Heating Up the Holidays 3-Story Bundle(81)

“Not yet, we haven’t had the moment of the big reveal.”

He runs his hand over my hair and turns me in his arms so I can lean into his chest.

“So,” he says. “It’s kind of dark in here.”

“It’s a darkroom.” I breathe in his smell to crowd out the developing chemicals.

I don’t mind the dark, and because it’s Christmas, we’ve been busy putting lights up everywhere. High, so everyone knows we’re okay. In here, the dark has kept the fragile negative from getting overexposed.

Out there, the Christmas lights expose everything, us, our new and fragile love, the New Year.

Light and dark have their purpose, in them, we can see different kinds of things, or protect others. Or sometimes, the most beautiful lights would not be seen as well without some blackness behind them.

Joy is myriad and luminescent.

He kisses my neck. “How well can you see the picture?”

The room is small, with lots of white and reflective surfaces, but it really is light tight. The red bulb makes everything grainy, and I really can’t pick up good visual details, of anything, but I’ve been in here so long, Evan talking me through the whole process because I’ve wanted to know everything.

He’d been as precise in the process as a seasoned bench scientist, explained his homemade enlarger, the developer, stop bath, fixer, and the stages of rinsing.

The bathroom was crowded with both of us inside, hardly any room to move, especially with the piece of plywood he’s cut to lay over the vanity as a table.

Everything he had explained to me before he put in the safelight and I watched his grainy shadow move my print through the process.

I had insisted on an eight-by-ten, and I was anxious, because his enlarger could be a little iffy with the film exposed from the pinholes. I’d had to wait until yesterday to use the camera to expose my film because Christmas Eve’s Eve had stayed gray and stormy, and we’d stayed naked.

Christmas Eve dawned sunny, and we took my camera outside to expose my film.

To make out in the snow that had gotten hip deep through the drifts.

My mom came into town today, a full trolley of luggage with suitcases that made Evan’s van incredibly useful, and I was so proud of her for playing it cool with Evan.

Even if I couldn’t.

There has been lots of laughter, and knowing looks, and looks that know are the best kind, of course. There have been presents, impractical ones.

Misunderstandings cleared up to make way for love in the New Year.

Carols are playing from every radio station.

I reach up and curl my hand around his nape, pull him down to me.

“Is this the part where I’m irresistible?” he says. I can feel him smile against my temple.

“There’s always that part, but yes, and I’m drawn to you despite my hard-boiled and gruff exterior.”

I kiss him, not an almost kiss.

“Is it good?” I ask. He breaks our kiss to look up at the picture, hanging behind me. It’s an exposure of me—I know that.

We set the camera up on a fence post and I stood in its line of exposure, close-up. I wanted to see how it saw me.

“It’s beautiful, Jenny. You’re looking right at the camera. Your eyes are—so happy, wide open. Your hair’s kind of blowing across the bottom of your face, but it looks pretty and wild like that.”

“Turn on the light,” I tell him.

He turns on the vanity lights, and I step in front of the picture hanging up over his bathtub.

I look gorgeous.

I touch the print on the edge of the paper, to tip it up away from the glare.

“What’s she thinking?” Evan asks.

“I think she has a lot to look forward to. I think she knows that it isn’t how her eyes see that makes her a scientist, but who she is that lets her see the world. I think she’s thinking about how much she hasn’t seen, yet.”

“Yeah, so much.”

“Hard to imagine.”

“Exactly,” he says.

He kisses my temple, my neck. I turn for a real kiss.

Think about all the small things in the big world.





Acknowledgments


This was a difficult story to write, which means there are even more people to thank, who inspired and supported me.

Thank you to the Ohio State University Medical Center Nisonger Center, where I rotated and worked closely with patients and families and learned that for all of us, every one of us, “ability” is a construct, and that all of us will face physical, sensory, and cognitive changes in our lifetime. Universal Access must be just that, universal, so that we all may access the world as we choose to.

Thank you to my agent, Emily Sylvan Kim, who, when I said, out of the blue, that I wanted to do a holiday story and sent her a synopsis about a microbiologist with retinitis pigmentosa, replied, “This is great!”

Thank you to my editor, Sue Grimshaw, and the entire Loveswept team, who developed the Heating Up the Holidays concept with the talented Lisa Renee Jones and Serena Bell. I’m honored to appear alongside such gifted writers. Meeting everyone at RWA 2013 cemented how privileged I am to work with such inspired and powerful women.

Did I say this was a hard story to write? I want to thank Shelley Ann Clark, for her help early on and developmental feedback about the character of Jenny, as well as two friends who asked to be nameless—one working in OT and one with visual difference. These early comments were foundational.