If I'm Honest - Picture Perfect Ch. 02 Pt. 01

Chapter 2 - New York, USA

Things were quiet for the next few days. The bracelet remained almost offended by any further attempts to remove it, rebuking even the careful application of wire cutter, but otherwise gave the impression of being profoundly ordinary. The only real reminder of how odd New Years Eve had felt was the woman currently on the airport lounge's tv.

"...for CTV News this is Danielle Scott reporting."

My flight to JFK was early enough that my stop for coffee, once I'd got through security, lined up with the morning news and Dani broadcasting cheerily from somewhere downtown; professional, beautiful. We'd fucked again in the morning before she left, both of us chasing the high from the night before that we were never quite going to recapture without whatever force had brought us together. That had been 4 days earlier and despite exchanging numbers I hadn't expected to hear from her again, which made the nude selfie I'd received from her the night before had been a particularly pleasant surprise then. Even if she admitted it was only because she was bored, I had been too, and had rewarded her with several of my own.

Watching her throw things back to the studio, smirking into my cardboard cup, I knew she wasn't relationship material. The safe, conventional energy she gave off publically was very different to the assertive brunette, spreading her legs on my phone, and I think we both knew trying to deal with whatever the other had going on would have been a disaster waiting to happen. But I was still trying to ignore the part of me that was saying I wish it wasn't. It had been too damn long since I'd been with anyone, and I was left off guard by the fact that what I'd missed more than the sex was waking up with someone's shape next to me. I refused to admit to myself how lonely she'd made part of me realise I was but...

Ok, yeah, I was lonely.

At least I had this trip to distract myself. Chris had asked me to fly down and meet with him just after Christmas. He was an old contact of mine from the photodesk at Lonely Planet and despite being laid off in the pandemic seemed to have landed on his feet at a new publication called The Near Horizon. I'd heard the name mentioned a few months earlier with a lot of buzzwords like agile, hungry and disruptive and had honestly expected it to fizzle out having wasted a lot of someone's money. What I hadn't expected was for Chris to tell me how much interest they apparently had in my portfolio, enough to want me to travel to Brooklyn to talk about joining. It felt a little too good to be true still, but at that moment I wasn't going to say no to anyone willing to pay my way out of Toronto.

I was about to head early towards my gate when a hand brushed against mine as I reached for what remained of my coffee. The girl with dirty blonde hair looking back at me couldn't have been more than nineteen, slight and shy, neatly dressed in the uniform of the coffee chain I'd just bought my drink from. Our eyes met for just slightly too long, and I swore she blushed. For the first time since the taxi with Dani I became painfully aware of the bracelet and sensed the same sort of eagerness from it that I would do from Alice whenever she encouraged me to hit on someone she thought would be a good match. Which was obviously insane, it was a piece of metal, not a person.

"Sorry, ma'am," she said, and I recognised the familiar awkward dance that comes with trying to work out if another woman might just reciprocate your interest. "You dropped your passport, I thought..."

I glanced down at the little black book she was offering back to me. It wasn't like me to misplace something like that, I'm the sort of person to triple check they have their keys before they leave the door, but patting at my pockets showed I had in fact misplaced it. The barista flicked it open, past pages full of stamps, confirming it was mine with a photo that was several hair colours out of date.

"Shit, I don't know what's wrong with me. You're a lifesaver. Thank you."

I reached back to take it, and she held onto it for a beat that again went on just too long not to notice.

"The blue suits you better, your hair that is," the girl continued, comparing it to the bright purple in the picture.

The bracelet hummed. She was practically a kid, but there was something about the adorably uncertain way she flirted and the slight smattering of freckles across her cheeks that made it unusually hard not to let her take her shot. There was an unsure hand at my back insistently pushing me towards whether this was leading, just as it had guided me into the cab with Dani. It seemed wonderfully simple. And yet...

I glanced at the nearest departure board, still almost an hour until take off. It was a long time for flirting, but remembering how things with Dani had spun so headily out of my control I was scared that if I let myself start whatever this was, there was no way I was getting on that plane. I was already barely going to have time to get over to Brooklyn for my interview at The Near Horizon with everything on schedule and if I missed boarding I could kiss the opportunity goodbye.

It took far more willpower than it should have done to step back from her, waving the passport at her with equal parts gratitude and apology. "Sorry, you're very cute, but I've got a plane I really need to catch." I started to hurry off down the terminal before she could reply and something made me change my mind. "Thanks again."

Reaching the gate didn't make things easier, despite what I'd hoped. If anything the bracelet felt even more agitated and I sensed the eyes of several other women on me, studying me as if I was provocatively alone in a bar rather than at an airport desk. Despite the almost physical tinge of excitement running through me I did my best to try and drown out the lingering attention, slipping in my earbuds to brush up on my French with DuoLingo, but I was distractible and I'm fairly sure there wasn't a single word that ended up sticking.

The next approach came from the airline's agent, checking passports as people boarded. I'd caught her brown eyes watching me as the line moved, dark skinned, gorgeous, hair tucked up under a fashionable red beret. She was painfully out of my league on looks alone and yet the interest as I approached her was unmistakable. Several passengers ahead of me even found themselves being waved through with the barest glance at their documents as she stole looks in my direction.

I glanced at her name badge as I finally handed her my boarding pass, and while I can no longer remember what it said I can vividly recall how my focus was drawn to the curve of the chest it was pinned to, and the trace of the black bra visible under her white shirt. She flashed a perfect smile at me, and my resolve strained.

"Do you have an onward flight from New York today, Miss Levesque?"

I did my best to shake my head.

She continued, "I've just been told we're attempting to accommodate some passengers that were delayed on another flight for their connection. Do you think I could tempt you to travel with us this evening instead?"

It was an obvious lie, but then she wasn't trying to be subtle. The subtext was as overt as if she had asked me back to her place for coffee, and even my romantically hopeless self couldn't miss the suggestive gleam in her eyes. Hot little thoughts pushed their way into my imagination as I pictured her lips working their way across my body and I hesitated, genuinely weighing up if letting her fuck me against the wall of an airport toilet was worth losing out on a job for. If I was less stubborn I might well have let her.

"I've got a job interview and I really need to be on that plane," I mumbled in reply. It was an apology for her, but a reminder for me, needing to hear myself say the words out loud to push back against the influence that was magically spurring us towards each other.

I've always been obstinate. I was the sort of person who could dig her heels in to spite herself just to avoid feeling pressured into doing something. Months later, when I'd had a chance to get my head around how things worked, I might have given in to the bracelet, especially for someone as frighteningly attractive as she was. But back then in January '22 I still had no idea what was going on, and that feeling that I was being compelled by some other force was what ultimately spurred me to take back my boarding pass and get on the plane.

And still the bracelet wasn't satisfied. Between my apartment and reaching the Near Horizon's Brooklyn office I counted being hit on seven times; by the young mother sitting with her kid across the aisle from me on the flight, each flicker of eye contact leaving me gripping the cheap plastic of the plane's arm rest. The TSA officer at immigration, who I worried might simply detain me when I weakly refused her advances and the pretty redhead student stood next to me on the crowded subway car. Each left me more flustered, more worn down, mentally exhausted from the effort of simply making an appointment, wondering if I was going mad and if I was, whether I was also becoming too horny to care.

New York isn't my favourite city at the best of times. You can find something to photograph around every street corner and yet never find anything that hasn't already been captured a hundred times already. It's a lumbering, expensive, wonderful archetype of what we think of as a modern urbanity. And yet it's still alway left my wanderlust with the faint whiff of disappointment every time I've visited. However, I'd never been relieved to escape it before, and I practically ran the final few blocks from Court Street Station to the office, perched on the 4th floor of an extortionately hipster warehouse conversion near to the bridge.

The office itself was just as you'd expect, all fashionably exposed brickwork with pictures from around the world, tastefully framed to provide splashes of colour. A handful of desks filled the communal space and large windows dominated one wall, offering the sort of Manhattan views that probably cost more for a month than my entire apartment did for a year. I was panting by the time I tumbled through the door, hurrying despite being half an hour early. The sudden appearance of a breathless Canadian woman quickly drew the attention of the desk's residents, including the sweater-clad Chris, who emerged from behind a cluster of pot plants to check if I was ok.

"Jesus, Riley, are you ok? You do know your interview isn't for another 30 right?"

Chris was old school. Pushing his 60s, he was a veteran of an era when finding your way to the best photographs still took work. Where you couldn't simply find the fastest route to the middle of India or Colombia with a few taps of a smartphone and where the world still seemed large rather than an Instagram click away. He'd dialled back his work a decade or so ago for health and family, becoming a commissioning editor instead, and I still found it hard to really picture him as anything other than the slightly portly, balding, bespectacled figure he was now. But he knew his shit. Better than I expected I ever would. And despite how affable he was had always been beautifully blunt in his critique of my submissions in a way I wished more people would echo.

"Yeah..." I said, taking a moment to catch my breath, reassured as I noted the others in the office were all men. "It's been..." I considered trying to explain, before realising I wouldn't even know where to start reasoning it to myself, let alone someone else. "Nevermind. Sorry if I'm too early?"

"No, you're fine. You just look like you're sprinted all the way from JFK."

I made a note to get back to the gym. I'd jogged a few hundred yards at most, hardly flattering if I looked like I'd run a marathon."

"Let me get you a drink and I'll see if Lydia's ready for you," he said, already heading for a small tucked away kitchen.

The name caused a small blossoming revival of my anxiety and I tried not to let it show too openly. Naturally I had done as much digging into The Near Horizon as possible, so I knew the name Lydia Mitchell. She was the company's self made angel investor, the person making the entire thing possible, and if things went well, paying my travel expenses. I suddenly felt very under-dressed, having shown up without pretence in jeans and a checked shirt expecting to simply be talking to Chris, not some financial creature that had crawled out of Wall Street and washed up on the wrong side of the East River.

Chris emerged from the kitchen with a glass of water and must have caught my expression as he passed it to me. "Sorry, it was meant to be just me but she was in the office today and likes seeing where her money's going. You'll be fine, trust me, she's a sweetheart."

It was impossible to explain to him why right then the prospect of her being nice was worse than the one of her being a bitch.

I took my time with the water, hoping that it might cool me down, stalled for time in the bathroom, making sure I at least didn't look as flustered as I felt. Briefly I even considered walking out, wondering if this was all some divine attempt to keep me from taking the job. But like I said, I'm stubborn, and the prospect of my career being hurt by whatever madness was going on was enough to drive me into the small conference room where Lydia was waiting.

The instant Chris showed me through the door, I realised I wasn't leaving the building without getting fucked.

Lydia was younger than I expected. She couldn't be out of her thirties yet, with the sort of lingering yoga-addict youthfulness that comes from having the money for private chefs and personal trainers. She wore a tailored grey blazer, held shut across a much more casual top by a single button, sleeves rolled up to reveal a tattoo of several stylised birds printed boldly on the inside of one forearm. Her blonde hair was chin length, chopped in a faux-scruffy manner that a stylist clearly took a lot of care to make look so effortless. But it was the deep brown of her eyes and the way they lit up on seeing me that made my heart skip inside my chest. She was beautiful, and even someone as clueless as me couldn't miss her interest, or how strong the queer energy she radiated was.

"You must be Riley. I realise you probably get people telling you they love the hair all the time, but...I do love the hair."

She was delightfully approachable from the first words out of her mouth, flirting with ease behind a veneer of just-professional-enough. Her smile was easy, and while her confidence definitely fit someone who had apparently made millions in finance, she remained a far cry from what you would picture in every other way, warm and casual. And while Lydia was right about how I'd heard a hundred comments about my blue hair, in that moment I'd give up on feeling anything other than won over.

Finishing holding the door for me, Chris made to enter the room and join us, only for Lydia to look up towards him.

"It's fine Chris, I can handle this one on my own. You're the one who's been telling me how much you want her on board so this is really just a chance for me to look over her portfolio and make sure she's what I'm looking for. Go grab a coffee."

He glanced over to me, and I couldn't tell if there was a hint of knowing to his expression or if he was simply looking to see if I wanted someone professional in my corner. The bracelet practically burnt on my wrist, psychically screaming at me to let him go. I accepted the inevitable, giving him a shrug, and felt the pressure that had been building in my mind all afternoon ease, just slightly.

"You did say she was a sweetheart," I pointed out, giving him permission to drift grudgingly away back to the office.

As the door clicked shut I became acutely conscious of how alone we were, and how there was already a sizzle of tension between us with barely a word exchanged. I watched Lydia take me in as I found a seat at the polished conference room table, attempting to leave just enough distance between us only for her to slide her chair closer anyway. She brushed up against my personal space, my heart raced, and I wondered why I had been fighting this all day.

"So, Riley, I really love what I've seen so far." There was a knowing grin accompanying the statement that left me unsure if she meant my work, or me.

"Thank you. I'm not going to turn down praise." Somehow I managed to keep a straight, blush free face, but Lydia evidently picked up on my hesitancy. Even if she might not have appreciated it was from anticipation rather than nerves.

"Please, relax Dear. Your name has been at the top of Chris' list of who he's wished was involved for months. The job is already as good as yours, if you want it. Think of this more as a chance to ask a few questions and look through your portfolio so I can tell you what it is we're looking for."

I reached from my travel bag and drew out a neat folder bound in neat black leather. "Sounds good to me"

"Besides, I only bite when people ask me to."

A slight, surprised, sputter came from my mouth unwillingly, met with the barest of chuckles from her. I could feel her watching my reaction, buoyed by the reaction she got from me. Part of me would have loved to know if she was always quite so forward, or if the power of the silver bracelet was smothering her inhibitions.

Clearly flustered, I grasped at the first thought I could find to steer the conversation in any direction that wouldn't lead to an awkward, pointed silence. "You aren't what I would have expected from someone in finance"

That much was true. Lydia was a world away from a Wolf of Wall Street style 'alpha' personality, all laid back charm and earnest seeming charisma. I'd never been to California but if anything she fit that imagined sun blushed wealth than anything that belonged here on the east coast.

"No? That's a good thing I hope?"

Our eyes met again, and it was my turn to smile at her. "Definitely."

Lydia took a moment to return it, before forcing herself to my portfolio, thumbing through carefully curated pages. It was something I've spent far more hours working on than I should, selecting, ordering and rearranging the prints carefully arrayed within, picking over every image the way a poet might syllables. As far as I was concerned the couple dozen pages were the embodiment of my career, the strongest reflection of who I was, autobiographical from Japan to Jaipur, via Havana, Mexico and the Middle East. And I was constantly looking to make it perfect.

"I realised during Covid that I was in a position to do something with the money I'd made that actually excited me, rather than just hedging on projects I had no interest in," Lydia said, pausing at an image of the Hawa Hahal. "To actually help create something I could be proud of."

For a brief few minutes I stopped noticing the sexual tension, pushed quietly into the background by a needy little desire to see her like my work. I watched her carefully, looking for signs of interest in the pictures before her even more eagerly than I had looked for her interest in myself.

"You're actually hoping to compete with the likes of Lonely Planet then," I asked.

"We think there's an opportunity to disrupt the space a little. The world's smaller than it used to be Riley. You don't need a guidebook anymore to tell you that the Hagia Sophia is worth seeing or to inspire you to visit the Great Wall. Even places like Thailand are all there already on TikTok for any 18 year old with a backpack to go and chase after. What we want to do is to leave the low hanging fruit for others and focus on building a unique brand for the first few years. We want writers and photographers that can find the places that other people aren't, go bold and honest and eye-catching. To show the things no-one else is looking at. We want..."