Eight Girls Taking Pictures by Whitney Otto Read Free Book Online Page A

take the picture.”
    As it happened, he was smiling.

    Julius gallantly tried to sleep on the floor, but his tossing and turning distracted Cymbeline from sleep, and, for the tenth time, she asked him to sleep beside her. On the eleventh time, he said yes.
    They arranged the sheets so that he was on top, and she was underneath, and the blanket covered them both. They kept on as many clothes as they could without looking too rumpled in the morning.
    Cymbeline must have dozed off because she awoke within that strange consciousness where you are awake enough to know that you aren’t in your own bed but can’t for the life of you figure out whose bed you are in. She must know the man beside her, she told herself, as she struggled for understanding. Her eyes scanned the room, fixating on the light from the window to adjust to the darkness. The sounds of the city, muted in the very early morning hours, were unfamiliar. Her heart knocking against her chest as the adrenaline surged through her so that she was suddenly fully awake. The calm aftermath was like recovering from a sprint, full of relief and exhaustion. The man beside her was Julius. Without shifting her position as she lay on her back, she slipped her hand into his.
    “You’re okay,” he said. “It was just a bad dream.”
    Later, she could not say how it started, but the way it ended was unforgettable. She remembered her fingers threaded through his hair and his kisses in places that made her long for him years later.
    Then everything wound down to nothing, Julius quiet as he lay beside her, his fingers lightly resting on her arm.
    “What are we doing here?” she asked.
    “I thought you would understand Berlin.”
    “No. Here. ”
    “Waiting for the morning.”
    They were silent.
    “Do I mean anything to you?”
    He said nothing.
    “I love you, you know.” Then, because she couldn’t take back what she hadn’t intended to say, she added, “I love you.” And that was when she felt the rearrangement of every molecule in the room.
    “Schiss, schiss, schiss,” he said so softly she almost couldn’t hear it. He said, “I wanted to have Berlin to remember you by, you know, so maybe I would miss you a little less.”
    But I can stay! she wanted to cry out. I want to stay!
    “I’m sorry,” he said finally.
    His apology scraped across her heart, leaving her angry and confused and in love and angry and confused.
    She once read that the sea will silently pull a mile back into itself before returning to the shore as a tsunami. In the stillness of this moment, she fought against being overwhelmed by a violent surge of truth and loss that felt imminent. She said, “How could I have been so stupid.” She said, “Of all the girls in the city you pick me? Schiss .”
    “You’re not the other girls.”
    Now she was sitting up. “And what about your wife? Is she ‘not the other girls’?” (No response.) “Or is it a girlfriend?” (No response.) “How not the other girls is she?”
    He turned his back to her as he sat on the edge of the bed, his head in his hands. In the morning light she could see his hair, mussed and ungroomed, his undershirt, his slim, square shoulders, so perfect to her, exposed. She loved him she loved him she loved him—every other thought obliterated but that one.
    “I don’t have a woman.” He turned toward her. “Do you see now?” He rose and began to dress. She watched him. He paused to tell her that their train left in an hour and did she want to meet at the station?
    The sun was up, flooding the room.
    She crossed to the window and saw him disappear down the street.It all came back to her: the advance and retreat of their relationship; the genuine camaraderie and shared interests. The warmth between them that never quite caught. The comment about the suffragettes, and people being allowed to be who they are. The young man, Otto Girondi, at the Photographic Exposition—the same young man who had been laughing in