Free The Lover From an Icy Sea by Alexandra S Sophia Page A

any model he’d ever shot. But he was not. He was caught—and, once caught, his affections leaned in only one direction.
    Presently, the object of those affections was literally sky-high somewhere out over the Atlantic.
    Kit looked up from where he stood. Walking north up Sixth Avenue and still only in the twenties, his view was unobstructed by skyscrapers. The surrounding buildings were uninteresting—many of them sweatshops or wholesale houses to the fashion or interior design industry, none over four or five stories, and not one having anything to distinguish itself from the next in line.
    A lifetime contains perhaps eighty springs. For reasons that have nothing to do with the season itself, the first twenty-five and the last twenty-five don’t really count. The mind is either too innocent or too feeble—in any case, too preoccupied—to notice. That leaves only thirty that really matter.
    A warm spring evening in any urban setting transforms many women in the same way that estrus transforms other female mammals on the plain, on the steppe, in the swamp, even in the sea. In the case of urban mammals, the most obvious signal is in their dress. And while one might easily attribute this to the change in temperature, it’s not the case that all women change their signals with the arrival of spring. Only those who are receptive do.
    In the case of a New York urban setting, skirts generally shoot up like kites while blouses forget buttons like yesterday’s news.
    Kit wondered for a moment how Daneka would’ve chosen to dress before heading out to the airport. He decided that—like her temperament—she would’ve dressed conservatively.
     
     

Chapter 11
     
    The next ten days in Kit’s life were indistinguishable from any other ten days except in one respect: his daily call to Daneka’s answering machine. This machine always picked up after the same four rings and always delivered the same message, followed by the same four beeps. Kit felt each time as if he were shouting down into a crypt.
    As he returned home each evening after the same mundane work with the same stunningly beautiful women and with nothing more than the spare, clinking change of a camera shutter in his mental purse, he suspected he’d become merely another urban drone. Day succeeded day with an identical call to the same machine, message and beeps.
    The photographs of Daneka provided the only relief to his routine. At the end of every day, at the conclusion of his last session of dozens if not hundreds of takes of faces and bodies he knew would capture the fantasies of millions of men—if not immediately in print, then in virtually unlimited digital variation—Kit returned to his apartment to gaze at a string of simple black and white photographs hanging from a clothesline.
    As he walked the length of that clothesline, he couldn’t honestly say whether it was Daneka he admired or his own work. One thing, however, was certain: a certain pair of eyes had captured and caged him, and there was no getting out or past them.
    Kit recognized that his obsession and most of Daneka’s allure lay in her eyes—or rather, hidden in caverns behind those eyes. To find that allure, then uncover it, he’d first have to gain her trust. Once uncovered, he’d have to maintain that trust and mine it, bit by bit. It would no doubt be a painful excavation. She’d have to expose herself, her motives, her ambition, her history in order to convince him—if she even cared to convince him—that she was worth the effort. The question remained, of course: Was he worth the effort?
    Kit bumped up against his worktable, saw the boxes of two-day old Chinese take-out food and chop sticks with bits of two-day old rice still clinging to the tips, and served himself dinner.
    The following day, for a change, he had a gig in California. Some super chick who went by the name of ‘Alise’ (which rhymed, according to the tabloids, with ‘bee’s knees’—which she clearly