Page 14 of Picture Perfect

PART THREE

THEY SAY TIME heals all wounds, but I was beginning to think I had one of those stubborn ones that refused to scab over. Dumb, yeah, but Shane had somehow pierced my heart. A lot of people seem to think that just because you’re perceived as “super smart”—after all, I’d been going to school for most of my life and all of my adult life thus far—you can rationalize just about anything, including your emotions. But that’s so not true. I mean I knew my emotions around Shane shouldn’t run that deep—because, truthfully, we barely knew each other, had spent very little time together—but they did. Being intelligent made me accept the facts for what they were.

But my intelligence couldn’t help me figure out how to let him go. My heart and my head couldn’t help each other.

What made it worse was when that November I saw that he’d made it. And the way he’d done it made it seem easy, because he hadn’t spent a lot of time doing it before getting all the jobs he could have ever wanted. There was something charismatic about Shane, and photographers loved trying to capture that je ne sais quoi that made him remarkable.

It was still fairly early in the morning that cold day late fall, and I was working at the coffee shop. The place was full of some of our regulars—a group of retirees who liked to gather, drink “normal” coffee, and gab about everything they thought was wrong with our fair city—but we also had a lot of folks who didn’t usually frequent our establishment, probably because the falling snow prevented little more than shopping or hunkering down. Drinking coffee to fuel up before said shopping trip would help those souls brave the cold and snow.

We’d finally hit a lull, though, those few moments after breakfast had been served and all the business folks had picked up their lattes before heading to their first meeting of the day, and I would be leaving in half an hour after my replacement had arrived. All the older guys with plain coffee had gotten their refills and the waitresses were busy delivering checks and retrieving dirty dishes. I’d wiped the counter and done other cleaning and just happened to glance up at the widescreen TV hanging on the wall at a diagonal from where I stood. Most times, I barely even noticed it was there, because it was usually turned to a twenty-four hour news network, and if I tuned in for even five minutes, just reading the scrolling bar at the bottom and the various changing banners, with or without the din of the coffee crowd, I’d get a feel for the news of the day.

But the news wasn’t on at the moment. Instead, it was an advertisement for a chain store, and they were letting shoppers know about their upcoming Black Friday sale where all clothing prices would be slashed. But there was a young guy there, a man dressed like a business professional during a holiday, meaning he was wearing a cheesy bone-colored sweater and a fake smile, and he was smiling at his fellow model, a woman designed to look like his girlfriend, wearing her own garish cranberry-colored sweater. It was just a flash, but that was Shane, all right. For the duration of my shift, I kept an eye on the television, hoping to get another glimpse, because those ads are often repeated ad nauseum, but no such luck.

Retrieving my coat and purse from the tiny room that held personal belongings before walking through the kitchen and shouting out my goodbyes to my coworkers, I pulled my phone out and found the department store’s website. Scrolling through their front page, I had confirmation. Yes, Shane had landed what I imagined was a lucrative modeling gig, because this store was huge. I wondered what kind of compensation he’d earned for the shoot. More than that, he was building a portfolio, one his agent no doubt leveraged to get them both higher rates. A recognizable face meant higher pay. And Shane’s face would become familiar to people—that I knew. It wouldn’t be long before he’d be snatched up. He had one of those faces that seemed friendly and approachable, in spite of the fact that he was drop-dead gorgeous.

Good for him, I thought. He’d set out to do something to make his life more meaningful, and, by God, he’d done it.

But that ache in my heart…how could I ever dampen it if I started seeing him everywhere?

Well, I knew how. My dissertation was almost fully written, and I merely needed to go back through it and make sure it worked. I wouldn’t be defending it until spring, but my advisor wanted a good month or so to look it over, and she would give me advice on how to improve it, whether that meant more research or simply refining areas that she felt needed more attention. Whatever the case, I wouldn’t be confirmed until I finished that damn thing up, and I was ready to begin a new chapter of my life.

It started with leaving school behind. Well, that wasn’t entirely true. I’d merely be switching roles. Instead of being a perpetual student, I would now be a professor of English. I’d been teaching undergrad classes for years now, but this time, I would be able to do so as, I hoped, an associate professor, one with a full-time job.

I hadn’t modeled with Greg since my shoot with Shane months earlier. It hadn’t stopped him from asking, but I just couldn’t. There was the problem my aching heart presented, but there was another practical reason.

I was going to be a professor soon. I’d never worried about most of the photos out there. The ones where I was fully dressed, for example, or even most of the ones in my underwear that honestly covered more than a bikini would didn’t concern me. Instead, it was the nude ones. I’d been on Amazon one day looking for a Christmas gift for my advisor and there was a book on one of the pages I browsed—a hot bestselling romance title—and what did you know? It was Shane standing behind me, his hands cupped over my full breasts, both of our faces on the cover looking lusty and primed for passion—and if I could see this damned cover without even looking for it—who else could find it?

Could this threaten my career before it had even started?

In that moment, I saw the foolishness of my agreeing to the compromising poses all those months ago. Never mind what happened afterward and never mind that there was no actual nudity (like nipples or bush); I appeared in dozens of risqué photographs and that could be my undoing. No matter what a person thought about America, the truth is our roots are puritanical, and even centuries haven’t been able to undo our fascination with sex that we deny, coupled equally with repulsion of the naked body. And, whether one thinks that is foolish or not, that is the country I grew up in—and I considered myself an intelligent, analytical, rational person.

In other words, I should have thought of the consequences before.

So it was stupid. I knew there was probably no way I could get rid of the photos already purchased but maybe I could stop any more from getting out. I’d considered going straight to my advisor and throwing myself on my sword, telling her my story, about how I’d begun modeling for a little extra cash and, before I knew it, I was posing in compromising positions while making double what I’d earned before. Earning in two hours the same amount I’d earn at the coffee shop in a month or two—earning my rent and then some—kind of shut down my thought process. And it wasn’t like I was selling drugs or killing people.

But talking to my advisor about the breakdown of my nonfunctioning brain might prove difficult, because intertwined in all that was something I did not want to talk about, and it boiled down to one word…one person.

Shane.

The man continued to consume my brainwaves, no matter how I tried to prevent it. As irrational as it seemed, I cared about him and pondered what might have happened had he stayed behind. We might have moved from dalliance to dating.

I’d never know, though, and now my entire future hung in the balance. I had to do something. I couldn’t just sit back and watch all my years of hard work be destroyed for a few moments of thoughtlessness in front of the camera.

And I somehow knew that was going to happen if I didn’t control what I could now.

Talking to anyone at the university would be a mistake. I knew there was a sliver of hope that my advisor or someone up the ladder might be cool about it all, but the odds were that my past activities would at best be frowned upon, at worst be reason for them to deny me my degree. And even if not, it could affect all my chances for future employment in my dream job.

I couldn’t let that happen.

The first thing I had to do was research and do a little damage control, so I went to Greg’s website. I found that he offered two ways of buying his photos there. A person could purchase an exclusive photo and, once the transaction had been completed, that shot was no longer for sale. But the photos could also be purchased at a lower price, and if one was, that particular shot would no longer be exclusive. It would then be more affordable for another person—say an indie author—to buy it, but that author might see that picture on the cover of a dozen other books. Either way, Greg could make crazy money on a single photo shoot. In fact, when I saw the prices he charged for exclusive shots, I knew why he could easily afford to pay Shane and me more than the usual rate. Two exclusive photos took care of the usual fee and three or four took care of the extra he’d paid us this last time.

I couldn’t figure out what I’d hoped to by scoping out his website. I’d been hoping I could puzzle out how many photos were already out there, but I couldn’t. I had no way of knowing how many exclusive images had been scooped up. All I could tell was that at least ten images had been purchased for non-exclusive rights.

That alone scared me. The only relief I felt was that most of those were bra-on images. Only a couple of them had my bra off, and they weren’t the nastiest of the bunch. I imagined most of the authors wanted pictures that were titillating but tasteful. They didn’t want to turn their readers off.

I had to talk to Greg.

Of course, the first question out of his mouth when I called was to ask if I was wanting another photo shoot soon. “No, I need to talk to you about another matter.”

---