Page 59 of Tipping Point

“Where is she?”

“She produces for a local breakfast show and their star has a habit of drinking too much over the weekends. He’s on his last warning and she’s babysitting him.”

She hands me my cup and I follow her back to the sitting room.

Before she sits, she makes her way to the bookcase where she picks up a wooden, velvet-lined box. The Celestia collar is nestled inside. She runs a finger over the giant diamond in the center before closing the lid. She picks it up and makes to hand it over to me.

“Did you try it on?” I ask curiously, taking the wooden box.

She gives an infinitesimal shake of her head.

We’re both thinking about what I said to her.

What was I thinking? I was drunk on the sight of her, the red lips beneath the lace mask. I’ve been drunk on her all week, thinking about her naked on her hotel bed.

Fuck.

I have an erection again. I adjust my jeans and sit back nonchalantly.

“Congratulations on the race,” she says softly, trying to change the subject.

“Thank you.”

“You loved it,” she states. My stomach swoops low.

“I did.”

“What changed?”

I want to tell her it’s because I’m free.

“You found your passion for it again?” she’s guessing. I don’t know what to tell her, so I shrug.

She takes it as confirmation. Her eyes light up. It’s heartbreaking. She sits forward curiously, grey eyes wide and wondrous.

“What changed?” she insists.

Because I am an absolute prick, I know what she wants to hear. But she’ll spot a lie. I have to be as close to the truth as I can be.

“You,” I say, thinking of my fury in the car, my pounding heart as I imagine her fingers dipping into her lush body, coming out wet.

She actually blushes.

She pulls up her bare feet and tucks them below her.

I lean forward and place my cup on the coffee table, the wooden box with the necklace next to it. There is a large coffee book on the table.

“The Last Keeper,” I read. “Camille Chauvin.”

I frown. Snatch it up. Page after page of an old man about his duties as a lighthouse keeper, but it’s intoxicating, how she captured him, throughout the four seasons. I page through, engrossed. The last five pages are highly detailed photographs. It’s the old man, from behind, one hand trailing on the rail next to him, the ocean behind. In the first he’s in short shirt sleeves, grey-haired, and tanned a rich brown, the ocean filled with white foamy strips of waves crashing happily.

In the second he’s wearing a knitted wool jumper, the sky overcast, the ocean a murky blue. A single gull hangs suspended in time. In the third, it’s snowing. The ocean is a murky mess of waves and in the distance, storm clouds have gathered with a single slither of lightning arching towards the ocean. In the fourth he’s wearing the jumper again, but t’s a different pair of pants, an open sky. The fourth is just the empty stairway. It’s a sunny day, the gull is perched on the rail, undisturbed.

It wounds me somehow. The empty photo. When I look up at her, her eyes are a stormy ocean. Loss crashes over her.

“Who was he?”

“I think the question is, does it matter?”

---