26
There’s something heady and disorienting about the smell of those chemicals as I wash my prints and clip them to drip-dry on the line. I always get light-headed in the darkroom. Maybe it’s an effect of the strange red light, but most likely it’s just the developer killing off my brain cells one by one.
The photos are turning out better than I expected. In black and white, they seem almost timeless. Nechama could have emerged from any era between now and the 1940s, a composite of all our mothers and grandmothers and great-grandmothers. And I understand now why these traditions are so important to people, why the community I grew up in clings to them with both hands—they’re like a thread strung through time. If you tug, you’ll feel your ancestors tugging back.
I dip another print and watch the image emerge beneath the developer fluid, the smiling faces of Nechama’s daughters smudged with flour, Nechama herself wrist deep in a mound of dough and watching them with fondness crinkling the edges of her eyes. Film either softens its subjects or makes them stark; with Nechama, it’s the former.
There are a couple of digital photos of me in there too. I’m impressed by Menuchah’s eye; for such a young girl, she really has an instinct for how to frame a subject. I almost don’t recognize myself. I fit into the scene more easily than I would have thought. All that time away from Crown Heights, but I still look right at home kneading challah dough, a tiny smile settled on my lips as if I couldn’t be happier doing anything else.
The door to the darkroom swings open and shut again. There’s not that many people using analog at Parker, so I look on reflex.
“Nice to see someone’s focused today,” Wyatt says. His smile always makes me stand a little straighter.
“Unlike yourself, I’m guessing?”
Wyatt ducks under one of the lines of drying prints and moves closer to me, peering over my shoulder at my own photographs. “For the record, I am very busy and important.”
“Oh, right. And that’s why you’ve stalked me into the darkroom. Just doing your mentoring duty.”
“Absolutely.”
He reaches past me to pluck one of the images off the line. The sudden proximity makes me stand too still, like if I move, the moment will splinter.
The photo is one I took of Nechama standing behind her youngest daughter, Batsheva, Nechama’s hands gently cupped around Shevy’s as she shows her daughter how to knead the dough. A puff of flour has been caught in the air, frozen forever by the snap of my camera lens.
“This one,” Wyatt says. “This is perfection.”
At least it’s red in here; my blush blends right in. “Not perfect. But it’s…okay.”
Wyatt shakes his head. “Nothing’s ever perfect. But nothing has to be. And you shouldn’t doubt yourself like that. You should take pride in your work.”
I can’t keep looking at him when he’s saying things like that. The eye contact makes me feel too unsettled, hyperaware of my position in space relative to his. The air between us feels as if there’s an electric current running through it. So I turn away to look at the other photos myself, scanning from one shot to the next without really seeing them. Maybe Wyatt’s right. Maybe there’s a part of me that can’t stand to be observed, even by him.
“You’re talented,” Wyatt says from behind me. His voice is soft but close enough that I can almost imagine his head tilting in toward my neck, his breath ruffling through my hair. “Acknowledging that won’t hold you back. It won’t keep you from learning. I wish you could see yourself the way everyone else does. The way I do.”
I turn around and he’s so close all of a sudden, close enough that I would have stepped back on reflex if not for the table behind me, pressing up against my thighs. Wyatt seems frozen too, his eyes widened slightly and his lips parted but unbreathing. It would be easy for him to step away. But he stays where he is. And if before I found it impossible to look at him, now I can’t look away. The red light casts strange shadows about his face and shimmers in his dark eyes like lights moving beneath the surface of a lake.
Any minute now, I think. Any minute now he’s going to move back.
But he doesn’t, and I stay where I am, and my heart is pounding so fast I wonder if he can hear it.
The words I want to say are trapped on my lips: I wish I could see anything the way you do. But speaking has become impossible. Wyatt shifts closer, just slightly, and when his fingertips skim my hip, I almost shiver right out of my skin.
The loud droning sound of Wyatt’s phone vibrating in his pocket cracks the amber of that moment, and reality crashes in like an unexpected wave. He flinches and takes a sharp step back. I turn my face away, pretending sudden interest in the tray of developer fluid on the table behind me. But really, I just don’t want Wyatt to see my face. I don’t want him to see that I can’t quite hide how hurt I am that he just…
It’s like he regrets it already.
“I’m sorry. I have to get this,” he says, and I nod without looking up. I stare at the developer and listen to the sound of his footsteps walking away, the subsequent open-shut of the darkroom door.
I exhale and tip my head forward, bracing myself against the table for a moment. Shit. If that phone hadn’t rung when it did…I feel like I know what would have happened next. And it was time. Wasn’t it? We both want this; we both have tried so hard to keep things professional. It seems so stupid to keep fighting it. We’re both adults. I’m not even Wyatt’s student anymore. For fuck’s sake, I’ve spent the night at his house. If there was ever a boundary there, it’s clearly shredded to bits by now.
I wonder if Wyatt is relieved we got interrupted. Maybe he’s out there thanking whoever is on the other end of the phone for saving his ass from the student throwing herself at him in the darkroom. Maybe he’s already castigating himself for even considering going for it, making a brand-new list of all the reasons we can never be together. A list I’ll probably get the privilege of hearing recited as soon as he comes back, always with the cautious and inherently condescending tone of a man who thinks he knows what’s best for me.
Because that’s what this is all about, isn’t it? Like, let’s be honest—Wyatt isn’t holding himself back because he thinks his professorial pride would be injured by fucking me again. He is on some martyr shit. He thinks if he was with me again, really with me, he’d be doing some kind of irreversible harm to my studently innocence. And while I appreciate that he is considerate of the potential power imbalance, said power imbalance hardly even exists. Doesn’t exist. Not really.
So it’s just Wyatt wallowing in the swamp of his own indulgent self-sacrifice.
But he still wants it. All this time that’s passed since we had sex…it’s changed nothing. Wyatt wants this. He wants me. And maybe that’s egotistical to admit, but he literally just told me to stop being modest.
Why are we still pretending? Why am I still letting him decide how I feel or set the standards for what I should find to be exploitative?
If that phone hadn’t gone off, we’d be kissing right now. His hands in my hair, on my body, slipping beneath the hem of my shirt. And I’d have my tongue in his mouth and my fingers latching around his belt loops as he shoved me back against the table behind us, developer fluid sloshing in the trays and spilling onto the vinyl floor.
My skin still feels too alive where he touched me, that place on my hip burning with the memory of his hand.
If we were together, he’d murmur sweet things in my ear about how much he misses me every time I’m away.
When he comes back…if he comes back…this ends. I’ll cup his face between both my hands, and I’ll kiss him so hard he forgets he’s ever kissed anyone else.
I exhale and slide another print into the developer. I get through just one more of them before the door opens again, and I listen to the sound of Wyatt’s footsteps as he moves through the small maze of the light lock. I turn around, summoning up the courage to take those last steps forward, and immediately stop in my tracks.
Wyatt stands in the entryway, his phone hanging from one hand with the screen still lit up in red scale thanks to some screen-filtering app.
His face is streaked with tears.