I just laughed. “I’m gonna get all the expensive stuff out of the caravan. It’s got locks, but they’re not the best and I’d rather not take any chances of my kit being nicked while we’re sleeping.”
“Is that your polite way of giving me privacy to get in the shower?”
I shrugged. “If you want it to be.”
She held my gaze. “I mean, I won’t be using the bathroom in front of you, but I’m not going to be weird about modesty at this point.”
“Right, because once you’ve had your mouth on someone, privacy seems a bit silly.”
She hesitated. “About earlier…”
“No worries, really.” I stood up, headed for the door. “Take your time in the shower. I’ll just be uploading today’s shots from my camera.”
She just nodded and began rummaging in her bag. “Okay.
When I got back to the room with my various bags of photography gear—my many lenses, spare cameras, SD cards, my iPad, power adapters, card reader adapter for the iPad and the camera connection adapter, cell phone and charger, Poppy was already in the shower. She’d left the door partly opened, enough that I could see the tub with the shower curtain drawn closed, and steaming escaping in coiling banks and swirls. She was singing quietly in a smooth and pretty alto, an old Taylor Swift song, by the sound of it.
I connected my camera to the iPad, waited for Photos to load and synch today’s shots. I got some good ones, some crap ones, and a couple gold star ones that I moved to a different folder to edit and add to the ongoing project file. Then I got to Poppy’s section, particularly the macro stuff, and my brain about exploded. Fucking spectacular. And she claimed photography wasn’t even her main bag? I’d give just about my left arm to see her canvas work, if that’s the case.
One shot in particular of the caterpillar was just wicked good. She’d caught it mid-arch, with a flare of sunspots behind it, casting its own shadow in the golden hour light. It was in perfect clarity, filling the frame, caught with a sense of motion, as if at any moment the photo could become a video. Without even thinking about it, I transferred the shot to Lightroom and started touching it up, brightening the light, punching up the colors, smoothing out the edges. Nothing noticeable, until you saw the final version next to the original.
I heard the shower shut off, the curtain rings rattle as she tugged the towel down, and the rings scrape against metal as she dragged the curtain back. I couldn’t help but glance up, and my breath snagged in my throat. Dripping wet, hair was pasted to her cheeks and slicked back against her head and around her shoulders, fabulously long. Droplets of water dribbled down her forehead, dotted her upper lip, beaded on her shoulders…slid down her cleavage where she had the white bath towel wrapped around her torso over her breasts. It was a small towel, and barely covered her ass, leaving all of her thick golden-tanned thighs bared.
I swallowed hard. Had absolutely no ability to look away.
Had I ever seen such beauty? Never. She was fucking perfect—female beauty at its nadir, feminine allure crystallized and refined and shaped into the body and person of Poppy Goode.
She caught me staring. “What? Never seen a girl just out of the shower?”
“Seen the sunrise from Mount Fuji, sunset in the Gobi, seen the midnight sun in the Arctic Circle, seen glaciers crack off and slide down mountainsides, seen ice calve off the shelf into bergs the size of cities. I’ve seen flocks of birds so thick the sun goes dark, seen a lioness give birth in the wild, seen the bottom of the ocean and the top of the world. Seen some of the most beautiful women from just about every country on the globe, seen ’em anywhere from totally nude to garbed in the full panoply of state.” I couldn’t, didn’t try to look away from her, from the way the water caught the light and the way the towel both hid and revealed her curves all at once. “Never in my life have I seen anything so beautiful and breathtaking as you, right now, just like that.”
She huffed, shaking her head. “Jesus, dude. What the hell do I say to something like that?”
I shrugged. “Don’t have to say anything.” I forced myself to swallow, to breathe, to look away. “Just the truth, as I see it.”
A brief but taut silence. “Errol?”
I looked up. “Yeah?”
She shrugged, embarrassed or awkward or…something. “Thank you.”
I smiled. “Just the truth, Poppy. You’re so fuckin’ beautiful it’s hard to look at you for too long, sometimes.”
“People have told me all my life that I’m beautiful. But when you say it, especially like that?” Another shrug, her voice quieter now. “I guess I…feelit. Feel beautiful, in a way that I don’t always feel.”
She was within touching distance, and I had to touch her. I swiped a fingertip down the outside of her arm, through water droplets that still trickled over her skin, here and there.
“You ought to feel beautiful always,” I whispered. “You ought to feel like the queen of the world. Like…like Venus, or Diana, or Aphrodite.”
I wanted to touch her, to pull that towel off, to lick every last droplet off her flesh. But now she was clean and I wasn’t.
“I’m…I’m gonna rinse off, too,” I said.
She nodded. Glanced down at my lap, at the iPad. “Whatcha got there?”
“Oh, this.” I turned it to show her.
She tucked the edge of the towel in tighter between her breasts, and then took the iPad. “Wow.”
