Free Captured Shadows by Richard Rider

my own. "Cut your face out and paste it over mine. Then both halves'll be you and I won't ever look at nothing again for my whole life."
    "You belong in an asylum."
    "Ain't you a charmer?" Archie murmured with his lips suddenly just above my collar. I shivered at his touch and turned in his arms, opening my mouth against his and tasting the sweetness of his breath, those ever-present barley sugars, as he kissed me.
    When we emerged from the darkroom, blinking in the sunlight that flooded through the glass walls and ceiling of the upstairs studio, Mr Everett was sitting in the chair we sometimes used for portraits and shuffling through a stack of photographs as though they were a deck of cards, murmuring to himself like a madman. He looked excited, bright red spots blooming on his cheeks above his whiskers, and when he saw us across the room his sudden beaming smile was almost dazzling.
    "Splendid," he kept saying. "Splendid! You marvellous boys."
    I heard Archie stifle a noise behind me, a sort of embarrassed laugh surrounded by a cough, and I wanted to make a show of bravery and go to look at the photographs but I was rooted to the floorboards in terror. It seemed inexplicable and ridiculous, given all that Mr Everett had seen in the flesh the night before and all that had just been said and done in the darkroom, and I suppose Archie thought so as well because he pushed past me, then, suddenly brash with bravado when before he had been nothing but impeccably polite and formal towards our employer.
    "May I see?"
    "Wonderful!" Mr Everett all but bellowed at him, handing over the photographs and strutting out of the room like a chortling peacock, I assumed to shut himself in his office and wallow in the imagined success of his new enterprise.
    Still too apprehensive to join Archie, I stayed where I was and watched him look at the first picture; watched his mouth fall open slightly and then close, teeth pinching his lower lip; watched the sudden strange gentleness of his hands on the paper, and the faint flush of blood rising in his cheeks.
    "Good Lord," he muttered eventually, and stared at me as though I had slapped him; then, perhaps realising I wouldn't go to him of my own accord, he came forward and thrust the pile of pictures into my hand before taking a step back, holding his arms clutched around his middle as though he had a pain. He didn't speak, he simply let me look in silence; I placed the photographs one by one on the table until there were a dozen or more, then he stood close by me and we both leaned in to inspect them again.
    "Good Lord," I echoed. I couldn't think of anything else to say.
    Our discomfort and fear were so evident in the earlier pictures, twisted unhappy expressions and eyes lowered in shame or gazing off into the distance beneath frowning brows, but I remembered so clearly that lightning moment when our eyes met and found that photograph amongst the others, lifting it to my face to peer more closely at it.
    "Stop looking at my prick," Archie said, sounding as though he meant it as a brash salacious sort of joke when in fact he only seemed small and scared.
    "I'm not," I told him, holding out the photograph for him to take. "I'm looking at your eyes."
    Now I could see why Mr Everett had told us not to look away; there was something urgent in the picture, a sort of unaffected yearning although from the necks down we still looked clumsy and awkward. Archie in the photograph was smiling very slightly, just enough of a hint to be obvious. I merely looked stunned, as though the moment of realising something enormous had been captured by Mr Everett's flash powders and chemistry , which I suppose was true.
    "What do you think of them?" I asked Archie, dry in the mouth and stumbling over my words, and he dropped the two he was holding back onto the table and kissed me where we were, drenched in sunlight and high above London as though nobody else in the city existed.

CHAPTER XII
     
    Something had changed