Page 20 of Will You (Not) Marry Me

Eva was done. She was done playing everyone’s games, dancing along to the beat of their drum, tired of twisting herself up in lies and a false persona in hopes of escaping from it all. She didn’t care anymore. Let Finn see the real her. She wasn’t going to get her freedom anyway, so what did it matter?

CHAPTER9

FINN

It seemed he’d managed to get a little too close to the truth of the matter a little too quickly, and it had sent Eva running. Finn sat back on the sofa, thinking about the encounter, and though it had ended with Eva visibly upset, he thought that it was still a strange sort of success. It was some real emotion from her, not whatever this act had been. And Tobias had been right all along. He’d said to be kind to drive her crazy. It turned out she just needed someone to be kind to her, period.

The front door opened and Eva trudged back inside, windswept and slightly damp from the snow. She spotted him on the sofa as he craned his neck back to look at her. She looked defeated. And very, very tired.

“Hi,” she said softly. She looked so sad as she kicked off her wet boots by the door, her camera gripped firmly in one hand.

“Hi,” Finn replied. “Did you… um, did you get any good photos?”

She shrugged a little. But it wasn’t the same sort of shrug she’d given him time and time again. This was a shrug that had no self-confidence in it. She padded down the hall in her socks, and he heard her bedroom door click open. Then, slowly, she reappeared, a laptop under her arm, and sat at the kitchen table.

“I can show you if you want,” she said in a quiet voice.

Finn had to force himself not to jump up off the sofa and rush to her side right then. Gentle, that was the energy she needed right now.

“Yes,” he said, getting up slowly and sitting by her side in a leisurely manner. “I’d love to.”

She slipped a memory card out from the camera and into her laptop and started clicking away, pulling up some sort of software Finn had never seen before.

“They’re not edited yet, obviously, so…” She trailed off with a shrug, looking slightly embarrassed to be showing him, but turned the screen towards him so he could see.

There were a couple hundred images that she’d taken in the hours she’d been out. They were at such intriguing angles, showing the trees, the snow and the frozen lake as he’d never really seen them before. You could have handed Finn the exact same camera and he would never have thought to take photos of the shadows instead of the trees, a line of footprints pressed deep into the snow instead of a selfie. It fascinated him that this is what Eva’s photos looked like. He didn’t know what he had been expecting, but it certainly hadn’t been this. They looked perfect, like art, like you could print them straight out and hang them in a gallery. When he’d seen her with that camera, bragging about her degree, he’d honestly thought she was just full of herself. Just someone playing at being an artist and thinking they were the next Da Vinci or something. But these… They were beautiful.

“What do you mean by editing them?” he asked, aware of Eva looking at him, waiting for a response. “Aren’t the photos just… done?”

Eva offered him a small smile as if he’d said something amusing. A real smile, not a smirk. “I mean…” She fidgeted with her fingers, not quite able to think how to explain it to him. “Here, I’ll show you.”

She pulled up one of the pictures. The horizon was a crisp line that slashed through the middle of the shot, with the shadows of the trees stretching out towards it like hungry hands. It looked like a still from a movie, something creepy that stayed with you long after you watched it.

Finn tilted his head as he watched her work. How she managed to navigate the software, he had no idea. He’d never been that simpatico with technology; give him a pen and notebook any day. But the screen that currently looked like it was designed by international space programmers was at her mercy, Eva’s fingers flying over the keyboard at an incredible speed.

“This shadow there is a bit fuzzy on the edge, so I can sharpen it up using this tool. And the whole thing is overexposed, so I just need to bring that down a little. I might have to do a mask on it if I want it a bit more perfect, like more precise. But see, that’s better already.”

She leaned back so he could see. The image certainly looked sharper and somehowmoreblack and white than it was before.

He realized with a jolt that he was sad, not for himself but for Eva. If she was taking such harsh photographs, images of desolate, frozen-over landscapes, did that just mean that was all she had access to at the moment? That they were the only possible photographs to take out there? Or was it a reflection of how she felt? Empty, cold and alone.

With that sobering thought, any lingering trace of irritation he had towards her disappeared. If she felt as bleak as those photos, he didn’t exactly blame her for being a brat. He had a fleeting thought to show her his journal in return for seeing her photographs, but he shut that idea straight down. That was too personal, surely? And too soon. He was getting ahead of himself, and he didn’t want to scare her off. Besides, the thought of showing anyone his scribbles, the thoughts he poured out of his head to keep it from bursting, made him feel slightly sick. He didn’t even show Tobias that sort of stuff, not since they were kids. He’d stick to just talking for now.

“I’ll be honest. I don’t really understand, still,” Finn said with a self-deprecating shrug. “But it looks beautiful either way.”

That little smile of hers was back, and Finn wanted to foster it like he would a tiny flame, encouraging it to grow. Eva shrugged.

“Thanks. It’s a lot of practice,” she said. “To know what to look for, what angles to chase out, using the lighting that you have, using the camera settings to achieve what you want or knowing before you even hit the shutter how you would use editing to make the photo even better than reality…”

She trailed off with another shrug as if knowing all that wasn’t impressive. But she’d finally,finallygiven Finn a way in to get to know her, and he sure wasn’t going to waste the opportunity.

“So, the art degree?”

“Yeah?”

“That’s impressive. Sounds like a lot of work.”

Eva picked at her fingernails. “Yeah, it was.”

---