Double Exposure

Emma stood and clutched her jeans to her chest, covering her breasts. The pants, shirt, bra and plastic bag covered the majority of her bare skin. The majority of the good parts, anyway. Kyle was simultaneously relieved and disappointed.

“Here, stand in front of me until you get sprayed. I’ll block you from view,” he told her, because it was clear she wasn’t comfortable with her nudity. Her cheeks were pink and she had inched closer to him, farther from the room at large.

If she was going to go through with this, he wanted to help her. He wanted her to trust him. And now that he thought about it, he didn’t particularly want just any guy in the room to have the same view he’d had of her breasts.

Her eyes narrowed. “What’s the catch?”

He held his hands up. “None, I promise. I’m just trying to be a nice guy. So sue me.” He was being a friggin’ Boy Scout here, with his eyes trained on her face, and she was sure he had an angle? He was insulted.

“I’m just making sure I’m not about to become a punch line.”

“What kind of a-hole do you take me for?” Kyle moved around behind her and glowered at a guy he suspected of checking out Emma’s butt in her—dear God—bikini panties. It wasn’t a G-string. It covered her cheeks, but not much else. And those were some perfectly curved, smooth ass cheeks. No wonder the guy was staring. Kyle swallowed hard and crossed his green arms over each other, knowing his shoulders and hips were broad enough to block a good portion of Emma. He’d played hockey in high school and he’d kept up with his weight training. There were no skinny jeans in his future and he wasn’t afraid to play the muscle if need be.

The guy immediately stopped his ogling. Kyle thought so, the sick bastard. Of course he wasn’t sure he was much better, as was confirmed by Emma.

“I don’t think you’re an a-hole. But I do think you’re the office flirt and quite the prankster,” Emma said, her voice dry. He couldn’t see her since he was behind her and facing away, but he could hear the plastic bag rattling as she stuffed her clothes into it.

Sometimes Emma sounded like she had fallen out of the forties. “Prankster?” Kyle snorted. “Flirt? Why, because I like to enjoy myself at work?”

“Oh, you definitely enjoy yourself when you’re sidling up to Gina in accounting and her cleavage. Usually when you’re an hour late on your deadline.”

Kyle was actually shocked. He now understood exactly why it seemed that Emma didn’t like him. It was because she didn’t like him.

Which was fine. Not great, but fine. She was entitled to not like him, even if he was harboring a serious case of lust for her. But she had no right to insult his professional integrity. “I’ve never been late on a deadline. And for your information, I have never noticed Gina’s cleavage. Her husband is a good friend of mine, so Gina and I are friends. That’s all there is to it.”

“Never late? Are you kidding me? And are you seriously trying to claim you don’t flirt with every woman in the office?”

“Never late. Not once,” he insisted. He and Claire had worked out a deal where he started at eight-thirty instead of eight Monday through Thursday and then on Fridays he came in an hour early and left an hour later. Maybe that had created a perception of tardiness, but he wasn’t sure why he had to explain that to her.

He added, “I’m friendly. I like people. Since when is that a crime?” It was actually the main reason he loved his job. He got to interact with both people in the office and out in the field. It was an industry of meetings, social gatherings, sporting events and fund-raisers. He covered them all, and enjoyed all of it. He may have lost his spot covering sports over a little press-pass snafu, but in the end he had given a longtime buddy who had cancer a once-in-a-lifetime shot at meeting the Cleveland Browns football players, and so he couldn’t regret his demotion.

If anything, writing his arts and entertainment column had opened up a whole new part of the city to him. And he was doing a damn good job, thank you very much. None of that seemed to matter to Emma, though.

It bugged the crap out of him that she made it sound like he was on the verge of violating sexual harassment laws. “And I don’t flirt with you,” he pointed out.

Her gasp of outrage indicated that wasn’t perhaps the best argument he could have used. The woman standing in front of him, who had originally been in line behind Emma, gave him a look confirming this. She shook her head slightly in what was clearly a friendly warning.

“Because I respect you,” he added. Usually that response could get a guy out of a veritable ton of trouble. It was akin to whitewashing graffiti in his experience.

“You’re a douche bag,” Emma said succinctly. “Respect that.”

So Emma definitely wasn’t like other women. While most ladies he knew thought he was charming, Emma read it as bullshit. That was something he wasn’t sure how to fix. Nor was he sure why he cared, but for some reason he did. For months it had been bothering him that Emma hadn’t warmed to him, and now it felt like a twofold mission—to force her to appreciate his good qualities and to determine why she thought work and fun had to be mutually exclusive.

“Maybe I don’t flirt with you because you’re mean to me,” he told her mildly, figuring arguing back was a tactic that wouldn’t work with Emma. It would just give her an excuse to stomp away from him indignantly. If he were calm, maybe it would calm her down.

She snorted. “I am not mean to you.” Weighted plastic hit him in the back. “Hold my bag,” she demanded.

Kyle figured that was an invitation to turn around.

So he did.

And was so glad he did.

Emma was fairly quivering with outrage from their conversation, goose bumps all over her skin, her eyes wide and snappish. The bag she was shoving at him no longer covered her breasts. They jiggled from her movements, free from their bra. Yes, he was looking. Yes, he felt zero guilt for looking. He just took the bag and waited with great interest as she stood, arms out, to receive her coating of green paint.

“You look ridiculous,” she told him, jumping with a shriek as the first spray of cool paint hit her.

“You don’t look so elegant yourself,” he told her. Only she didn’t look ridiculous. She looked delicious. Bouncy and juicy and flushed. Even her annoyance was hot. He liked to think that passion would translate to the bedroom, that when she let her cool mask of professionalism slip, she would tear a man up. She would be bossy and demanding, pushing him down while she drew his cock into her mouth...

“Why are you wearing your hat?” she asked him.

“Huh?” Kyle wished more than anything he could adjust his underwear. Things were really starting to become painful down there. All this up and down. It wasn’t good for a guy. “Because my keys are under it. I’m not sure I trust this whole numbering system.” He’d left his wallet and phone in the car, but he didn’t want his keys getting mixed up with someone else’s.

“You can’t wear that in the shoot.” The woman who was spraying Emma, a heavily tattooed girl in her twenties, gave him a look of disapproval. “Ian doesn’t allow any props.”

“I know. I’ll take it off before it’s time to shoot.”

“You’re wearing your keys on your head?” Emma asked him, stepping forward as the handler deemed her fully painted. “You look really silly.”

She was walking like Frankenstein, wet arms out in front of her, knees locked, her face shiny and very, very green. Some of the paint had strayed into her hair so that she looked like she’d been caught in an angry game of paintball and lost. Her nipples could have passed for a couple of undersize Brussels sprouts given their color, and she had scratched her nose, so the flesh peeked through the paint. Just for the record, he wasn’t the only one looking silly.

“If you call me a silly goose I’m going to make fun of you. Just a warning,” Kyle said.

She stuck her tongue out at him, a pink moist thrust through her green lips. It shouldn’t have been sexy, yet somehow it was. He couldn’t help but imagine that tongue on various parts of his body, sliding along, flickering over his flesh to torture him.

Kyle shifted uncomfortably. He needed to get away from her before the story here became him pushing her against the nearest wall and entwining his green body with hers in some sort of alien porno.

Fortunately, he was saved from potentially enormous embarrassment by a man speaking into a microphone. “All participants, you need to start moving into the warehouse where volunteers will show you to your spots.”

So they started shuffling forward, dozens of people in shades of green ranging from moss to emerald, and others in variations of brown. Emma hesitated. Kyle leaned forward and murmured to her, wanting to reassure and relax her. “Has anyone ever told you that you look good in green?”

Emma snorted. “No. It’s not on my color wheel.”

“Maybe they never saw you in head-to-toe green. Because it’s working on you right now.”

“Uh-huh.”

When she was directed to a spot against the wall of the warehouse with a cracked window above her head, Kyle said, “Work it, girl. Make love to the camera.”

Her lips twitched, like she was actually considering laughing. He took it as a good sign.

“Hat off!” A burly woman with a do-rag on her head and a clipboard in her hand snarled at him.

Kyle stripped off his hat, dumped his keys into it and thrust it behind his back as he moved into position beside Emma. He let the hat drop to the ground, his keys making a reassuring clinking sound. They had a way out of this place, that’s all he cared about. After the shoot he planned to interview some participants, but for the most part, he had all the necessary facts from the press release the artist’s team had released to the Journal. An opinion column was his favorite kind.

“How are you doing?” he asked Emma.

Her hip was bumping into his. “I don’t feel like art. I feel like a big naked emerald idiot. Do you even see the photographer?”

“No.” All he saw was a bunch of green butt cheeks as the people in front of them were instructed to lie on the floor on their stomachs. “I’m glad we get to stand. This building is probably radioactive. I don’t want my junk touching the ground even wearing briefs.” He shifted uncomfortably at the thought. “I would like kids one day.”

What had once been a thriving steel mill was now a crumbling warehouse with broken windows, the concrete beneath their feet reduced to a siltlike dust. Now that he thought about it, he wasn’t crazy about being barefoot. There was no way in hell he would lie down on the floor and breathe that rubble in.

“I thought they made steel here before it closed. How dangerous could that be?”

Kyle pointed to the sign hanging at an awkward angle. “That dangerous.”

It said Days Without An Accident: 3.

“Oh. Well, all the machinery is gone. And they said the shoot wouldn’t run that long.”

Great. Now she was reassuring him. He was supposed to be the man here, easing her nervousness about her nudity. Instead she was snaking her hand over and slipping it into his and squeezing. Wait. Nothing wrong with that.

Kyle squeezed back.

“I’m sure your virility is intact,” she told him.

There was no doubt about that. Kyle let his thigh brush hers, and their shoulders bumped. He glanced over at her. “Promise?”

She gave a short laugh before snapping her lips shut. “Yes.”

“You didn’t even look.” He was playing in dangerous territory here, but he was a gambling man. He would bet she wasn’t going to slap him in the middle of the photo shoot.

Emma turned to him, her tongue moistening her lips nervously. “Kyle...what are you doing?”

“Flirting with you.”

“Why?”

“Because you’re attractive. Which I’ve always known, but today has given me a whole new appreciation for that fact.”

“You are not attracted to me.”

“Um, my Jolly Green Giant says otherwise.” He didn’t mean to brag, but anyone looking below his waist would see his erection. There was no disguising it, boxer briefs or not.

“Your...” Her eyes dropped. And widened. “Oh. Oh.”

He wasn’t sure he’d ever heard Emma speechless before. It was satisfying, to say the least.

She was still staring at his jock.

All the attention had it jumping a little. Which made her jerk away like she’d been stung by a bee.

Kyle smiled. He loved his job.

3

EMMA KNEW SHE was staring at the tent Kyle’s penis was making. Jolly Green Giant, indeed.

She was holding his hand. And she had the overwhelming urge to tangle her body up with his on a big bed. Neither of those things made sense.

She also knew she was naked except for a tiny pair of underwear, so she couldn’t explain her odd reaction to him other than the obvious—she was trained to equate nudity with sexy times. That was the only explanation for why her nipples were suddenly as hard as the steel that had once been shipped in and out of this warehouse. Why her insides were molten and her fingers itched to reach out and give his erection a hard squeeze to see his reaction.

It couldn’t possibly have anything to do with Kyle himself.

Which she knew was a total lie. She’d been attracted to him since the day she’d met him two years ago, when he had been led around the office by Claire and introduced to the drooling staff. Even the men liked him—they saw Kyle as a man’s man, a golf buddy.

But none of them were standing here covered in body paint, bare leg squashed against his, staring at his erection.

“Emma.” His voice was tight, pained.

She dragged her eyes off his briefs and forced them upward. “Yes?” she asked breathlessly.

“Do you think—”

But whatever he’d been about to say was drowned out by the sound of the man with the megaphone, yelling for their attention.

“Okay, I need everyone to stand still in the positions you’ve been given. Ladies along the back wall, I need your arms up to form the letter “I” in front of your chest, got it?”

“That’s you,” Kyle murmured.

Emma moved her arms automatically, feeling a little stunned. Why did she have the feeling that Kyle had been about to ask her out? Why would he do that? He wouldn’t. He wasn’t attracted to her. Or at least that’s what she had always thought until today. But he clearly was attracted to her, as was evidenced by what she had seen hiding beneath the green.

That didn’t mean, however, that he would ask her out, so why had she jumped to that conclusion?

Because she wanted that conclusion.

Ugh.

It was a relief to cover her green breasts. Not that anyone would have been able to see much of anything, given that she was one of two hundred people and she was slathered in paint, but it still made her feel better. She would no longer be on display for Kyle or for future internet trawlers.

“Mr. Bainbridge wants to thank all of you for participating. He’ll only need to shoot for a few minutes, and when you all see the results, I think you’ll be pleased to see how he has captured the sense of people being reduced to the walls of a crumbling manufacturing economy.”

The words jolted her out of her musings about Kyle and back to the real business at hand. Was that an official statement? Emma repeated the words back in her head, wondering if she could quote that in her article. But unless this guy was the photographer’s spokesman, she had to tread lightly.

“There’s the man of the hour,” Kyle muttered. “It’s about freaking time. My paint is starting to crust and flake.”

“Where?” But the words were barely out of her mouth when she finally saw the photographer, Ian Bainbridge, as he climbed onto a platform set up on the other side of the warehouse. His camera and equipment were already there, ready to use immediately. Emma had of course researched the artist. She knew he was originally from New Zealand, and that he looked like a former soccer player who had gotten in touch with his emotions. He wore a lot of black rocker T-shirts with blazers and tweed bowler hats. He also had funky black glasses that appeared in some photos of him and not in others. Today no glasses and no blazer adorned him, but a hat jauntily perched on his head as he made adjustments to his camera.

There was also very clearly a bodyguard behind him, which was no surprise given that the attention of his stalker had escalated in recent months, as reported by the Pittsburgh paper where Ian had shot the month before. Emma wondered what sort of desperation drove someone to follow another human being around and pretend you were in an actual relationship with him. Fantasizing about Justin Timberlake at age twelve was normal, but creating chaos at his concert was not. And this had the makings of a celebrity-crush stalking.

The shoot itself lasted all of ten minutes, if even. It seemed like Ian pushed a few buttons, then he was climbing back down off the platform. Emma felt a little let down, frankly. You stripped to your undies and were dolled up as an alien—you expected the occasion to feel momentous. Instead, she just had a cramp in her calf from the position she had been standing in, and her nose itched. She was already lamenting the loss of the panties she was wearing, even if they were plain white from the discount store. They were comfy, with strings that didn’t dig into her hips. Now she had to toss them.

Plus there was clearly no way in hell she was going to be able to get anywhere near Ian. He disappeared behind a bevy of handlers. There was no one who looked like a stalker, either, whatever a lovesick crazy was supposed to look like.

“Someone thinks he’s a rock star,” Kyle said with an eye roll, pulling off the wall and moving his arms back and forth. “Man, I’m stiff. That took forever.”

“It was ten minutes.”

Kyle bent over and scooped up his hat and keys. “Ten minutes I’ll never get back. I don’t know. I mean, I dig photography, but this all seems a little...melodramatic. And I’m still not sure why we’re green.”

Emma kind of agreed, but she wasn’t about to admit it. “Who are we to say what is art and what isn’t? And ten minutes ago you were saying the exact same thing.” She joined the line that was forming to reenter the tent and collect their belongings. The other attendees were chattering all around them, an air of excitement buzzing about the cold warehouse. It was June, and yet despite the season and the dozens of warm bodies, there was a definite bite in the air. “I’m cold.”

“I noticed.” He eyed her chest.

“What?” Emma looked down at her taut nipples and flushed. “Seriously?”

“I can’t help it! You’re not wearing a bra. It’s bullshit if anyone thinks men and women can take off their clothes and not be tempted to look at what everyone has got. It’s human nature. I call bullcrap on these shoots. I think Bainbridge is just a perv who wants to see naked bodies.”

Emma wasn’t sure if Kyle was joking or not. “This seems like an extreme way to go about it. The internet is full of images of naked people.” But she did agree with him that it was hard not to be curious in the face of mass nudity. Which was why she was more than ready to put her shirt back on. She did not relish standing around in line with a crowd. At that very second, as she averted her eyes from an older gentleman’s droopy derriere, someone could be looking at her behind and coming to the same droopy conclusion. It wasn’t natural. Inevitably, it was bound to bring out the middle school in at least a few people. Like her. Kyle wasn’t really doing any better.

“You were the one who said you were looking forward to stripping in public,” she reminded him.

“I know. Which just proves my point—men and women should not be naked in groups together.”

“You’re contradicting yourself! You told me this wasn’t an orgy.” It didn’t feel like an orgy. It felt cold and itchy.

“It isn’t. But it seems like it should be. Like this is just a way to skirt the issue.”

Emma sighed. “I can’t think about it anymore. It’s stressful. I just want my bra back.”

“Hey! Seems like there’s some sort of commotion in the tent,” Kyle said, up on tiptoes to see over the heads of those in front of them.

Emma was a good six inches shorter than him and she couldn’t see anything at all. The voices had gotten louder, and word started making its way down the line in an audible buzz of shock until it finally reached them.

“Some people’s bags of clothing got stolen,” the woman in line ahead of them said with no small amount of excitement.

“What? Stolen?” Emma automatically crossed her arms over her breasts tighter. “What do you mean?”

“Some nut stole everyone’s clothes.”

Her clothes were gone?

Emma felt like she was going to faint.

* * *

KYLE GAVE A short laugh, amused because it seemed so obvious. Why wouldn’t someone steal clothes? It was the perfect prank. As a “prankster” himself, according to Emma, he should know. “Holy shit. That figures.”

But when he saw Emma’s face, he cut off his laughter. She looked like she’d had a piano dropped on her foot. “It’s okay. I have my keys, remember? We can at least get out of here.”

“Naked! We’ll have to leave naked!” She squeezed her arms tighter across her chest, like that was going to alter the facts. “This is awful! How does something like this happen? What good does security do if someone can just—” she waved her arms around madly “—steal your clothes!”

“Emma, it’s okay,” Kyle said, hoping he sounded reassuring. She was clearly starting to panic and people were looking at her, including one guy in his sixties who leered at her chest. “I’m sure I have something in the car you can cover up with, and hey, we don’t even know that our clothes are missing. What are the odds?”

But the odds were not in their favor. It figured. As organizers bustled around trying to sort out the situation and quickly process people whose possessions were intact, it became clear that they were two of about forty people whose bags had disappeared. Kyle felt more than a little annoyed now that he had confirmation it was their stuff, and now that he had time to think about it. Those were eighty-dollar jeans in that bag, plus his favorite blue T-shirt, which chicks said brought out the blue in his eyes.

It was kind of like when the airline lost your luggage or the dry cleaner stained your favorite dress shirt. But those were accidents that all fell under the umbrella of Shit Happens.

This was a nutter intentionally trying to ruin their day. Or rather, Ian Bainbridge’s day. So if Kyle wanted to look on the bright side, this would make his column that much more interesting. Not to mention, he begrudgingly supposed, this would be an entertaining story to tell for years to come. He might even find it funny, later, when he’d showered and his eyelids weren’t crusty with paint.

A couple of people were furious, shouting at the volunteer staff, but most just grumbled and wrote down their information for the organizers. The police were called, but Kyle had no intention of sticking around until they showed up. Emma had been ogled enough for one day. He had the sneaking suspicion that if he didn’t get her home soon, she was going to have a meltdown of epic proportions. For a woman wound tighter than a top, she was holding it together remarkably well, but he suspected she had just about reached her limit, given the way she was bouncing on the heels of her feet and tearing the flesh off her lower lip with her teeth.

“I can’t believe this!” she exclaimed for about the tenth time.

“I’m actually surprised it’s never happened before,” Kyle said truthfully as they exited the tent and headed to his car. “I mean, it doesn’t seem like it would be that hard, and it’s definitely disruptive, which was clearly the goal here.” He gestured back to the distraught crowd still in the tent.

“It’s ridiculous,” she snapped. “Who does something like that? It’s just...childish.”