Forever With You (Silver State Series) (13 page)

I pace by the door, waiting for him to text and let me know he’s here.  As I pace, I begin to feel silly, like I might be too dressed up.  I glance down at my flat leather sandals and have just begun to wonder for the dozenth time whether I should opt for them instead when my phone chimes with a text from Kyle.  I wrench my eyes away from the flats, out of time to change my mind yet again.  Taking a deep breath, I stuff my phone in my purse and head downstairs.

I’m a bit taken aback when I notice Kyle has removed the rag top and taken the doors off his Jeep – it now looks like little more than an oversized go-kart.  He’s standing up on the floorboard of the driver’s side, his elbows hooked over the roll bar as he studies a map with sunglasses perched on his head.  My heart lodges in my throat as I walk toward him down the sidewalk, which is shaded by the leafy boughs of several tall oak trees. 
Quit fidgeting and breathe
, I remind myself. 

I roll my shoulders back and lift my chin, repeating the same words in my head like a mantra: 
It’s only physical.  It’s only physical.

“I think you lost part of your car,” I say as soon as I’m close enough for him to hear.

Kyle glances up and flashes me a toothy grin as he begins to refold the map.  “Damn,” he says.  “You look…really good.”

I glance down, battling furiously to keep the heat from rising to my cheeks.  I wonder if there’s a medication you can take to prevent blushing – it’s truly my downfall. 

Taking a breath to steady myself, I look him in the eyes and utter the most confident “Thank you” I can muster before climbing up into the passenger seat.  I watch as Kyle crouches down and swings into his seat while lowering his sunglasses to the bridge of his nose.

“Is it okay with you if we drive for a while?” he asks as he starts his Jeep.  “There’s this old barn I’d love to take you to that I’ve driven past a couple times, but it’s out in the middle of nowhere about thirty or so miles from here.”

“I don’t have any place to be,” I reply lazily, stretching my legs out in front of me.  “Just so long as I’m back before class tomorrow.”

He laughs.  “I think we can accomplish that.”

Once we’re out of Reno heading north on the 395, Kyle sticks the speedometer on seventy and settles back with his left hand loosely gripping the bottom of the wheel and his right resting on the seat next to his leg, where his fingers drum the rhythm to a song only he can hear.  I hang onto the roll bar as we hurtle through the desert, thrilled by the whipping and slicing of the arid wind.  My hair is gathered in my left hand to keep it from gusting around and obstructing my view of our surroundings.  I grow mesmerized by the blue humpbacks of the distant mountains and the power lines that undulate overhead as we zoom past them.  The sunlight is muted by the thin cover of clouds that suffuses the western sky.

Twenty minutes into our trek we cross the state line into California and continue north to the junction with state road 70.  We hang a left and head west for another five miles or so before Kyle begins to slow down.  He pulls off the highway next to an old, boarded up fruit stand, onto a dirt trail that winds across the valley and seems to dead-end at a huge, rustic barn.  We roll to a stop several yards shy of the dilapidated structure, and Kyle shifts into park but leaves his keys dangling in the ignition.

“What do you think?” he asks as he hops out and gathers his camera bag and a tripod from the backseat floorboard.

“I feel a little overdressed,” I reply as I step to the dusty ground.

“Nah, you’re perfect,” he says.  “That’s exactly the look I was going for.”

As we walk toward the barn, I notice the roof is caved in on one side, and the battered wooden walls bow inward.  The entire structure reminds me of a house of cards that’s on the verge of collapse.  It looks like the outside was once painted red, but now it’s mostly peeled off or faded to a sun-bleached salmon color.

“I wonder how old it is,” I muse.

“I do, too,” says Kyle.

“I hope it’s safe to go inside.”

“Should be, unless a storm comes along.  Don’t worry, we’ll be careful.”

Kyle begins to unpack his camera equipment, folding out his tripod and switching lenses.  Meanwhile, I wander inside.  My eyes are immediately drawn upward.  I peer through the rotted boards that once formed the floor of the loft, up to the ceiling that seems several stories tall.  It’s the strangest thing – it conjures the vague sense of being in a church, only here instead of stained glass and organ pipes, there’s decayed woodwork and creamy, filtered light seeping through the gaps in the walls.

When I turn back around I realize Kyle already has his camera around his neck and the viewfinder to his eye.  He’s trailed a few steps behind me, contentedly clicking away as I explore.

I smile bashfully when I notice he’s following me.  I stop and turn to face him, my hands on my hips. 
Click
.  “I don’t really know what to do,” I say timidly.  “I’m not sure how to pose.”

“We’ll get to that later,” says Kyle, peering out from behind his camera.  “For now just keep doing what you would normally do.  Pretend I’m not even here.”

Easier said than done
.  I swivel back around and venture farther into the barn, stopping when I notice an ancient tractor with the seat missing.  I walk a slow circle around it, trailing my fingers over the dusty exterior, then examine a splintered ladder that leads up to the loft.  I cast my gaze upward to take in the rafters that span the vaulted ceiling.

When I reach the area where the roof is partially missing I stop in the circle of light that pours through the huge crater and look up at the sky.  “I wonder what happened here,” I say quietly.  When no response comes, I whirl around and find Kyle is no longer behind me.

“Over here,” says a voice.  I turn my head back over my shoulder and see him coming toward me from the outside of the barn, his camera held aloft as he clicks away.  Once he’s within ten feet of me, he stops and lowers the camera.  He crooks his finger at me, gesturing for me to follow him outside.

“Stand right here,” he directs, pointing to a spot next to a window the glass was long ago broken out of.  I do as he says.

“Now turn around and put your hands up on the windowsill – yeah, just like that – and stand up on your tiptoes like you’re looking inside…Perfect.”

He points me toward a section of wall that’s still intact.  The boards are a light, mud-tinged gray at the bottom, but they darken to a charred black closer to the rusted metal overhang.  He has me step just outside the shadow of the roof and turn to the side, then he takes a few shots of me in profile while I stand awkwardly, unsure what to do with my hands.  “Hold one hand up to your forehead like you’re blocking the sun,” he offers.  “Kind of stare out into the distance.”

He looks down at the display on his camera and smiles.  “That’s a good one,” he says.

We wander over to an old tractor tire lying on the ground, and Kyle asks me to sit down on it.  “Stretch one leg out to the side,” he suggests.  I do as he asks, smoothing my skirt between my legs to keep myself covered.  “Now look up at me.”

I glance up into his lens.  “Do you want me to smile?” I ask. 

“Smile a little, but not into the camera,” he says.  “Do that thing you always do with your eyes.”

“What thing?”

“That thing where you cut your eyes to the side without turning your head.  Yeah, like that.  Now smile a little like you know a secret you’re not sharing… Yes! Exactly.”

He lowers the camera again and looks at me for a moment.  “Are you uncomfortable?” he asks.

“A little,” I admit.

“I know it’s hard, but just try not to think about the camera,” he says.  “You’re gorgeous on your own, so you don’t have to worry about trying to look good.”

“Thanks,” I say softly, “I just don’t know what to do with my hands or my face.”

He crouches down so he’s at eye level with me and breaks off a piece of grass, which he rubs between his fingers as he gazes off toward the horizon, seemingly deep in thought.  “Just…be yourself,” he says finally, as if that should solve everything.  He stands back up and offers me his hand to pull me to my feet.  “Let’s just talk about something so you’ll forget I’m taking your picture.”

“What should we talk about?” I ask as I follow him back into the barn.

“Let’s talk about the first day I sat next to you in freshman biology,” he says.  “I thought you had the most beautiful hair I’d ever seen.”

I laugh, and he sneakily snaps another photo.  “I think you told me that at the time,” I say.  “You were really nice to me for a couple weeks.”

“What do you mean, ‘a couple weeks’?” he says, still clicking away as I lean against one of the weather-beaten walls, my right hand clasped around the elbow of my left arm as it dangles at my side.  “I was
always
nice to you.”

I shake my head, still chuckling.  “Yeah right, you mostly ignored me.  Well, first you were mean to me,
then
you ignored me.”

“
Mean
to you?” asks Kyle incredulously, momentarily distracted from the task at hand.

“You’re not gonna believe I remember this, but there was this one day freshman year when I wore a sweater my Aunt Liz had knitted for me, and you told Mason Frye I looked like a yarn factory had exploded on me.”

He lets out a gut-wrenching laugh.  “Man, fifteen year old me sucked at witty insults.”

I cross my arms, silently challenging him while attempting to conceal my amusement.

He blows out a sigh.  “Oh Tawny, don’t you know what they say about adolescent boys?” he teases.  “The minute they start making fun of you it means they like you.”

I roll my eyes, but his smile fades as his eyes latch onto mine with an expression of sincerity.  “You had no
idea
how pretty you were, did you?”  He looks down, fiddling with the buttons on his camera, adjusting the settings.  “Hell,” he murmurs, “you still don’t have a clue…”

Kyle – 1:45 PM

I
can’t help taking a succession of photos as Tawny’s cheeks stain pink and she glances down, her hair falling down her back and around one shoulder, where the ends brush against her elbow.  I pause and chew on my lip, racking my brain for some way to get her to loosen up.  Finally I ask, “Do you know how to do the Thriller dance?”

“The what?”

“You know, from the Michael Jackson video.”  I move my hips as I hum a few bars of the song.

She snorts in laughter.  “Oh yeah, I like that song.  I don’t know the dance though.”

I let my camera fall on its strap against my chest and hold out both my hands to her.  “Come here, I’ll show you,” I say.  She eyes me dubiously, but slips her fingers in my palms and allows me to tug her away from the wall. 

For the next several minutes I make a complete ass of myself trying to show Tawny how to do part of the dance.  Though I’m sure she has no idea, she actually moves pretty well – she can roll her hips around like a pro.  In any case, I achieved what I set out to do, which was get her to relax.  I laugh my encouragement as she continues to skip around, adding her own steps to the dance, and I snap photo after photo, reveling in the sound of her joyful laughter as she plays.

“What else have you got in your bag of tricks?” she asks breathlessly.  “Can you moonwalk, too?”

I peer over my viewfinder at her.  “Maybe,” I reply.  “I can’t reveal all my magic right here, though.  I have to have
some
assurance you’ll still hang out with me after today.”

She shakes her head as she laughs.  “Fine.  I’ll get it out of you eventually.”

“Besides,” I add as I tinker with the aperture on my camera, “you should be thanking me.  You’ve got Thriller down cold – you’ll be a huge hit at parties.”

Half an hour later, she’s loosened up to the point where she can begin to pose for me.  She starts out giggling and making silly faces, but then as the sun passes behind a bank of clouds, causing the landscape to fill in with more dramatic shadows, something in her seems to shift, and her posturing grows less playful and more sexy.

Now she’s the one in charge.  I follow her to a doorway and snap away while she leans against one side of the frame and rests her head against the wood.  Her face is arranged into a seductive pout as she gazes at me.  Then she turns and presses her back against the frame, arching into it.  She kicks one leg up and plants her foot against the wall opposite, revealing almost her entire leg.  She bends the knee of her standing leg, sinking a little into the pose, and rolls her head to the side, casting her eyes to the ground.  My heart rattles in my chest as I press down on the shutter release, capturing her fluid movements from multiple angles while I circle around her.

She leads me back to the window where she posed earlier.  This time she goes around to the inside of the window while I stay outside, and she leans out the opening toward me.  As she rests her elbows against the sill and bends outward, her cleavage peeks through the triangular hole in the neckline of her dress.  I step forward and touch her hair, marveling at its softness as I arrange it around her face.  She stares at me intently as I groom it into place and blinks in surprise when I rub the pad of my thumb over her lips to part them.

We keep going like this for another forty-five minutes.  I continue to trail along after Tawny as she sets up shot after amazing shot, utterly transfixed by her beauty and grace as she dances and stretches and bends and smiles.  I take close-ups of her blue eyes fringed with thick, dark lashes, her full, pink mouth and her petite wrists and hands, captivated by her every feature.

Finally Tawny wanders over to a patch of grass , hidden from the view of the road, and sits down.  For a moment she gazes up at the sky, which is now overcast.  The clouds have rolled in, but they don’t look to me like they hold any rain.

I watch as she rolls her spine down until she’s lying flat on her back with one leg bent and one outstretched.  An idea occurs to me, and I walk over and step one foot on either side of her hips so I’m standing directly above her.  Tawny’s grown used to me now; she doesn’t pay me any notice, only staring off to some remote spot as I capture her pensive expression while admiring the elegant length of her neck, the faint tan lines visible on her bare shoulders and the way her thick, wavy hair is splayed out all around her like the rays of an auburn sun.