Beautiful Stranger

say yes.
    I’d had sex with a few dozen women since moving to the States, but lately I’d had a hard time remembering details. Every memory of sex made me think of being with Sara. She was sweet and wild. She hid so much of herself, and yet she let me do fucking anything . I had never met a woman I found so paradoxically secretive and open.
    “I met a woman, mate.”
    Will shoved his chopsticks back into the takeout container and slid it across the desk. “So you’re going to talk about it now?”
    “Oi. Maybe.”
    “You’ve been seeing her for a while now, haven’t you?”
    “Few weeks, yeah.”
    “Just her?”
    I nodded. “She’s a fucking stellar lay, and it’s good because she told me she doesn’t want me sleeping with other women.”
    Will gave me the holy shit face. I ignored it.
    “But she’s different. There’s something about her . . .” I rubbed my mouth, stared out the window. What the fuck is wrong with me today? “I can’t get her out of my head.”
    “Do I know her?”
    “Don’t think so.” I thought back, trying to remember if Will had actually met Sara at the fund-raiser. I was with him most of the night after I left her to straighten her dress and freshen up, and I don’t think I ever saw them speak.
    “So you won’t tell me who she is.” Will laughed, leaning back in his chair. “Has she captured your soul, young lover?”
    “Fuck off.” I grabbed the plastic bag and shoved the mostly empty containers inside. “I just like her. But it’s just sex right now. By mutual agreement.”
    “Which is good,” he said, carefully. “She’s not a digger then.”
    “Am I a wanker for thinking that’s weird? She doesn’t want more. Even if I did, I think that would just make her run off. She’s terrified of being seen in public with me. Do you think I like her so much because she’s so bloody uninterested in anything but my dick?”
    And like I always did when I thought of Sara, I began to make guesses about her endgame.
    Will whistled quietly. “She sounds fantastic. But I can’t imagine why she’d be interested in your dick. With that tiny thing you’ll never be half the man your mother is.”
    “You just insulted Brigid? You’re an arsehole.”
    He shrugged, cracked open a fortune cookie.
    “You put the seat down to piss, don’t you?” I asked, grinning.
    “Nah. Don’t like getting my dick wet.”
    “Will. The only way you could give a woman pleasure is by handing over your credit card, mate.”
    And somehow, in the flurry of insults that followed, Will made me forget to act like a pathetic arse about the whole thing and I stopped worrying about whether Sara was fucking with my head.

    After lunch, I left the office, hailing a cab almost immediately for a quick jaunt to see a new art installation being set up in Chelsea. I’d helped an old client find and open a gallery, and he was showing a set of rare E. J. Bellocq photos for only a few weeks. All it took was a one-line email from him— They’re here —and the rest of my day was shot. I was mad to see the never-before-shown reconstructed pieces from the damaged negatives of Bellocq’s “Storyville” collection. Although I had come to his work rather late in my education,his had been the art that triggered my fascination with photographs of the body, of its angles, its simplicity, its everyday vulnerability.
    Though, until Sara, I’d never taken a picture of myself with a lover.
    And there was the real rub. My shots of Sara and me together in no way mimicked Bellocq’s art, but still it reminded me of her. Her thin waist, soft stomach, and the gentle curve of her hips.
    Glancing down at my phone, I wished for the thousandth time that I had one single picture of her eyes when we were making love.
    Fuck.
    Having sex. When we were having sex.

    It was warm, without being unbearably thick outside, and after viewing the photos, I wanted to walk off my excitement for a bit. Chelsea to midtown wasn’t awful, but around Times Square I realized a man with a camera was following me.
    I always assumed that the paps would learn I wasn’t nearly as interesting as they suspected, but that hadn’t yet happened. They stalked my weekend activities, my fund-raisers, every work function. It had been almost four years since anything of interest had happened to me—other than a date with the occasional semifamous woman—but at least half of the time that I dared to walk Manhattan alone, someone found me.
    And