Page 88 of Overexposed

Laughing, Ollie wrapped an arm around my shoulders as I slid mine around his waist. We headed for the stairs, sidestepping one of the cleaners who was coming up the stairs.

She froze in place, her eyes wide and her expression uncertain. I offered her another smile. “Good morning.”

The woman nodded briefly, then stepped hastily out of the way.

“Come on,” Ollie said, tugging me along. “Let’s go feed you. You definitely need to keep up your strength.”

I didn’t mind if I did.

Sadly for me, Ollie apparently miscalculated the time for his interview and a scorching call from Jerry had him giving me a quick kiss before he headed out. Ollie had been planning to make breakfast, but with his absence, I went for cereal.

Someone—Gem I was pretty sure—had seen me sneaking the bowls of Cocoa Puffties. I loved the cereal a stupid amount. They’d had an unopened box in there, so I hadn’t felt any guilt for the first bowl. Not really for the second or third bowls either.

But then a new box showed up. I hadn’t eaten the cereal in front of them. A girl’s gotta keep some of her dirty little secrets. The indulgence of the too-sweet and absolutely, deliciously chocolatey goodness was something I wanted to continue to enjoy.

Bowl in hand, I drifted into the dining room. There were places to eat at the breakfast bar in the kitchen. We’d had exactly no meals in here since I arrived, which was fine—the kitchen was more comfortable.

A stack of mail and a large flat package waited there. Munching on the cereal, I drifted over to look at the addresslabel on the package. I recognized theNotorietyaddress and the warnings todo not bend.

It had to be photos.

I wrestled with my conscience for a solid thirty seconds before I set the bowl down and pulled the tab on the seal for the package. Hard cardboard kept the photos flat, and folders protected the photos themselves. Setting the pieces aside, I flipped open the first one.

With a frown, I studied it. Then moved to the next. Then the next. One after another, I paged through the images. There had to have been fifteen or twenty sent over in total. Likely culled as the best from the three thousand she took on the day.

If these were the best, I had to grimace. “Shit. Shit. Oh my god, what was that woman thinking? Clearly she wasn’t, ’cause she has no idea what she’s doing.” She’d been more interested in sexual assault than focusing on the task at hand. What a creep.

With a sigh, I set the last one down.

“My thoughts exactly,” Seven said from the doorway. I only startled a little because I hadn’t even realized he was home. “It seems that opening my mail and rifling through it has distressed you. I don’t know if you’re aware, but it’s actually a federal offense to open someone else's mail.”

“I’m your girlfriend, Seven, basically de facto at this stage. But that’s beside the point becausethese?They’re shit. Total steaming dung piles. Every single one.” I was sorry I had opened the package up too, but I couldn’t unsee the travesty of what she’d sent over.

His eyebrows skyrocketed. “Excuse me?”

I strode over to him, took his arm, and walked him back to the table. Parking him in front of the images, I started flipping through them one at a time to show him.

“Shit.” I slapped it down.

“Shit.” I slapped down the second image.

“Only slightly up from shit, but I can’t even tell if you’re supposed to be human.” Down went images three through five.

Six through fourteen were next. “These are hardly an improvement. You look like the wax display of you at Madame Tussauds…”

“There isn’t a wax of me there.”

“Could have fooled me,” I said with a scoff. “Because we have evidence right here.”

“What about this one?” It was the last one in this stack. The first one I’d opened. “What’s wrong with it, Stray?”

“It’s soulless. You look like a two-dimensional replica of yourself, flat and lifeless. I don’t even know how bad you have to fuck up a shot to do that. I was there. The light wasn’t the worst. You can do a lot with a little, and you were in white and on full display but all she manages to capture is a sexless, unappealing facsimile.”

His mouth fell open through my diatribe. Yes, it was a damn diatribe. I took photos for a living, but I also understood the art. The woman had the easiest subject in the world—personality excluded—and she failed utterly.

“You think you can do better?” The words landed on the table like a proverbial gauntlet.

“I could do better pictures than this with a store-bought instant camera and the photos developed in a nineties-era Kodak machine.” That wasn’t arrogance; it was a straight-up fact. “I sure as fuck couldn’t do any worse.”

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