Sweet Romance15 min read
The Photograph in the Shower
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The first time I saw Greyson Petersen, a single thought struck me and held: I had to photograph him.
"I want a picture of you," I said before I knew what I was doing.
He didn't answer at first. He simply watched me, and his face was the clean, unyielding kind of winter that makes your skin feel raw and honest.
I was called to the dean's office because my half-brother, Brock Estrada, had gotten a student pregnant. The girl's mother wanted two hundred thousand dollars and threatened to drag him through the courts.
"Was it forced?" I asked the girl in front of her mother.
She looked at her mother and said nothing. Her mother pounded the table, spitting accusations.
"If she didn't resist, it's not rape," I said, like a bad defense lawyer. "If she wanted it, it's—"
"Shame on you," the woman shrieked and raised her hand to slap me.
Her hand was held midair by a man who had just come in from the snow. He had flakes on his shoulders. He had the kind of posture that makes hallway light fall somewhere else.
"Professor," the dean said. "Sorry to trouble you. Our counselor is on leave."
"This is Professor Greyson Petersen," someone introduced him.
"Greyson," I said softly like a charm.
He frowned once. He didn't smile. He told the kids to leave. His voice was low, calm, and the kind of voice men write about and then try to be when they grow tired.
"You two step outside," he said. The pair shuffled out. The girl's mother kept the insults going.
I dropped a thick folder of motel receipts and entry logs in front of her. Her face went the color of old coins.
"If you love your daughter," I said, softer now, "then stop trying to make this a prison. Forcing him to be a criminal by lie will haunt her for life."
I left. Outside, I lit a cigarette. I liked to watch smoke fold itself into air the way pictures fold light into shapes. Greyson came down the steps and handed me a card.
"Give me your number," he said.
I laughed at him. "Why? For old times' sake?"
He didn't laugh. He merely watched me like a scientist watching a specimen.
"Tell your brother to do the honorable thing," Greyson said before he left, voice clipped. "Or don't. But don't wreck a girl's life."
I tossed the card into the ash and left him there. I wanted to take his portrait. I wanted to make him mine with film and light.
The man who hated my flirtation, who scolded me, who later would be the only person who kept me from dying when I thought I wanted to—Greyson ended up on the other side of my lens anyway.
"You'll model for me," I told him the day I cornered him in a café.
"What?" His brow lifted.
"For a day. One set. Just you."
He tightened his jaw and left.
Weeks later, after I had finished a shoot I liked but didn't love, I texted him a reckless message: Greyson, coffee?
His reply took hours: I need to ask you something.
He came to the café wearing a camel coat and a book. "Sit," he said when I waved.
I showed him photos of another model. "If you were the model, it would be better," I said, not that gracefully.
"You're unbearably forward," he said. "For a professional like you, this is... surprising."
"Then make it worth my while," I said. "Be my model for a day."
He finally cut a deal. If I did what he asked—if I photographed him properly—he would intervene with my brother's mess.
"I don't want them made into a spectacle either," he said. "Handle it quietly."
He was distant, exact, tidy like a lens cap. I am not tidy. I am excessive. He irritated me the way velvet scratches skin.
I ended up printing one of his photos life-size. I hung a large, framed photograph of him in my shower.
When he found out, he texted: Take it down.
I answered: No. It's an altar.
He answered: Remove it.
I answered: Not happening. I like seeing you while I shower.
He did not answer. I liked that he didn't know whether I was joking.
When my brother and the pregnant girl came to me for signatures on the withdrawal form, it was simple. I signed. I handed them the travel-ready stack of forms and put fifty thousand dollars in Brock's pocket. "Either make this right or get your legs broken," I told him. He left shaking but relieved.
The photo stayed in my bathroom for a week, then two, and then a small war between us began: a war of distances and tiny, penetrating gestures. He refused to be charmed, which in turn made me more charming.
When Greyson finally used my photograph in an academic journal, I told him he owed me dinner. "All right," he texted. "Tomorrow."
He came to my door that evening and was as precise in person as he was in his papers—clean, contained, an animal that did not know how to be vulgar. I wore a wine-colored dress and a coat I knew would tempt him; he did not appear tempted.
"Sit," he said.
He is not a man who smiles much. When he does, it causes a small damage in me.
At his house once, I dared to be brazen. I took off my coat inside his hallway like a woman leaving something important. His place was neat, quiet. I sat awkwardly and waited for him.
"You're always so... loose," Greyson said.
"Not loose. Alive," I said.
"What do you want?"
I leaned in close. "One chance," I whispered. "Prove that you are mine. Let me know."
He did something I did not expect. He unbuckled his belt and, with a clipped voice, offered, "Prove it."
That night he proved more than either of us intended. We left the rules behind for a while and were two reckless people matched for the length of a breath. After, we lit cigarettes, and the world was quieter.
For days, we hovered in the in-between. He stayed away. Then he came back in clean clothes and took my things with inexplicable tenderness. My wallet, my phone, my camera bag—they were returned as if he'd ironed them.
"You took them?" I asked, tired.
"I came by," he said. "I couldn't leave them lying."
He had a way of being there when I didn't want him to be and still making me feel like a trespasser. That is, until his mother's voice entered the story.
Loretta Booker had never liked me. She had read online rumors about my past—old pain, older scandal—and decided before meeting me that my life was a mistake. When she and Greyson's sister, Soledad D'Angelo, visited my house unexpectedly, she came with a kind of polite cruelty that was surgical.
"You're Anna Young?" she asked with the softness of a blade.
"Yes," I said.
"Your past has been... colorful," she said, and dropped the things that pass for lines loudly in the middle of someone else's quiet.
"She is not a liar," Greyson's sister offered, touchingly naïve. "She is very good at her work."
Loretta kept smiling and circling. "You ran away at sixteen, didn't you? You stole someone's heart and left him dead. There were accusations. It was messy. He died. That shouldn't be an easy thing."
Everything went still. I said, "You are right."
"You're right?" Loretta repeated. "What do you mean?"
"I am guilty of being the person I was. I'm guilty of having loved the wrong way." I told them half-truths like a woman who is saving something else. "But you should know I have tried to live with what happened."
I left his house that afternoon. I left because she had forced the wound open and I was tired of tending it for other people.
The nights that followed were worse. I traveled. For two years I disappeared into work—tigers in Africa, dusty towns, long trains that smell of diesel and almonds. I disappeared to be found.
I returned because Brock was getting married and my father—Flint Bernard—wanted to see me. I drove to my mother's house and found Loretta different. She had grown older in the right ways; she said sorry in a way I didn't expect.
"You should stop punishing yourself for me," she said. "I was trying to stop my own fear."
I believed her then. I wanted to. I also wanted things that Loretta's apology could not give me: the right to be loved by a man who had once put me in the middle of his life.
At my brother's reception, Greyson came, impeccably dressed, looking like a man who belonged in places where people were allowed to feel safe. He walked past me as if I were air, then stood and watched me. His face was an unreadable command.
"You didn't have to be here," he said later when we were walking into a quieter hallway.
"I thought you'd want to see how they are," I said. "I thought you might be curious."
"I'm not curious," he said. "I worry about not knowing what you know."
Those words landed like a stone in the water between us. The coldness shifted. "What are you?" I asked him.
"A man who doesn't give up easily," Greyson said.
Our patchwork continued—threads caught in the doors of other people's lives. There were other suitors. Philip Fischer, a glossy, generous young man, admired me in public and offered money and hands. He was sweet in the way young men are sweet—unwilling to give up easily and entirely lacking the knowledge of past storms. I liked him in small doses and liked my power over him more. I was not kind about it; no one ever said I was.
I did things the wrong way. I hung his face on my bathroom wall. I sent teasing messages. I let other men come too close. Greyson watched. Sometimes he laughed; sometimes his silence was iron.
His sister Soledad, the gentle one with the laugh like a bell, came and called me "sister" in a whisper across the room and I wanted to believe that Greyson's family could accept me. His mother was still a blade. Her words had altars of rumor under them.
One winter night, after he'd walked away from me and refused my calls, I stood outside his house until he reappeared. I had a fever once; this night I had a hunger I didn't expect. He came to the door and offered me a cigarette like an olive branch.
"Do you want to come in?" he asked, because he is the kind of man who does things properly even when they are petty.
"I do," I said. We made love that night like two people making a treaty. He kissed me like a man who means work, then walked away without a trace of regret.
Then Loretta did the thing Loretta had done for years: she called my mother, in a way that made my life into a story she invited other people to read.
My mother, who had every reason to revile me, who had used rage like a barricade, went into a meltdown—worse and frailer than I had ever seen. She said: "You will not take my child. I will not lose my daughter."
Her voice cut through me and sent me away. For a time, everything greyed: me, Greyson, my past, the photograph in the shower.
But old sins have a way of coming home.
At my brother's wedding reception, in a room full of people, I stood behind a thin veil of patience long enough. People had been nice to him; people had smiled at me, drank, clapped. I had no plan when I rose from my seat, only a small, fierce light in my chest: truth.
"Listen," I said, voice steady although my hands shook. "I have something to tell you."
A hush fell. People loved a story. They also loved a scandal. The room bent forward. Greyson's eyes met mine, calm and absent. For once, his eyes were the sea and not the ice.
"You remember Fabien Chavez?" I asked.
Murmurs. Some women's jaws tightened. They pulled their coats in against the winter.
"He was seventeen. We were both very young. We thought it was an adventure. My family—my mother—pounced on him like a rumor. She called him a criminal in public. She tore him down. My mother's fear killed him—" I didn't know whether my voice would hold. "—and the law never punished what she did. He froze in the night and died."
People shifted. Someone's fork clattered.
"You say this like it happened ten years ago," Loretta said then, voice small and sharp as glass. "Why tell us now? To humiliate me?"
"You tried to humiliate me," I said. "You called him a rapist in the station, in the papers. You told the world. He died. He was seventeen. He was not a monster. You took his life with your words."
Greyson had gone pale. He crossed to me, face like thunder.
"You should be ashamed," he said.
"Do you deny it?" I asked the room. "Does anyone deny that she—"
"No!" a voice cried, a nasty, visceral denial that sounded like someone trying to hold back a dam.
I had laid out a folder of evidence: messages between my mother and the people who printed the posters; the police report; a child's photograph; an old torn receipt that had been used to bribe someone. It was small, painstaking, and terrible.
When I opened the folder and put the receipts on the table, a woman near the center of the room gasped. Her hand flew to her mouth. "Is that—"
People began to murmur. My mother's face crumpled like thin paper. Her eyes roared, and she clasped her hands, the way a drowning person might.
"I was desperate," she cried, and then the more dangerous pattern she knew: blame the world. "He was going to take her away. I was trying to protect my child—"
"Protecting you ruined someone," I said. "You were never brave enough to face loss. You hid behind other people's bodies. You used my life like a weapon."
The room watched. Greyson stood close. I could see his pulse in the side of his neck. Someone recorded us with a phone. If there was justice left in the world, it was going to be public.
My mother's face shifted from anger to denial to panic. She began to plead at first, then she grabbed at me like a drowning woman might grab a lifeboat.
"Anna!" she wailed. "Please! Please—"
"Stop!" I did not shout. My voice stayed too chill to be mine. "You will not take me into the ruins of your fear anymore."
Loretta's eyes were wild. "You planned to embarrass me!"
I held up my hand. "Do you want me to call the reporter who wrote those articles? Do you want me to call the police who cleared her because of your testimony? Do you want me to call Fabien's family?"
The table grew louder. A man in an expensive coat pulled someone forward and put a phone near my face.
"You did it," he said into the camera. "Tell them."
I told them. I told them how I had been sixteen and afraid and how Fabien had been kind and foolish and dead because we were both young. I told them how a mother had taken pity on her fear and turned it into accusation. I told them how posters and whispers had become a verdict without a trial.
The crowd was a living thing. Some stared in horror. Others nodded; some whispered, "She always was a mess." A woman whipped out her phone and began to film my tears and my steadiness.
Loretta tried to stand, then fell back into a chair. Her face had gone pale as flour. "You will regret this," she hissed. "You want to humiliate me among people who will never love me."
Something in the room shifted. People began to say things that were louder and honest. A distant relative—someone who once took my mother's side because it was easier—stood, and then another. They said what I had said: she was cruel. They said it into the open like a verdict.
"She meant to ruin him," one person declared. "How many more lives have you taken with your cowardice?"
The reaction was like a wave. Phones rose. Someone shouted, "Shame!" Another yelled, "Apology!" A few hands clapped slowly at the realization of brutality disguised as protection.
Loretta's progression was clear: from anger, to denial, to collapse. She had stood fierce for years and then, with her wild eyes, she showed the shape of someone who had been undone. She started to cry in a way that made people recoil.
"Forgive me," she said, and this was not repentance but panic. "Forgive me. I did it because I feared you would leave. I thought by punishing others I could hold you!"
The room closed in on her. It was merciless and stunned. Neighbors who had once avoided us came forward to record, to demand, to point out inconsistencies. The man's voice that had once paid to buy silence now provided the microphone that announced everything.
Greyson moved toward her and then stopped a yard away. He did not touch her. He folded his hands at his back and watched her break.
"You cannot fix the dead," he said quietly. "But you can stop lying."
The crowd sighed. There was a low sound like the deflating of something huge. A woman from my high school—who had once lectured me about my clothes—shot me an apologetic look. Others whispered: "We should have known."
Loretta's complaints became words with no hope. "Please," she begged. "If only you'd come home. If only I'd known..."
People stared harder. They had been spectators for too long.
By the time the room emptied, half a dozen people had said they'd sign a petition for public apologies and open records. Someone suggested that the men who hid evidence for money should be compelled to come forward. Someone else suggested charity for Fabien's family.
At the center of it all, Loretta sat like a small animal with fur singed. She had been publicly unmasked. The punishment was not a jail cell. It was worse in some ways: every whisper had been sharpened and turned into evidence. Her social standing was shredded. Some turned away. Some took photos that would live longer than her explanations.
She could do nothing now except face the faces of a room that had been given permission to condemn. It was the exact kind of public humiliation she had wielded for years, now aimed back at her.
As I left that night, phones still lighting up, I ran my fingers over the edge of my camera case and realized: the thing I had wanted most was not revenge. It was to stop being a footnote in my mother's fear.
The punishment had been public: not legal, not graceful, but real. Loretta's attempts to hold the world in collusion had backfired; the world refused to collude any longer. She had to face their eyes and their cameras and the fact that her words had weight.
People reacted in ways that defined the scene: horror, whispers, some filming, some whispering "finally," and some who burst into applause when the truth was stated plainly. Loretta's reactions shifted: white-hot anger, then fierce denial, then trembling collapse, then finally, unspeakable, raw pleading. Those who had once distanced themselves came forward to comfort me as well—some for the first time.
It wasn't a clean justice. It wasn't a trial. But it was public. And mass witnessing is a strange kind of punishment. It forced Loretta to own what she'd done, and for the rest of her life she would carry the memory of the moment people said her name and meant condemnation.
Greyson took my hand in the cold of the night outside. "I'm sorry," he said simply. "I should have listened to you sooner."
"I lied to you," I said. "I ran. I pretended I was invincible." I laughed, small and raw. "But you waited."
He did not try to be a hero. He took my hand and led me home.
Time does what it always does: it gives small mercies.
In the weeks after the banquet, Loretta retreated and then apologized. She began to do the quiet, tiny work of apology—letters to Fabien's people, embraces that lacked the old barbed edge. The punishment had broken something in her that led to softening. She would never get what she had taken back, but she could choose honesty.
Greyson's family watched all this like a play. Soledad and his mother circled the edges carefully until one night his mother came to me again. This time, she sat quietly, hands folded.
"Anna," she said. "You are a survivor."
Her acceptance felt solid. It was not forgiveness in a fairy tale sense; it was a decision to stop seeing me as a threat.
Greyson and I moved forward in the smallest, most human increments: a shared cup of coffee, a midnight message, a tense, tender dinner with his parents. He misread me sometimes. I hurt him sometimes. We were, in short, ordinary and fracturing and then whole again.
"How far will you go for me?" he asked once, the way men ask if a ghost of doubt exists.
"I can go ninety-nine steps," I told him, thinking of how people always imagined an arithmetic of love. "You take the other one."
He laughed, and I laughed. He kissed me like a man who will travel.
The photograph in my bathroom remained for a while. I still showered in front of him sometimes, smoke curling out of my mouth and the steam carrying the edge of our days. Once, he came into the bathroom and took it down quietly, then set it aside and folded the frame. He left it on the shelf in my studio, like an artifact.
"Why did you hang it there?" he asked later, a rare softness in his voice.
"It reminded me that beauty can be bordered by water," I said. "It reminded me that I could own someone with a photograph and that owning someone is not the same as being owned."
He nodded like a man who understood more than he said.
Months unspooled. Brock and his girl had their child. She stayed and their family softened. My mother began to do the hard work of apology, and I began the harder work of forgiving. I traveled sometimes. Greyson came with me sometimes. We learned the small rituals of living—who washes the dishes, who takes out the trash, who makes tea when the world seems like a closed fist.
One night in winter, Greyson held me in his arms and said, "I want you to meet my parents properly."
I had already met them, but meeting them properly meant he was making the world official.
"I don't know about children," I admitted. "I don't know if I'm patient enough."
"I don't want a house full of children either," he said. "I want a life that is ours. If that's enough—"
"It is," I said.
He kissed the corner of my mouth, soft and decisive. He went on, "We don't do grand gestures. We do steady ones. I will not promise you a life without storms. But I will promise that I will stand in the rain with you every day I can."
I laughed, because it sounded like the kind of vow I could live with. "You're very practical," I said.
"Someone has to be," he said.
We married quietly some winters later—not for show, not for healing other people's wounds, but because after everything, we wanted to share a life.
The framed photograph eventually moved from the shelf to an album. I kept his face in my work, often, as a study of light and restraint. We kept the tiny private joke of the photograph in the shower between us. It was our thing: obscene, intimate, completely useless, and wholly ours.
The memory of public exposure never fully vanished. Loretta's punishment had been fierce and public, and it had forced a justice in the only place she had been used to wielding power—the court of other people's eyes. It had cost her dignity and given her a chance to begin again. It taught me the hardest lesson: that sometimes the only justice you can make is the one you make with truth.
We lived in the smallness of the ordinary: coffee, a camera, a temperamental dog, a backyard telescope that Greyson loved. We watched the sky sometimes, and once he pointed out a constellation and said, "Remember the night we almost gave up? I have kept that night like a photograph."
I smiled. "You keep a lot of photographs."
He kissed me then, right there, like a promise and not a plea.
In the end, the photograph in the shower was not an altar of possession. It was a relic of a fight, a laugh, a memory. We left it there for a time, and then we moved it when it felt right.
"Do you regret anything?" he asked me once on a long winter drive.
"Only that I'm not better at forgiving myself," I said.
"Then we will practice," he said, reaching across. "I will be stubborn enough for both of us."
I looked at his hand and took it. Outside, the highway unrolled like a film strip. The lights of the city winked like stars we had not yet named.
We were not perfect. We had scars that no happy ending could erase. But we had light and company, and sometimes that has to be enough.
The End
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