Calico Read online

  Contents

  COPYRIGHT

  Dedication

  ONE

  TWO

  THREE

  FOUR

  FIVE

  SIX

  SEVEN

  EIGHT

  NINE

  TEN

  ELEVEN

  TWELVE

  THIRTEEN

  FOURTEEN

  FIFTEEN

  SIXTEEN

  SEVENTEEEN

  EIGHTEEN

  NINETEEN

  TWENTY

  TWENTY-ONE

  TWENTY-TWO

  TWENTY-THREE

  TWENTY-FOUR

  TWENTY-FIVE

  EPILOGUE

  CALLIE'S NEWSLETTER

  WANT MORE?

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  TELL ME YOUR FAVORITE BITS!

  CALICO

  Copyright © 2016 Callie Hart

  copyright © 2016 Callie Hart

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the author, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. For permission requests, write to the author, addressed “Attention: Permissions Coordinator,” at [email protected]

  This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to peoples either living or deceased is purely coincidental. Names, places and characters are figments of the author’s imagination, or, if real, used fictitiously. The author recognises the trademarks and copyrights of all registered products and works mentioned within this work.

  For Mike, Jen, Kevin and Tiffany.

  CHAPTER ONE

  CALLAN

  Callan Cross is a Cunt

  NOW

  Attending a funeral purely so you can piss on a headstone is pretty fucked up. There are plenty other things about me that are very fucked up, but today my urge to urinate on a dead man’s freshly turned grave is hitting the top of the list. I’ve only ever been to one funeral. That’s not to say that as a twenty-nine year old man, I’ve been lucky enough to avoid loss. Not to say that acquaintances, friends and even work colleagues haven’t died before. That first funeral was just such a doozy that I vowed I would never attend another of the maudlin, bullshit events. I use my work as an excuse. National Geographic have called me away to Nepal to take photos of snow leopards. I’ve been doing fashion shit (which I hate doing) in Paris. I’ve landed myself a huge commercial gig out in the middle of bum fuck nowhere, Idaho, taking structural shots for an architect/lawyer/pharmaceutical firm. My excuses are all interchangeable; I just will not go. I’d rather choke on my own puke. This time, though…this time, I’m making an exception.

  “You’re going back to South Carolina? I thought you hated it there?” Rae, the girl I’ve been fucking for the past three months, rolls onto her stomach and sparks up the joint she’s just constructed. She’s naked, and the low light from the lamp on the bedside table beside her casts shadows in the subtle slopes of her body—the hollow between her shoulder blades, the dip at the base of her spine, the pronounced curve of her buttocks. I met Rae at one of those fucking terrible fashion shoots. It was for some couture bullshit magazine, and half her face was painted turquoise. She was wearing a scrap of silk that barely covered the very curves I’m studying right now. The hair stylist on site had created a fake bird’s nest in her hair, complete with fake fucking goldfinch, the sight of which had made me seriously fucking uncomfortable. Birds in general have that affect on me.

  Rae had been sitting on a chair, leaning forward, and I’d directed her to open her legs a little further so the material of her dress hung down in between. Rae had done as I’d asked and more. She’d spread her legs as wide as she could, and then she’d purposefully shifted the material of her dress out of the way entirely.

  She wasn’t wearing any underwear. She also didn’t seem to care that there were two other people in the studio when she gently stroked her middle finger over her pussy, either. Models have no sense of body shame. They’re so used to being naked, primped and preened over, pulled this way and that. I’ve had enough experience working with them to know that they’re not going to be shy if you need to see them naked. Rae was going for shock value, though. She was trying to get my attention, and it worked. I didn’t let her know that, naturally. I continued taking pictures, trying not to smile, while the editor of the magazine turned purple and nearly passed out.

  Rae blows pot smoke down her nose, and then offers me the joint. I decline. “Such a fucking baby,” she says. “You should just do it. Give in. Let go. You’d be a hell of a lot less uptight. Who died, anyway?”

  Rae’s never liked that I don’t drink, smoke, or do drugs. I don’t gel very well with her lifestyle. She puts more coke up her nose than half of the Hollywood A-listers I work with. I slap her ass, growling under my breath when her flesh bounces. “A guy I used to live next door to. A guy I didn’t like very much.”

  Rae rolls her eyes. “Your ex-next door neighbor from a million years ago? You’re a perplexing man, Callan. I know fifteen sexual positions you could be bending me into this weekend, and you’d rather go eat cucumber sandwiches and drink stale coffee with a bunch of weird old people. I have to say, I think I’m offended.”

  “Be offended, sweetheart. I’m going. That’s all there is to it. I’ll be back on Tuesday. I can fuck you all you want then.” I kind of want her to leave, but I’m over the habit of kicking her out of my apartment right after we hook up. It makes her crazy, and while there are plenty of women I could be having sex with here in New York, Rae is simple. She doesn’t want a relationship. She’s not expecting me to propose at any point. She does fuck like a fiend, though, and she has the dirtiest mind on the face of the planet. I’ve grown accustomed to letting her sleep over, regardless of the fact that it pains me to share my personal space sometimes. I’m buck naked as I hop off the bed and begin gathering up the clothes and personal effects I’m taking with me back to Port Royal.

  One suit. One pair of jeans. One pair of Chuck Taylors. Two t-shirts. Three pairs of boxers. Three pairs of socks. Everything else is camera gear—my Leica, and my lenses. My tripod, and my cleaning kit. Batteries. Filters. Extra lens caps.

  The Leica’s an old film camera. I use a digital Canon for work, purely because clients want to see the end product before they leave the building, and that’s impossible when you have to go home and develop the shots. When I’m shooting for me, though, I’ll always use the Leica. It’s so old. It was the very first camera I ever bought, back when I was just a kid. I saved for two years solid, driving my mom around and running errands before I had enough money to pick it up second hand. I dropped it back in college and my heart nearly exploded out of my chest. Thankfully it survived. Mostly. Now it has beautiful, strange light leaks that color and distort the pictures I take. It’s like it’s haunted or something. Ghosts and obscure shadows hover in the backgrounds of the self-portraits and urban landscapes I develop.

  Rae turns onto her back, breasts exposed, pussy exposed, and takes another long drag from her joint. Her auburn hair spills out on the mattress around her head like a pool of blood. “Will you bring me back a souvenir?” she asks. “Something really cheesy and lame. Something I can put on my keychain maybe.” Her face is suddenly hidden behind a veil of smoke.

  “Probably not. Port Royal isn’t a souvenir kind of place. And I’ll forget.”

  “Fair enough.”

  This is the dynamic of our arrangement: Rae asks me something, I’m brutally honest in response, and she doesn’t get mad. Perfect. It works both ways, too. She doesn’t lie to me. Doesn
’t play any weird head games. We tell each other exactly what we’re thinking, and most of the time it helps keep things ticking over smoothly. No hurt feelings. No unmet expectations.

  “Are you going to hook up with your old high school sweetheart when you’re in town? That’s what happens when people go home for funerals, isn’t it?” Rae asks. She pouts, but she’s not angry with me. She’s undoubtedly sad that she won’t be able to join in. She doesn’t realize that what she’s said has made me angry, though. I turn my back on her, snatching up my t-shirt from the floor and pulling it on. I grab a fresh pair of boxers and pull those on too, my skin feeling hot and prickly.

  “No. No high school sweetheart fucking for me.”

  “Did she move away? Did you guys have a raging fight before you broke up? What was her name?”

  “I didn’t have a high school sweetheart. I was a virgin until I was eighteen.” I grit out the words, hoping Rae will hear how clipped and pissed off I sound so she won’t probe any deeper into the matter, but she can be a little oblivious sometimes. Either that, or she hears how pissed off I am just fine and that only makes her more curious.

  “But you loved someone through high school, right? You must have. Everyone had a crush on someone in high school.”

  “Nope. Not me.”

  “Liar.” She gets up off the bed and pads naked out onto the balcony. She flicks the butt of her joint over the side of the building and then leans against the wall, watching me. She crosses her arms underneath her breasts—the breasts I came all over about twenty minutes ago—and raises an eyebrow at me. “I was fucking my high school gym teacher when I was sixteen. He was my high school crush.”

  “Somehow, that information does not surprise me, Rae.”

  “He was married. Had three kids. I was fascinated by the fact that he had back hair. All of the shitty little punks in my year were still trying to grow pubes on their balls and Mike was just covered in all this hair.”

  “That’s very disturbing information.”

  “That I used to be into hairy guys?”

  I throw a bunch of magazines onto the mattress—plane reading material—and then I duck down to cast an eye underneath the bed. My dress shoes are around here somewhere, I know they are. “No. The fact that you were fucking a married man with three children and you don’t seem all that bothered about it. That’s disturbing.” Damn. No shoes. Fuck.

  “He was the one who was cheating, Callan. He was the one lying to his wife and kids when he snuck out at night. He told them he was going bowling with friends from work when really he was meeting me in a motel so he could fuck my little sixteen-year-old pussy.”

  “So, he was a liar and a pedophile. Wonderful. Have you seen a pair of black leather shoes anywhere around here?”

  “He wasn’t a pedophile. Age of consent in Maryland is sixteen. I was legal.”

  I stand up straight and look at her. “That makes it totally okay then.”

  “Why are you so pissed off, babe?” Rae pushes away from the balcony wall and comes back inside. She places her hands on my chest and makes the same soft purring sound she makes when I go down on her. “Are you mad that I was fucking an older guy in school and you weren’t fucking anybody at all?”

  “How old was he?” I ask.

  “Thirty-eight.” Rae announces this proudly with a toss of her hair. She looks up at me, defiance shining brightly in her crystal clear blue eyes. “That’s funny, actually,” she says. “I’ve just realized. That means that even back then, he was still nine years older than you are now.”

  “Yeah. That’s pretty hilarious.” But I’m not laughing. I take hold of her hands and remove them from my chest. I don’t really feel like reminiscing with her over some dirty old pervert who took advantage of her way back when. It’s kind of weird that she’s so proud of it.

  “You’re jealous,” she whispers, holding her hands up to her face so she can bite down childishly on her thumbnails. “Callan, you’re maddeningly jealous. How fantastic.”

  I bend down so that we’re eye level with one another. “I’m not. I’m tired. And I think your moral compass is broken. That’s it. That’s all.”

  She gives me a wicked grin. Her lips are full and stained bright red from her lipstick, swollen from the pounding they received when I fucked her mouth not too long ago. Those lips are part of the reason why I can’t really give her up. They remind me of someone else’s. “Your moral compass is broken, too, asshole,” she tells me. “You’re no better than me.”

  “See, that’s where you’re wrong. My moral compass works perfectly. I just choose to ignore it. That’s something else entirely.”

  Rae seems to think about this. “So, who’s worse, then—me, the woman who knows no better, or you, the man who sins with full knowledge of his actions?”

  I return Rae’s awful smile, feeling my insides turn a shade blacker. “Me. I’m the worst. You know this.”

  She nods, because she does. “It even said so in High Lite Magazine.”

  “High Lite?”

  Rae nods. “I bought a copy yesterday. Your face is plastered across the middle two pages like you’re goddamn revolutionary or something.” Her voice is peppered with something that sounds strangely akin to envy. I did an interview with a female journalist who works for High Lite about a month ago. She said she would push for an article about my work, but that I shouldn’t hold my breath. I haven’t been. In fact, I’d forgotten all about it until right here and now.

  “Were they awful about me?” I ask.

  Rae nods. “So mean. I can’t imagine what you did to deserve such a harsh editorial.” She can imagine perfectly well, though. She’s seen how I talk to people sometimes. She’s seen how abrasive I can be when rubbed the wrong way. Rae’s mouth pulls up at the corners into an impish smile. “The strap line was, ‘Callan Cross is a cunt.”

  “Nice. I didn’t know you could say cunt in a magazine.”

  Rae shrugs. “They’re sensationalists. They can do whatever they want.”

  “What was the tag line?”

  Rae puts on her best newsreader voice, which is actually quite impressive. “He’s tall, dark and savagely handsome, and he’s America’s most vitriolic photographer. At twenty-nine, Callan Cross has already conquered the world. Now he’s planning on burning it to the ground, one brutal image at a time.”

  “I like the tall, dark and handsome part.”

  “They said you were arrogant and potentially delusional.”

  “Who gives a fuck what they think about me as a person? What did they say about my work?”

  “Incendiary. Wild. Stirring. Transcendental. There were a few other adjectives thrown around, but they got a little fantastical. I stopped reading after a while. I just looked at the pictures instead.”

  “They were good, right?” I gave the journo some self-portraits I took of myself last year. My profile was in silhouette, and beneath it tree branches and a cold winter sky were visible in hues of blue and purple, which I transposed onto the image. The writer had asked if I’d created the self-portraits in Photoshop and that’s where the hostilities had begun. I’d told her, no, I had absolutely not used Photoshop. I had used an enlarger to blend the two images together, one on top of the other, and everything was done by hand. She’d looked at me blankly, like she couldn’t give two fucks, and I’d known immediately who I was dealing with: another hipster with an Instagram account, throwing a filter on a selfie and calling it art.

  Infuriating.

  “They were pretty dark and twisty,” Rae says. “Normally when you have your photo in a magazine, it’s a good idea for people to be able to see your face. You have such a nice one, after all.”

  “Thank you. I don’t care about people seeing my face, though. I want to be faceless altogether.”

  Rae scowls. She throws back the covers on the bed and climbs in, kicking my magazines onto the floor. “You are delusional,” she informs me. “I’m passing out now. I have an early call. I g
uess I’ll see you when you get back from your little jaunt down south.”

  “You will.” I don’t kiss her goodnight. That’s not the kind of people we are. I continue to search for my dress shoes, banging around, my blood inexplicably fizzing in my veins, until I realize I’m never going to find them. Wherever they are now, they are no longer in my apartment. Once I’ve made my peace with this, I grab my keys and leave. Rae’s fast asleep, will still be asleep by the time I get back, no doubt, but I’m not even close to tired. I’m wired. Edgy. I need to know what that journalist wrote about me.

  I find a copy of High Lite Magazine at a bodega on 5th, and I pay for it with a crumpled ten-dollar bill. I walk around in circles, looping the block while I read it.

  The journo talks about my work—has very impressive things to say, which I like. She calls me a narcissist, which is a cloak I don’t mind wearing, I guess. It’s mostly true. Towards the middle of the article, she writes about my background. Starts talking about my dead mother. I pointedly did not tell her anything about my family, even though she did ask. Toward the end of the piece, she mentions the first picture I ever received recognition for, all those years ago. I’m bubbling over with anger by the time I turn the page and see that she’s printed the fucking thing. Without my consent. I’ve spent the last ten years trying to bury that image, and yet there it is in full color, monopolizing half a goddamn page of real estate in one of the countries biggest lifestyle magazines. Every time I see that picture, it feels like I’ve swallowed razor blades and I’m slowly bleeding to death internally.

  It’s a picture of a girl. Her right eye is swollen and bruised, and her lip is split open. She has blood dried on her chin, and she’s crying. The girl was looking straight at me when I took the picture. She was naked, and she was hurt, and her blood and her tears were real. I should never have shared that picture. It was deeply personal. Deeply painful. It was a silent conversation shared between two damaged teenagers, who had been clinging to each other for survival.