Star Again: Stories

A story in the Available Light Cycle Universe
He reads every room for a living. Nobody has ever read him back. Three days at a photography conference in Prague. A woman who watches him as hard as he watches everyone else and refuses to let him hide behind the lens. Three photographs: colleague, desire, morning. And a fourth he was never given permission to take. Explicit, unhurried, nothing fades to black.

He died at seventy-nine and woke at twenty, same body, same year: 2003, in Leuven, the whole thing still ahead of him. James knows what's coming: the crashes, the fortunes, the people he'll lose. This time he'll go slow, build quiet, keep his head. But a second life is still a life, and knowing the future doesn't make it hurt less when it arrives. Least of all when it's her.