Chapter 2: The Studio and the Secret

Kieran’s hand found the small of her back as they walked.

It wasn’t possessive. It was provisional. A question asked with palm and fingertips. Is this okay? Viv didn’t have the vocabulary yet to answer with anything except the body’s forward momentum. It didn’t slow. It didn’t flinch. It just kept moving toward the door of the bar around the corner.

The bar was everything he had promised. Dark. Quiet. A jukebox playing something with organ and regret. Two other patrons hunched over glasses at opposite ends of the room like parentheses around a sentence nobody wanted to finish. Kieran guided her to a booth in the back, a crescent of cracked vinyl, and slid in across from her.

“Whiskey,” he told the waitress. “Two. Whatever’s not bottom shelf.”

“Bold assumption,” Viv said.

“You look like a woman who drinks whiskey.”

“What does a woman who drinks whiskey look like?”

Kieran leaned back. The camera was slung over his chair, lens cap on, but his eyes were still doing the work of a lens. Framing. Focusing. Waiting for the moment when the composition shifted. “Like she’s been disappointed by enough things to prefer the burn.”

Lex’s mouth, her mouth, twitched. The smirk. Viv was learning its repertoire. There was the deflective smirk, the sardonic smirk, and this one, which was something else. Appraising. Almost impressed.

The whiskey arrived. She drank. The burn traced a line down her throat and settled in her chest. Her shoulders dropped half an inch. The tension that had been riding her since the bathroom, since the studio, since waking up in a stranger’s skin, loosened its grip by one notch.

“You’ve been photographing the session all day,” she said. “What’s your verdict?”

“On the band? Solid. Mikey’s a metronome with a pulse. Your guitarist, Jake, needs to stop rushing the bridge on ‘Static.’ But the real story is you.”

“Me.”

“You.” He took a sip. “You sing like someone’s holding a gun to your head and you’ve made peace with the bullet. It’s unnerving. It’s also the sexiest thing I’ve heard in three years of shooting sessions for NME.”

The word sexiest landed in her stomach and detonated downward. She felt the heat spread through her pelvis, that tidal gathering she had almost surrendered to in the bathroom. Her thighs pressed together under the table, an involuntary motion, a reflex the body knew and Viv was only beginning to catalogue.

“You say that to all the bassists,” she said.

“Only the ones who look at me like they’re deciding whether to kiss me or bite me.”

Another sip. The whiskey was doing its work, loosening the seams between Viv’s consciousness and Lex’s instincts. The body knew how to do this. The body had done this before. These charged conversations in dark bars. This verbal sparring that was really foreplay with different vowels. Viv let it lead.

“And which way am I leaning?” she asked.

Kieran set down his glass. The clink of it against the wood was the only sound in the room for a moment. “I don’t know. But I’d like to find out.”

His knee brushed hers under the table, accidental maybe, but the way it stayed there, the way he didn’t pull back, suggested otherwise. The contact was minimal. Denim on denim. A square inch of pressure. She felt it in her molars.

“The studio,” she said. “Tommy’s waiting.”

“Tommy can wait another twenty minutes. I told him I needed some exterior shots. Golden hour.”

“It’s February. There’s no golden hour.”

“I lied.” He smiled. “I’m very good at lying when I want something.”

“And what do you want?”

The question hung between them. She watched him decide how to answer. Watched the calculations flicker behind his face. The weighing of options. The choice between charm and honesty. He went with honesty.

“I want to photograph you somewhere without Mikey hovering and Richie pacing and Tommy checking levels every thirty seconds. I want twenty minutes alone with you and my camera.” He paused. “And then I want to stop being a photographer for a while.”

The ache between her legs had become a presence. It was no longer background noise. It was the lead vocal. Everything else, the jukebox, the whiskey, the sound of Kieran’s voice, was accompaniment.

“There’s a photo studio,” she heard herself say. “Upstairs from the control room. Tommy uses it for promo shots. It’s got a couch. A backdrop. A door that locks.”

Kieran’s eyebrow lifted. “You’ve thought about this.”

“I’m thinking about it now.”

He stood. Dropped cash on the table, too much, a fifty for two whiskeys, but he didn’t wait for change. His hand found her back again, higher this time, thumb resting against the knob of her spine through the leather jacket. They walked out into the cold. The cold was irrelevant. The six blocks back to Magic Shop were irrelevant. The fact that Mikey was probably wondering where she’d gone was irrelevant.

The door to the photo studio was at the top of a narrow flight of stairs, behind the control room where Tommy was still tweaking faders. Viv could hear the faint thump of playback through the floorboards, the bridge of “Static,” the one Jake kept rushing. She turned the handle. The door swung inward.

Gray seamless backdrop. A couple of C-stands. A battered leather couch against the far wall. A window that looked out onto Crosby Street. The streetlights just starting to flicker on in the dusk. And a door with a lock.

She locked it.

When she turned around, Kieran was already setting down his camera. Not tossed aside. Placed carefully on a table, lens retracted, cap on. The care of the gesture was unexpectedly affecting. This was a man who respected instruments. Who understood that some things required deliberate handling.

“Come here,” he said.

She went.

The first kiss was a question. His mouth against hers. Not tentative, but not demanding either. A proposal. This is what I want. What do you want? Lex’s body answered before Viv could second-guess it. Her hands came up to his chest. Palms flat against the fabric of his shirt, flannel, soft from washing, warm from his skin. Her mouth opened. Her tongue found his.

The taste of whiskey. The scrape of stubble. The way he made a sound low in his throat, surprised and pleased, like she had exceeded some expectation he had been trying to keep modest.

His hands moved to her waist. The leather jacket creaked. His thumbs found the ridge of her hipbones through the jacket, through the sweater, and pressed. Not hard. Just enough to anchor her. She stepped closer. The length of her body met the length of his. Even through layers of clothing, the contact was a shock.

She could feel him. The shape of his desire, hardening against her hip. The knowledge that she had caused that, that her body, her mouth, her whiskey-rough voice had done that, sent a surge of something through her. Power. Pleasure. They were the same thing in this body.

Kieran pulled back just far enough to look at her. His pupils were blown wide. His breathing was no longer steady.

“You’re sure,” he said. Not a question. A confirmation.

“I’m sure.”

He walked her backward until her shoulders hit the wall. The seamless backdrop paper crinkled behind her. The wall was cold through the leather jacket, but his body was warm against her front. The contrast made her arch into him. His mouth found her neck, the place where jaw met throat, where the pulse beat closest to the surface. His tongue traced that pulse, and Viv heard herself make a sound she had never made before.

A moan. Low. Breathy. It vibrated in her own throat. She felt it travel down through her chest and settle between her legs, where she was already slick, already aching, already so sensitive that the pressure of her jeans against her clit was almost too much.

His hands were working on the jacket. The zipper came down with a metallic rasp. The jacket fell open. Then the sweater. He pushed it up, not off, just bunched it under her arms, and his mouth descended.