One Night Stand novel · Chapter 14 of 24

Chapter 14: Two Hundred Frames

I let him in.

I said it was for Dottie's laptop and not for him, and he said that was fine.

Dottie's kitchen was dark except for the light over the stove.

I unzipped the lid pocket of my camera bag and took out the paper sleeve.

It was soft at the corners, and the date on it was in my own twenty-two-year-old handwriting.

"You never looked at it?" Mateo said.

"I was afraid of what I'd find."

"What would you find?"

"That I'd taken the picture they paid for."

He pulled out a chair and did not sit in it.

The card went into the slot of Dottie's old laptop, and a gray box said it was reading.

Then the screen filled with small squares.

There were two hundred and eleven of them.

I clicked the first.

It was the Lantern Room's front stairs, blurred and orange, the way you shoot when your hands are cold and you are scared.

"That's the line outside," I said. "I had the flash off."

I clicked forward.

The bar, lit blue.

The ceiling, which I had shot by accident.

A man's back at a table, and then the same man turned a little, laughing at someone out of frame.

Mateo made a sound in his chest.

"That's me."

"Yes."

"I look twenty."

"You look like someone who doesn't know a camera is there."

"I didn't."

"I know."

I kept clicking, slowly, and neither of us said a word for a while.

There was one of him with his sleeves pushed up, trying to teach me a card trick, with the cards all over the floor.

There was one of my own hand holding his tie.

"I don't remember that," he said.

"You were telling me about the first hotel."

"I told you about the first hotel?"

"Eleanor's husband built it from a motel with eleven rooms.

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