Show Her

I was thirty-four that summer and working the espresso machine five days a week, and by Saturday afternoon at the Air & Auto Expo I was bored out of my skull. My friend Christa had bailed on me that morning with a text about her kid's soccer thing, so I'd paid twelve dollars for a cider I didn't even want and sat in the beer garden watching strangers sweat. The loudspeakers kept announcing helicopter rides. Somewhere past the fence a monster truck kept revving and never moving, like a dog barking at a door.

I'd come to the expo because planes, I guess. And because sitting home alone on a June Saturday felt worse than paying too much for cider. That was the entire plan, honestly. Planes, cider, people-watching, go home.

Then I saw him.

He was standing near the wing of a big 1940s cargo plane, the kind with rivets everywhere and a paint job that made it look like a flying cigar, and he had a camera up near his face. Tall, still kind of narrow in the shoulders, that same careful way of standing like he didn't want to bother anybody. Twelve years since I'd seen him and I knew him in about two seconds. Jameson. Thirty-six now, probably. He'd be thirty-six. He was two years ahead of me back at the community college, both of us slogging through the graphic design certificate program, and we'd dated for three months when I was twenty-two and he was twenty-four.

I ended it, and the way I ended it is the part I've never told anybody straight out.

We'd been in his car outside my apartment, some weeknight in October, and I pulled my shirt off over my head in the passenger seat just to see what he'd do. I wasn't even sure why. It wasn't a seduction, exactly. I wanted him to look. I wanted him to look so hard he forgot how to be polite about it. And he did look, he stared, he actually dropped the strap of my bra off my shoulder with one careful finger like he was handling film in a darkroom, and the shade of that bra, a deep plum color, I swear he committed it to memory the way other men memorize batting averages. But the next morning at his place he made eggs and talked about a class project and never once said anything about the night before, and something in me decided that was cowardice, and I dumped him two days later.

Spite, maybe, is what I felt sitting there in the beer garden watching him lift that camera. Or the memory of spite, kept warm all these years like a pilot light. Either way my heart picked up and I set the cider down.

He saw me before I'd decided anything. His camera lowered and his mouth moved and even across all that tarmac noise I could have guessed the shape of it. "Noor?" He said my name loud enough the second time that a guy at the next table glanced over.

"Jameson," I said, walking up. "Of course you're here. Of course you have a camera."

He laughed, a little sheepish. "It's a hobby. Planes are good subjects. They hold still." He looked better than I remembered, or maybe just realer, sunburn across the nose, khaki shorts, the camera with a big honest lens on it. "How have you been? It's been, what, ten years?"

"Twelve," I said. "And fine. I pull espresso in Fremont. You?"

"IT support for a school district out in Kent. Thrilling stuff." He shifted his weight. He was looking at me the way people look at a face they used to know the layout of, checking rooms they remember. And I felt it, that old flare, the irritation, the hunger, the whole stupid cocktail, and I made a decision on the spot that I didn't examine until later.

I was going to make him follow me.

"Come on," I said. "I'm bored and you're boring. Walk me past the food trucks, I want one of those gigantic lemonades."

So he walked me. He was easy company in the way he'd always been, pointing out the planes by name and year, telling me the B-25 over by the hangars had a leaky fuel line so they'd pulled it from the flight lineup. I let him talk. I was doing math in my head about the sun angle and the crowd and where the shadows fell, like I was planning a photo shoot I wasn't the photographer for.

The monster-truck pit sat behind everything else, a huge dirt bowl with chain-link on the far side and a gravel access road behind it. Trucks sat in rows, tires taller than me, and most of the crowd was up front watching a jet-car demonstration, which meant the back of the pit was nearly empty. Just gravel, chain-link, and a view of nobody.

I stopped at the fence there and pretended to fuss with my jeans. I wasn't fussing with anything. I rolled the waistband down a half inch at the back, slow, and I knew exactly what he'd see, because I'd worn the black lace thong on purpose, or at least I'd put it on that morning without asking myself why, and now the why stood next to me holding a camera.

I looked back over my shoulder. He was looking. He swallowed, and his face went through about four expressions before landing on careful, which is his landing spot for everything.

"Careful," he said, and his voice had gone rough. "Somebody could see."

"That's kind of the point," I said, and rolled the waistband back up, and walked on like nothing happened. My blood was up now. That warm moving-through-you feeling, the one I'd been chasing since before I had a name for it, the one that only shows up when somebody's watching and I know they're watching.

The old control tower stands at the north end of the airfield, a concrete box with a top floor of windows all smacked with stickers, roped off with one saggy chain and a sign that said STRUCTURALLY ASSESSED, which is a phrase that should have meant something and apparently meant nothing. The stairwell door hung open. Nobody was around. The jet-car demo had everyone pressed up against the runway fence.

We stood by the tower wall and he was still holding the camera and there was this quiet between us that had twelve years of unfinished business in it, and I got tired of it.

"You remember the car," I said. It wasn't really a question.

His ears went pink. "Yeah," he said. "I think about it more than I should." He looked down at the gravel. "I handled it badly. The next morning. I just didn't know what to say, so I said nothing, and you read that as me not caring."

"I read it as cowardice."

"Fair." He said it simply, no argument, and somehow that made me madder and hotter at the same time.

So I unbuttoned my flannel shirt. Slowly. One button at a time, looking right at him, the whole time, over the open air, in the middle of an afternoon with a thousand people a few hundred yards away and engines droning like weather. Underneath I had on a gray bra and I let the shirt hang open so the edges framed it. He raised the camera. I heard the shutter, once, twice, a soft professional clicking, and God, that sound went through me like current. Him watching. Him keeping it. Him making a record of me being seen.

"You can photograph," I said. "You can look all you want."

"Noor." He lowered the camera. "What are we doing here?"

"Whatever I say we're doing." I took his wrist and pulled him toward the stairwell door. "Come on."

The stairwell inside was dim and cool, concrete walls, one