
Did I give the impression that I’d ever, ever hurt her?
Fuck. My temples ache as I lower my camera, my muscles taut as I flick through what I’ve got so far. They’re good. Great, actually.
This is where I should feel that rush, that triumph, that fierce satisfaction of a shoot coming together…
Nothing. I feel nothing.
I just want Jenny.
* * *
She’s hunched over her sewing machine when I come home, reels of thread and scraps of fabric and a pincushion in the shape of a tomato scattered over the kitchen table.
“Oh!” Jenny jolts upright the second she spots me leaning in the doorway. “I didn’t hear you come in. How do you do that? You’re so freaking quiet, Lincoln.”
“I didn’t want to disturb you.” Didn’t want to scare her, more like, but in hindsight I can see how creeping around the apartment won’t achieve that. “Work stuff?”
“Yeah.” Jenny bites her bottom lip, glancing at the havoc all around her. Her blonde hair is piled in a messy topknot, a tight white t-shirt hugging her curves. Talk about torture. “I can clean it up if you need to use the kitchen.”
“I’m good.” As if I’d make her move all that stuff once she’s painstakingly set it up. As far as I’m concerned, she can leave it out permanently, and I tell her so.
A faint blush spreads over her cheeks, and Jenny shakes her head, staring at her pincushion. “You’re paying for half the apartment; you should be able to use it. Besides, where would you eat?”
I shrug, heart thumping. This is the longest conversation we’ve had in days. She didn’t flinch when she saw me, either, and you’d better believe I’ve made a note of that. “Standing up by the counter, I guess? Who cares?”