Exposures, a novel

The man and the woman came together once the blue night deepened to indigo, and the sliver of moon crested the pines on the black ridge.  They came alone to the cabin: a room of rough plank with a simple bed, covered in a white duvet, a wooden chair, and a table.  On the table lay an old camera and tripod, and in the corner, two studio lights bent in darkness.  A single light burned by the bed.

In the woman''s hand, a lime.

Small, and wrapped in a white robe, the woman sliced the lime in two, and gave half to the man.  He handed her a shot glass and poured each of them a finger of tequila.  The woman raised her drink to her lips, her eyes intent on the face of the man.

She had remarkable eyes.  The man almost felt as if there was someone within her, different at all times, as though her brown body was a chalice of many spirits, and she alone, the keeper.  He slipped into her gaze, wondering who she was this night.  He felt his thighs tense.

The woman lifted a hand and dribbled the limejuice onto the tip of her tongue.  Then she smiled, a slow hungry smile, the sucking gravity of low tide, the invisible collapse of space.  She kissed the man on the lips and they clung together, the bitter wildness on their tongues before the woman broke away.  She drained her tequila, the glass flashing in the lamplight. 

The man reached out and stroked the black copper sheen of her hair, felt the silk like the flow of heavy water cross his hand.  He drank his tequila then, memorizing the feel of a river.

The young woman walked over to the cabin window and stood a moment, looking out at the brilliance of the stars, the infinity of so many points of light in the fabric of night.  The moonlight was modest, the narrow crescent in the sky no more than one naked shoulder on a new bride.  But this woman was no bride.  She was a painter, her world created from the expanse of her mind.   

She glanced over her shoulder.  The man stood working with his camera in the half-light of the small lamp, his long legs in jeans, chest bare, swirls of dark hair on the pale plain of his body as he bent under the light.  He shifted, revealed by the movements of his square hands as not a love, but a photographer, observing her through glass.  Seeing not the woman, but the shape of her. 

The woman shrugged, and turning away, opened the window.   A draft of cold air slipped through her fingers and stirred the room, and the man looked up, startled.  Abruptly she threw the sash high and swung her legs over, sitting on the ledge.  Beyond her, snowfields stretched to the reach of the moon, a dusting of ice, a brilliant phosphorescence of light.  Snowbank.  The man lifted his camera to his eye.

Oblivious to the cold, the woman dropped her robe to her hips.  The man marked the image, appraising the weight of her hip curved to the window frame, the contrast in the drape of white cloth.  His gaze traveled the long comma of her back.  Ah, he had pressed the pad of his own thumb from that nape to buttocks, stroking the terrace of fragile bone.  Carefully he gauged the angle of her jaw behind the dark hair, the face lifted to the light of bodies in flight, the new stars and the swollen great ones, blown into scarves of hot gas and ash. 

The woman stretched a hand out the window and closed her fingers as if to catch a star.  Gently, the photographer pressed the trigger of his old camera, listening for the whir of the aperture.