Free Skin by Dale Mayer

grinned. Maybe she shouldn’t have, but she needed rest from the emotional overload, and a part of her wanted to see if Kane had plans for the evening and if they included her. As that was the wrong thing to be waiting for, she decided to go up to her room. Standing up, she excused herself. “I have homework to do.”
    Kane looked up at her. “Are you going to go through the pictures?”
    She nodded. “Yes, to see if I can find any worth keeping.”
    “Do you need help?” he asked, half-straightening from his chair.
    “No.” At the surprised look on his face, she gave a small laugh. “At least not at this stage. There are hundreds of shots, and I’m most likely to delete ninety percent of them. When the numbers get down to something reasonable, then I’ll show you and you can go through the ones I think might work.”
    He grinned. “In other words, you don’t want me to see the less-than-stellar pictures.”
    “So true.” She waved goodbye to the others and headed up to her room. Once inside, she brought out her laptop and started downloading the pictures. She had no idea how many she’d taken; only that she’d gone madly click-happy. The file was huge. She walked to the side counter and made herself a cup of coffee. She could have stayed longer, but she was happy to have time alone, time to find her balance again. Having one’s behavior pointed out took a bit of adjustment. At twenty-four, she wasn’t a kid any longer, but apparently she still didn’t know how to behave in public. She could put the blame for that squarely on Kane’s shoulders.
    Kane’s beautiful shoulders.
    If she had to do a photography class and would not be able to choose her own subject, Kane made a hell of a second choice.
    Hell, who was she kidding, Kane was her first choice.
    Finally, the file was downloaded. She sat down with her coffee, opened her image program, and quickly started sorting through the pictures. She did a quick go-through and deleted the ones that were obviously junk, then went back through the remaining hundred. She created a file titled “Project” and dropped several good images into that folder. There was one of Kane standing and staring at the sailboat. She loved the way the camera had caught the wistfulness in his eyes. She plowed through the next group and picked out a couple that caught his hard jaw as he stared at something off screen. She chose the images that spoke to her. They said something about Kane, the man. The camera loved him, making it that much harder to sort through the last thirty images in the file. When she was done, she turned her attention to the group of pictures she’d taken while he’d worked out.
    That was when she understood how the camera not only loved Kane, but that his body was made for this. All the beautifully defined muscles, the ripples as they moved and shifted…she wished for the first time that she had a video camera. He was a man in motion. Such a connection. In one shot, his jaw clenched, and his eyes were so focused. There was one of his bicep, the muscle so smooth and shiny but hard and tense with the effort he was exerting.
    She put one of her favorite photos into a different folder she named “Special”. Kane had just finished the workout; he’d collapsed back down to the mat. In her mind, she remembered the heaving chest, the quivering look at the hard muscle, but it was the look of relief, the look of pride, and that tinge of complacency as he realized he’d done it. He’d managed to complete his physically punishing workout again. He hadn’t let it beat him.
    She knew it was a competition for him. A challenge to see if he was up to it or if he was going to wuss out. He would not appreciate her thoughts, she was sure, but he had such a sense of satisfaction around him that she could only cheer with him. As she went through the pictures from start to finish, it was as if she was there all over again. Seeing the pain, the effort he exerted, hearing the