Page 58 of Sizzle Reel

“So you’re not super close with your family, I gather?” I ask, pushing down the anxiety that’s already burrowing inside me.

She shrugs. “I don’t hate my brother-in-law or anything, but it’s a lot of comments like, ‘Oh, Hollywood turned you so radical,’ as if I wasn’t an academic starting arguments for fun before I started acting. With Dave, a lot of the time it just ends up being one of those things where you’re like, I know this is going to go badly.”

My heart twinges. “I get that. My parents have been commenting about how liberal I’ve become since leaving college. Like, they dismiss the idea that any of it could be positive growth.”

She flips over, making real eye contact with me. “Are you out to your parents?”

The feeling in my chest graduates to a plain ache. Mom was so quick to forgive me after our phone call Saturday night, but it’s not like I felt any less tense talking to her this morning as she went on her daily walk. I was stressed out, waiting to have to fumble through a lie if she asked about dating, tasting the bitter flavor of I’m bi on my tongue knowing I’d never say it out loud.

“No. It’s…not the right time.”

She reaches over the rock and takes my hand. “I’m sorry about that.”

My throat closes. This is not something I want to deal with right now. This is a conversation I only want to have with Julia. “Can you relax your face?”

She breaks into a quick smile before obeying. “Call this one I Can’t Believe the Photographer Just Skirted That.”

I smile and snap my pictures. Get back on the rock and take some more pictures. But when I want to capture motion again, we return to conversation. I let her move around within a composed frame.

“You’ve got a support system, though, right?” Valeria says.

“Yeah,” I say. “My friends are great about it. And it’s…I try to just ignore that part of it—my parents. The thing I’m really focused on is…” I change the shot, keep my hands occupied. “Is just this sense of being a late bloomer. I was a late bloomer with guys, and I hate going through that stress again.”

“If it’s any consolation, late bloomers aren’t any better or worse than people who’ve been at it for years. Sometimes it’s a safety thing to disclose, but otherwise it really only matters if you want people to know. No one will ask or care otherwise. I was a late bloomer too.”

I can’t hide a prickle of surprise. “Really?”

“Yeah. And I bet you weren’t as late as you think. How old were you when you had your first kiss?”

My stomach tightens.

“Nineteen,” I say, just as she says, “Nineteen.”

A moment of silence passes. She breaks out in a grin. I make sure it’s on camera.

“See? You don’t think I’m some undesirable loser, right?”

She flips over on the rock, pressing her cheek into the warm surface. Her body rises and falls softly as she breathes. Bathed in the golden light, her curves hidden, she looks sublime.

“No, I don’t.”

Her eyes flutter open, and her gaze is suddenly heavy on me. She’s drilling into me, pinning me to this spot. No one’s looked at me this way before. “I see you the same way.”

For a moment, I feel the tilt of this slab of concrete, and my upper body starts swaying down the slope. I catch my body, but my mind can’t focus, not even on this shot I spent hours precomposing this morning. Valeria? Didn’t have her first kiss until nineteen? Valeria? Sees me as someone desirable?

“You do?” I ask, turning the camera off. I don’t want to share this moment with anyone. Not even future me, a few hours from now, a few hours outside of this feeling.

I leave the camera on the little tripod and crawl over to her. She rolls over onto her side, skin still pressed into the concrete. I do the same, leaving a foot of space between us. I think it’s a foot. My muscles, from my core to my legs to my face, are quivering. Getting closer makes everything worse, but somehow it’s also all I want to do.

“Obviously I don’t know what shit you went through before this, and that’s all valid, but yes, right now, all I see is this clever, talented woman who should maybe flip the camera on herself once in a while.”

She scoots closer to me. There are inches between us. My heart is beating so hard I swear it’s reverberating off the dense rock; the butterflies are packed so tightly it hurts. We’re so close. God, we’re so close. I can see the pores on her face, the individual hairs in her eyebrows, the creases in her lips. The different shades of brown in her eyes.

She moves a hair out of my eyes. Just like I did to her earlier. “Trust me,” she says, her voice lower now. My stomach flips. “Assuming you want it, if someone right comes along, it’ll be no time before you’re so deep in it that you don’t even remember what it felt like before.”

She looks to my lips.

“Hey!”

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