I was on their floor by half past eight, a full hour before the light would be worth anything.
The train had run near empty out of Lower Manhattan, forty minutes under the river with a car to myself and nothing to watch but my own face sliding across the black glass. I'd told no one I was coming early. There was no light reason for it. Nine to eleven was the window, and I knew that window better than they did. I'd left before it on purpose. Somewhere under the water I'd given up the pretense.
The loft was quiet at that hour. Coffee, and the linseed smell off the floors. Under it, the faint rosin of the guitars on the wall. Behind the shelf the bed still held the warm shape of the two of them. There's no offstage in a place built like this, no wall to slide between the work and the rest of it. I'd clocked that the first day. This morning I'd walked into it early on purpose.
Graham let me in without a word about the hour. He had a pencil behind his ear and drawings spread over the drafting table by the window, and he looked at me like a wall he was deciding whether to move, and held the look a second longer than was comfortable. Then he stood aside.
"You're early," he said.
"I know."
I waited for the light excuse to climb onto my tongue the way it always did. It stayed where I'd left it, at the door, under the river. For two sessions I'd hidden behind it. This time I let it lie.
He poured me coffee without asking and set it at my elbow. Third session of six. Somewhere in the week Friday sat waiting, the drafts I owed Odile, the note her assistant had made in that careful hand. She's waiting. I'd think about Friday on Friday.
I set the tripod where I always set it, planted the legs, framed the north windows and the bridge cables past them. Then I did the new thing. I set the interval running, laid the remote on the sill, and walked away from it into the middle of the room.
Rowan came out of the sleeping alcove pulling a shirt over his head, hair still creased on one side from the pillow. He stopped when he found me standing in the room instead of behind the camera.
"Huh." He smiled, slow and pleased. "Look at that."
"On the rug," I said. "Both of you. Facing the window."
His brows climbed. He looked at Graham. Graham set the pencil down.
Graham crossed the floor and lowered himself, unhurried, watching me the whole way down like I was the drawing now and he was working out where the weight would land. Rowan dropped beside him, closer than the shot needed, already grinning up at me.
"She's giving orders," Rowan said, like it was the best thing that had come to him all week.
"I'm blocking a shot." The old words came out on their own. But my feet were already carrying me to them, and my hands, the ones that knew the whole rig cold, had let go of it completely.
I knelt between the two of them and pulled my own shirt up over my head. For two sessions I'd let them work my buttons and draw the cloth off my shoulders and called whatever came next a composition. This time my own hands did it, and I held Rowan's eyes the whole while, and I wanted him watching.
"Lie back," I told him.
He went down easy, propped on his elbows to keep me in the frame of his own eyes. I opened his jeans and drew him out, already hard, and closed my hand around him and stroked once, slow, thumb dragging over the head. His breath caught.
"Harlow." My name came out of him with the bottom gone from it. His hips pushed up into my fist.
Graham moved without being asked. He came in behind me, the heat of him arriving before the weight, his hands working the fastening of my jeans and easing them down while I lifted one knee, then the other, out of them. His palm spread flat over my belly and slid lower. Two fingers parted me and found me already wet, and the sound I made got bitten in half.
His fingers worked me slow, spreading the slick, and for a breath I nearly did the thing I always did, nearly reached to slide the lens up between us and turn it into a frame. My hand went halfway to the remote on the sill. Then I left the remote where it lay and put my palm on Rowan's chest instead, flat over his heart, and felt it slamming under my hand.
I swung a leg over Rowan's hips and took him into me in one slow drop, the whole length, and the stretch scrubbed my head clean of every word I owned. He groaned. His hands flew to my hips and I caught both his wrists and pressed them back down.
"Don't," I said. "I've got this."
He let me hold him there. That was the thing. He gave me the weight of his hands to keep.
I rode him at my own pace, my own count that had nothing to do with seconds. Graham gathered my hair off my neck and set his mouth at my nape. One arm banded across my ribs and held me up against his chest. His other hand came around and down to where I moved on Rowan, fingers circling in time with the fall of my hips.
The shutter ticked from the sill, patient, taking us down. I'd set it and forgotten it and it ran anyway, honest, keeping every second I wasn't guarding. For once I let it keep them.
Rowan's chest went red under me, the flush climbing his throat just before he lost the words. "God, you," he started, and gave it up, and only watched me work on him with his pale eyes gone dark.
I leaned back into Graham and took Rowan harder, chasing it now, no numbers to grip, no ledge to stand on over the drop. Graham's fingers pressed and circled and his teeth found my shoulder. Rowan's hips finally broke my order and drove up to meet me, and I let him, and the two of them working me from both ends took the last professional thing out of my body. I came apart there with my head back on Graham's shoulder. Rowan was still deep in me. The sound that came out of me was one I'd quit trying to keep off the tape. Rowan went right after, his fingers digging into my thighs. Graham's arm stayed iron across my ribs, holding us up.
For a while none of us moved. I stayed down longer than I ever had; usually by now I'm up and behind the glass. My legs were shaking and I let them shake. Rowan's thumb drew slow circles on my hip. Graham's breath came down slow at my nape. The gold light had climbed the floor while my back was to it, the good window landing right on the hour with not one of us working it.
Then I got up. My hands went looking for the old exit — the tripod, the safe rectangle of the little screen. I went to the laptop on the counter instead, opened the morning's frames, and made my hands scroll. Footage I could stand behind. My hands needed a job that wasn't the truth.
Rowan came over doing up his jeans and leaned on the counter at my elbow. He watched me scroll. Not the screen. Me.
"You built that whole thing," he said.
"It's the job."
"No." Soft, with the edge he put on everything. "First two times I watched you fight the room. You hid inside the count. Today you came in an hour early and you put us exactly where you wanted us." He turned his head to see my face. "So I'm asking you straight. Are you doing this for the shots. Or are you doing it for us."
The question sat in the room, and the shutter, still running on the sill, ticked into the quiet like it meant to answer for me.
The frames slid by under my finger. The three of us tangled on the floor. Me, leading, my face in half of them, and printed across it the same word I'd developed by hand two weeks back and pinned wet to the line and stood in the red staring at. Want. Plain as a caption. It was in every frame now, and I'd walked in early and set it there myself.
I opened my mouth for the answer. It was right there, the clean one about composition and access, the sentence that had carried me ten years and never once failed me.
Nothing came out.
Ten years of the right words, and not one of them would come the one time it mattered. I closed the laptop. My own face went dark on the screen. The want didn't go anywhere. It sat in my chest with nowhere left to put it.
I turned from the question and went to my bag by the door. My hands did what they always did when a room got too true. They reached for the camera to pack it, to case the glass safe, to leave.
I had the strap coiled and the body half into the case before I stopped.
Then I did the other thing. I drew the zip back open. I lifted the camera out and set it down on the table, in the middle, where it had nowhere to go. I stood there with nothing in my hands and let that stand as my answer, because it was the only true one I could make.
Rowan crossed the floor to me. He came close, closer than any frame had ever needed him, close enough that the air shifted between us and I felt it shift.
"Stay for dinner?"