Chapter Text
“Art is an effort to create, beside the real world, a more humane world.”
André Maurois
The grease is everywhere. It clings to Gaz’s clothes as he finally turns the key in the lock and leaves this shithole behind, and it seems to have sunk deep into his pores as he grips the handrails to keep himself from toppling into one of the businessmen on the tram. They all try to keep their distance from him, and Gaz knows why. He stinks of fryer oil, and while his shift is over, everyone around him is only just setting off for work, white shirts pressed, suits perfectly tailored, a world Gaz brushes up against for twenty minutes a day and no more.
He’s tired. A leaden exhaustion drags his feet across the tiled floor of the station. The escalators are out of order, so he has to take the stairs, his head swimming because the steps are too high and feel nothing like a normal staircase, and when he finally gets outside, the pitiless morning heat hits him like a solid wall of stale air.
Fuck, what’s he done with his life? How the hell did he end up here, beneath sagging cables strung across the street and the blare of car horns, in the smog of a city that spits him out every morning as if it had tried to digest him alive? He stops for a moment and stares into the chaos of the biggest junction in his neighbourhood. It’s packed at this time of day. A mother pushes a pram across the road, and instead of a baby it’s piled high with packs of toilet paper and nappies. Several stalks of leek stick out of her hiking rucksack.
On the other side of the road, a hot dog vendor is selling coffee in small plastic cups that must be in breach of some environmental regulation or other. Gaz feels a stab of sympathy, scratches at his neck, and gets the queasy sense that the grease from his fryer has seeped even beneath his eyelids. He’s sweating. That’s a bad sign. If it’s already this warm so early in the morning, his flat under the roof will be unbearable by midday at the latest.
In an even fouler mood than he was a few minutes ago, he buries his hands in his trouser pockets, tips his head back, and closes his eyes for a moment.
Maybe he can stay here a little longer. Maybe, for just a little while, he can pretend he’s someone else, one of the people hurrying past him with briefcases and handbags. Maybe it’ll come true.
Something new. Something interesting. Something tourists and locals will both go for, you know.
Bloody hell, Soap hasn’t got the faintest idea. Whatever Mr Price, the editor, actually means by his hopelessly generic little phrases is a mystery to everyone at the magazine. Price talks, and they all lunge in whichever direction they hope might be the right one. For months now, Soap has apparently been getting it wrong every single time. His last photo series, a set of portraits of elderly library regulars, flopped, even though Price really had tried everything to place it somewhere. The project before that, waterfowl on London’s urban waterways, had at least paid well enough, but it had been mind-numbingly dull.
Soap wants to make something different. He wants to lift the camera, press the shutter, and watch art come into being in real time, right there in front of him. He wants people to look at his pictures and feel something other than the deadening tedium stock photos inspire. He wants to recapture what he used to feel when holding his camera. And yes, he never should’ve taken the job at the magazine. Soap knows it’s his own fault he ended up in this shitty city, but he’d been living hand to mouth as a freelance photographer for so long that Price’s repeated offer to simply come to London and work for him had eventually become too tempting to turn down.
Soap shades his eyes against the harsh morning sun and squints. The unseasonable heat is grinding away at his patience. He loves the rainy days, the heavy fog that usually rises early off the Thames and wraps itself around the old buildings and the new like a veil. He loves the way the light shifts when the steel and glass of the high-rises catch the low cloud and throw it back, and he loves...
Holy fucking shit.
He lets his hand fall and squints into the sun. There’s a man standing at the lights directly opposite him, his hands shoved deep into the pockets of a faded pair of jeans, utterly motionless.
Soap has his camera in his hand before he’s even had time to think. Through the viewfinder, he focuses on the tilted head, the gleaming walnut-brown skin, the slightly parted lips. The man’s wearing a plain pink shirt that glows in the golden morning light and gives his cheeks a bronze sheen. His hair is cropped close and tightly curled, and he’s standing there among all those people, right in the middle, as if he were a statue rather than a man.
Soap presses the shutter. His heart is hammering, hot adrenaline firing through his veins. He takes two steps to the left, nearly walks straight into a woman passing by, mutters an absent sorry, then takes another shot.
And another.
A different angle. A flash of pearl-white teeth. Fine black lashes and the blade-of-grass shadows they cast across his cheeks. The sinewy muscles in his arms, the hem of the shirt, the jeans, the battered trainers on cracked asphalt… A pair of dark brown hooded eyes studies him from across the road, alert and intelligent as a peregrine’s. Soap presses the shutter again before he even realises the man is looking at him. Heart pounding, he lowers the camera. The lights change to green, and the man crosses the road without taking his eyes off Soap.
And fucking hell, he looks seriously angry.
“What the hell d’you think this is, then, hmm?”
Gaz grabs the man by the collar and yanks him closer. Part of him hopes his fingers leave greasy smears on the collar of the bloke’s white shirt. Another part of him is so angry he wants to punch him straight in the face.
“You some kind of pervert, running around taking pictures of people, eh? There are kids about here too, on their way to school and all that. Piss off.”
Gaz lets go of the man and shoves him hard in the chest. The stranger takes a single step back, lifts his hands, the camera still in one of them, and looks at him.
“No, man, calm down. I wasn’t taking pictures of kids, for fuck’s sake.”
“Honestly, I don’t give a shit,” Gaz says. “I saw you taking photos.”
The man slowly lowers his hands and looks at him.
Oh.
He’s got very, very blue eyes. He studies Gaz with an intensity that’s almost discomfiting, as if he can make out every last detail: the shadows under his eyes, the frying grease soaked into his clothes, the stain on his sleeve because he’d been too lazy to refill the fucking ketchup bottle and it always sprayed everywhere when he shook it…
“Is that blood?”
“What?”
The man flicks his free hand vaguely in his direction. “That.”
Gaz stares at his sleeve, then at the man. A headache creeps mercilessly into his temple and starts throbbing there.
Brilliant.
“Ketchup.”
“Oh.”
The man shifts from one foot to the other. Gaz can’t place him. The mohawk fits the neighbourhood, and so do the earrings, but the clothes are obviously too expensive, same as the camera. He’s about Gaz’s age, but the brown beard makes him look rougher round the edges, and he’s definitely broader than Gaz.
“Look. I’m John. MacTavish. I’m a photographer.”
At that exact moment, Gaz considers simply turning around and walking off. He could buy a coffee from the vendor, too, and pour it straight over John MacTavish’s shirt, brown on white.
“And?”
“I wasn’t taking pictures of kids, I swear. I was… taking pictures of you.”
Gaz’s mouth falls open, then he looks down at himself. He looks exactly how he feels: worn out, grubby and utterly ordinary. But MacTavish looks as if he means it. There’s a slight, careful smile on his lips, as though he’s afraid he might spook Gaz somehow.
“I want to see them. The pictures. I want to see them, and if I don’t like them, you delete them.”
Fuck, Gaz wants to go home. Part of him wishes he’d never stopped at all, had just ignored the bloke, but there’s something about him that fascinates him. Maybe it’s the way he looks at Gaz, or the grin now blooming across his face. Or maybe Gaz is just chronically underfucked, because the greasy spoon where he spends most of his time is full of dockworkers in their fifties, and at lunchtime a whole horde of cleaners come in, all lovely, all kind, and all at least twenty years older than Gaz. Even the hordes of sleep-deprived workers from the storage hall opposite, who come in during their night-shift breaks to eat, are absolutely not anyone Gaz would ever consider. Most of them are just as exhausted and taciturn as he is, and honestly, he’s usually relieved when they finally leave and he can breathe again.
MacTavish steps carefully up beside him and lifts the camera so Gaz can see the display. He has to shield it with one hand just to make anything out, squints at it, and sees a beautiful man who absolutely, definitely, under no circumstances can be him.
What the fuck.
“I want to take more photos of you,” Soap blurts out before the man can slip away and vanish for good. “Look, if you don’t like these, I can shoot you somewhere else as well, maybe out in nature, or somewhere around Shoreditch. There are loads of good spots there too. I didn’t mean to come off weird. Street photography’s always a bit tricky…”
Soap closes his mouth before he makes even more of a fool of himself.
“Have you done something to it?” the man asks, not taking his eyes off the screen.
“No,” Soap says. “It’s unedited.”
The man finally drags his gaze away from the portrait and straightens up, then stuffs his hands back into his trouser pockets. He’s taller than Soap, only by a few centimetres, and he smells of sweat, fish and chips, and aftershave all at once.
“I’m Gaz,” he says. “And I really need to get to bed.”
Soap stares at him. “Okay,” he manages. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to keep you.”
He rummages through his bag, finds a crumpled business card, and holds it out to him.
Gaz. Strange name. Maybe a nickname. Or an alias. Maybe he’s an undercover cop, or in witness protection. Soap pictures him in uniform, then with a gun in his hand, and instantly he’s got a dozen new ideas for a shoot.
“Listen,” he says, “I know that was creepy, alright? It sort of comes with the job, but still. Let me make it up to you. Give me a ring and I’ll take some proper pictures, yeah?”
Gaz takes the card and studies it through narrowed eyes.
“141 Journal? Seriously?”
Soap feels warmth flood his cheeks and hopes they’re not actually turning red. Even though he’s been working for Price for over a year now, he still hasn’t quite gotten used to the fact that he isn’t just some small-time freelancer from Scotland any more, the kind of person people might recognise from Instagram at best.
“Yeah. But I don’t have to publish anything, I...”
He hesitates, running his thumb over the ridged shutter button of his camera again and again, trying to suppress his nerves.
“I just want to take a few more photos. Of you,” he finishes pathetically.
Gaz frowns, but then a yawn breaks across his face, and he shrugs.
“Look, man. Be careful taking photos of people like that. You’re lucky I was the one who said something. There are plenty of other blokes around here.”
Then he turns and walks away. Soap stays rooted to the spot. The fingers that had been holding out his business card burn like fire. He blinks, and Gaz is gone, swallowed up between chattering teenagers and a white delivery van, as though he’d never been there at all.
After a shower and a pitiful supper of bread and Marmite, Gaz sprawls bonelessly across his sofa and stares at the wall opposite. Where the sun hits it, the wallpaper’s slightly faded, the yellow tinge left behind by the chain-smoking former tenant gone in a long pale strip. Up in the corner, it looks like it’s starting to peel a little. Between the television and the wall, a dust mote hangs, shifting in the barely perceptible draught from the skylight thrown wide open. It’s hot, too hot to sleep. Gaz came out of the shower smelling better, sure, but within minutes he was sweating just as badly as before.
The business card is lying on his coffee table, reflected in the fingerprint-smeared glass.
Fuck.
Gaz should be asleep. He shouldn’t be sitting here staring holes into thin air, let alone thinking about the photo the man took of him.
But it’s hard not to.
Gaz isn’t an insecure man. Since he started pulling double shifts, finding a partner’s become difficult, yeah, but he knows that’s got nothing to do with how he looks. He doesn’t feel ugly when he looks in the mirror, and he doesn’t hide any insecurities under his clothes. But he’s never thought of himself as beautiful. Never as someone intense, never in any meaningful way or as anything other than ordinary. He’s always just been a Londoner among Londoners, one of millions, no more than that, but no less either. Average, that’s all. One of those people scraping by to keep up with his family’s rising rent, same as most other Londoners.
But in that photo...
Christ, it hit something deep in him. The way he was standing there while everyone around him passed in a blur of motion, and he was simply still, head tipped back, sunlit and serene… It’s a good photograph. Gaz doesn’t get photographed often, and certainly not by people who know what they’re doing. He goes out with his mates now and then, and sometimes someone snaps a quick picture in some pub and sends it to him later, or he takes shirtless selfies in his wardrobe-sized bathroom under the harsh neon light when he wants to impress somebody on Grindr.
But that portrait, that wasn’t an ordinary photograph. Gaz tears his gaze away from the wall and stares up instead, lost in thought, at the small patch of brilliant blue sky above him. John MacTavish probably isn’t an ordinary photographer either, not if he works for the 141 Journal. None of it makes sense. Why would a man like that be standing at a tram stop that early in the morning, photographing passers-by? Why did he give Gaz his card at all? He’s not a model. He’s not tall enough, not thin enough, and athletic in the wrong sort of way. His muscles come from hauling crates and inconsistent push-ups beside his bed, and on his chest you can see both fat and ribs, and…
Besides, Gaz wouldn’t take his clothes off anyway. His thoughts keep circling. With every minute that drifts past, he feels more as though he’s merging with the sofa, sweaty skin sticking to the upholstery. It’s disgusting. He picks up his phone and the business card, then puts them both back down again. He’s thirsty, but he’d have to get up to fetch some water, and the thought alone makes him feel sick.
Really, he ought to be asleep. Desperately. The longer he sits here doing nothing, the smaller the window gets in which he can sleep before he has to go back to work.
Gaz lets his head fall back and closes his eyes.
If only it weren’t so fucking hot…
The ping-ping of his phone tears Soap out of a deep, dreamless sleep. Without opening his eyes, he fumbles beneath his pillow, finds it somewhere beside his ear, and squints at the screen.
- Unknown number
- Hi.
Can you send me the photo??
Gaz02:27
Unknown number
Today
It’s two in the morning, 02:27 to be exact. Soap blinks, trying to make out anything at all on the screen, which is far too bright.
Soap sits up in bed, his back cracking, and drags a hand through his hair, then reads the message again. He hadn’t thought the man would get in touch at all, not after taking Soap for some paedophilic creep secretly photographing schoolkids. And he knows which photo he wants. It’s the best in the whole set. Soap spent hours that evening downloading, sorting and, frankly, just looking at the files from his memory card, and they all turned out well. But that one, the first one, with Gaz standing among the crowd like a rock in the surf, is by far the most striking.
Without exaggeration, it’s probably the best photograph Soap’s ever taken. With a grunt, he hauls himself out of bed and pads barefoot into the sitting room, where his laptop’s still open on the coffee table. Why’s Gaz texting him in the middle of the night? Soap types in the password, opens his photo library and transfers the picture to his phone.
He doesn’t even know how to sign off his message. Best?
Soap types wishes after Best and deletes it again. Then he types John before MacTavish, deletes MacTavish, adds it again and swears under his breath.
What he really wants is to ask Gaz whether he can photograph him again, somewhere with proper light, peace and enough time to really approach him as an artist. But he already asked, and Gaz gave no sign at all of wanting to take him up on it. Soap never asks more than once, an iron rule which, in his opinion, sets him apart from some of his colleagues for very good reason.
With his teeth clenched, he sends the message, the photo attached. Then he sends a second one after it.
- John MacTavish
- Here. You can be proud of it.
Best, MacTavish.
dropbox.com/scl/fi/gaz-standing-in-the-crowd.jpg02:29 - If you need the original file in high resolution, I can email it to you.02:30
Gaz
Christ. It’s ridiculous. And it’s the middle of the night. At this hour, Soap shouldn’t even be looking at his phone, never mind fantasizing about a photoshoot with some passer-by who quite obviously doesn’t want one.
His phone goes off again. Soap buries his face in his hands, rakes his fingers through his hair, then opens the message.
- Gaz
- You should be proud. You’re the photographer. I only walked home from work..03:31
Gaz
Oh. Warmth spreads through Soap in a strange, unexpected rush. He’d been expecting something else. Criticism, maybe, or a simple thanks and then nothing ever again. But this… this is kind. Genuinely, sincerely kind.
God, Soap’s ridiculous.
- John MacTavish
- Art always happens between model and photographer.
It’s never only one or the other.03:32
Gaz
Soap sends the message, slips his phone into his pocket, and pushes his thumb through the hole in the fabric until he feels the warm skin of his thigh. Then he goes into the kitchen, opens the fridge and peers inside. The over-motivated version of himself from the day before yesterday did a healthy food shop. Salad that would need preparing, fruit he’d have to peel… no. With grim determination, Soap reaches past a lettuce and some peppers and gets hold of the neck of a beer bottle.
He doesn’t have to be anywhere tomorrow morning. He can afford to…
Ping-ping!
Soap at least gives himself time to open the beer and take a long pull before reaching for his phone.
- Gaz
- I’d be interested..03:36
Gaz
The bottle slips from Soap’s grip, wet with condensation, and shatters across his kitchen tiles.
“Is that make-up?”
Gaz freezes. One hand is still on the handle of the fryer basket, the other halfway to a paper tray for the chips, and all he can do is stand there and stare at Nikolai as though the man has grown horns in the last few seconds.
“What?”
Nikolai isn’t a man of many words. The dockworker comes in every lunchtime, always orders fish and chips and a beer, and sits outside in the battered plastic chairs in any weather, even when it rains, except then he pulls his chair tight against the wall so he doesn’t get completely soaked. Gaz likes the Russian-born man, his rough humour and his readiness to get his hands dirty. Sometimes he helps Gaz carry new deliveries through to the back, or brings him little double-wrapped sweets from St Petersburg that stick to his teeth and taste of blueberry. Hot oil drips from the chips and hisses in the fryer. Gaz has two choices: lie, or tell the truth. He tips the chips into the tray, checks the fish, and sighs.
“Mascara and eyeliner, yeah,” he says, holding Nikolai’s gaze. To Gaz’s surprise, Nikolai doesn’t so much as twitch. He just glances down at the tray, the way he does every lunchtime.
“Hungry?” Gaz asks.
Nikolai snorts.
“Fuck, in weather like this we ought to get sent home for the heat, same as schoolkids. Too hot for them to sit in a shaded classroom, but we’re supposed to clean containers in thirty-five degrees. They can piss right off.” He looks up and gestures with one huge, hairy hand.
“Looks good. If anyone gives you grief, come to me.”
The fish is done. Gaz busies himself with it, seasons it, fishes out a little plastic fork, and slides the tray across the counter to Nikolai.
“Enjoy. And thanks, mate. I appreciate it, really.”
Nikolai grunts, pays, and disappears through the door into the midday heat with a bottle of beer in one hand and the fish and chips in the other, as though he hasn’t just been complaining about exactly that. Gaz braces both hands on the counter and turns his torso until the fan hits him full-on and balloons his shirt. It’s ridiculous how nervous he is. He’d already woken with a queasy stomach this morning, and it’s not getting any better. The closer the clock’s hand creeps towards 3:30, the more restless he becomes.
And fuck, it’s been months since he even picked up his make-up, and he’s never once come to work wearing it. He digs out his phone and opens his chat with MacTavish.
- John MacTavish
- When and where can we discuss the details?12:07
John MacTavish
Why was Gaz stupid enough not to let the man take him out somewhere? He’s bound to have money. They could have met in a restaurant with a functioning air con, but no, Gaz has to do several things at once, as usual. He stares at his reply as though he might somehow be able to take it back.
- Gaz
- Just come by my work. It’s dead here after 3:30.12:09
John MacTavish
And then he’d simply sent him the address. Just like that.
The hand slides round to 3:20, and now the sweat isn’t just from the heat. Gaz feels watched before MacTavish has even arrived, as though he’s invited a lion into his space and forgotten it needs feeding. And a meeting here, where Gaz is standing around in this hideous apron, wiping the serving counter again and again with a cloth to erase fingerprints long since gone, is certainly nothing like wherever MacTavish usually meets with his models. Gaz should never have asked for the photo. Fuck, had he just gone home, MacTavish would never have taken that absurdly beautiful picture, and Gaz wouldn’t be sick with nerves right now.
The doorbell chimes. Gaz looks up, and his heart drops into his stomach.
Fucking bastard. The man is ten minutes early too.
Soap is almost never down by the harbour. The last time was months ago, when he’d been trying, with embarrassing desperation, to take photographs of the Thames for Price in a way no one had ever seen before, and in the middle of a wet, bitterly cold February, no less. Now the vast site looks alive and chaotic. Workers swarm between loading bays and shout over engines and the shrill beeping of reversing trucks. Men in orange uniforms weave forklifts past stacked pallets, and a few are standing by a building, fussing with a pallet that looks seconds away from toppling. Above them, the sun burns, a huge, shimmering disc in the sky, and Soap curses the long-sleeved shirt he’s squeezed himself into in a desperate attempt to look vaguely professional.
Hopefully he hasn’t got sweat patches across his back. He twists around to check, but under his clammy hands the white fabric only feels creased and cool. His navigation app vibrates on his phone, and Soap turns left around a warehouse. A little takeaway is tacked onto the side of it, directly opposite of a large storage hall. Above the entrance hangs a large red sign with “Fish and Chips” written across it in peeling white letters. A blinking fish hangs in the window, along with a sign that says “Open”.
Sitting outside is a man in his mid-forties with slicked-back hair, blue overalls and a bottle of beer in front of him. He’s staring at his phone and doesn’t give Soap so much as a glance.
Okay.
Soap squares his shoulders and suddenly feels ridiculous, barging into the little chippy with all his camera gear. Why did he even bring it? He only wanted to talk through what Gaz had in mind, not launch straight into taking pictures. But Soap’s fingers are itching. It’s not remotely what Price wants from him, but Soap sees the light dancing on the window glass, the tarmac wavering in the heat, gulls squabbling on the warehouse roof, and for a moment he closes his eyes.
He hasn’t felt this in a long time, this sense of creating something real. Even the portraits of the library visitors had felt constructed somehow, artificial in a way that made it seem as though he wasn’t photographing people, but photographing pictures of people all over again.
“If you move two metres to the right and keep standing there staring, you could give me some shade while you’re at it.”
Soap’s eyes snap open. The man outside the takeaway raises his beer bottle and toasts him, eyebrows lifted. Soap bites his lip and puts on a polite, noncommittal smile.
“Sorry,” he says, and then, when he notices the half-eaten portion of fish and chips, “enjoy your meal.”
“The boy’s inside, if that’s why you’re here.”
The man has a heavy Russian accent, and when he smiles, his eyes stay razor-sharp and watchful.
“Thanks,” Soap says.
He needs to stop this. There’s no reason to be this nervous, and now the man is watching him too. Soap straightens his back, covers the two metres to the door as if wading through syrup, and pushes it open. The heat is brutal. Soap forces himself not to turn straight back around and leave the shop again at once, and even shuts the door behind him. A bell chimes, and the man behind the gleaming counter turns around.
It’s Gaz. Soap stares at him. The man is unmistakably the same one Soap photographed yesterday morning. The same hair, clipped shorter at the sides, the same shadow of stubble, the same brown eyes. Except, for one thing, he’s wearing an apron now, and for another, he’s clearly wearing make-up.
It’s subtle, blended into his face in a way that doesn’t look out of place. Soap wonders whether the man did it for him, whether he made an effort just because Soap was coming by today, but the thought slips away because Soap can’t ignore how genuinely good he looks. Even here, under the too-bright fluorescent light and plainly exhausted, there’s a casual confidence about him that fascinates Soap.
And not Soap the photographer.
Soap the man.
Oh no.
“Hi,” says MacTavish, lingering behind the door like something ordered and never collected.
Gaz studies him. He looks different from yesterday, different clothes, a touch of gel in his mohawk, but the eyes are the same. They fix on Gaz with a sharp, almost paranoid focus, as if MacTavish were the prey and Gaz the hunter, and somehow that gaze, bright blue and unflinching, sends a chill slipping down his spine.
“Hello,” Gaz replies, clearing his throat, his attention drifting to his hands and the counter, then to the sandwich display. He’s nervous, though he couldn’t quite say why.
“Do you want something to eat?” he asks at last, just to break the silence stretching between them.
The man steps closer with a certain caution, sets his camera and satchel on one of the tables and runs a hand through his hair. There’s already a sheen of sweat on his forehead.
“Air conditioning would be a lifesaver, eh?”
Gaz shrugs.
“London’s not exactly known for hot summers. For the few weeks a year it gets like this, it wouldn’t be worth it. Winter’s properly cosy, though.”
What’s he doing? This is the clumsiest, dullest, most painful small talk he’s ever managed.
“Fish and chips?” he offers, and regrets it immediately.
Out of the frying pan, straight into the fire. Go on, rub his nose in it, remind him you’re a rubbish fast-food bloke, not a model.
“No, thanks.” The man hesitates, then awkwardly reaches a hand across the counter. “I think we got off on the wrong foot last time. Let me start over. You can call me Soap.”
What kind of name is Soap?
Gaz takes the hand, shakes it as briefly as possible, and still probably leaves a trace of sweat behind.
“Why Soap?”
“You’ll laugh, because I work for the 141 now. But I started out in Scotland. That’s where I’m from.”
Gaz tilts his head. “I never would’ve guessed.”
Soap laughs, and God, there’s an entirely different person beneath the solemn photographer façade. His face opens up, skin creasing, revealing a line of white teeth. It’s like someone’s switched on a light. He looks alive and incredibly beautiful.
“Yeah,” Soap admits, still grinning, “you can probably still hear it, eh?”
Gaz returns the smile with ease, as if it were the simplest thing in the world to trade jokes here despite his bone-deep exhaustion. And he is exhausted. He managed two hours of sleep, having spent the rest of the afternoon staring at that damned photograph, the portrait that caught something in his features he’d thought gone years ago.
“A bit,” he says.
“Anyway, I started with soaps. Photographing them for a small company up in the Highlands. Family business, really lovely people. All natural products. So if you ever need proper soap...”
“Mhm. Handmade stuff’s usually out of my budget.”
Fuck. Gaz watches the smile drain from Soap’s face as if someone’s pulled a plug. What’s left is a completely serious expression beneath strong, furrowed brows.
“Sorry,” Soap says, without a hint of irony. “That was insensitive of me.”
Gaz opens his mouth, then closes it again. He can’t look away from Soap, from that expressive face, from the muscular arms stretching the fabric of his shirt, from hands that look like they could pin him down and touch him exactly the way he likes…
Oh fucking hell.
Gaz very urgently needs to get laid. This is getting ridiculous.
Soap’s nervousness fades the longer he sits at the counter, sweating it out. He watches Gaz serve the sparse trickle of customers, listens as he jokes with them, asks after things that make it clear he’s known them for years, notices the way he absently scratches the side of his nose with his little finger. It’s been a long time since Soap’s seen a man carry himself with that kind of quiet authority, and maybe never one who, no matter what he’s doing, looks so entirely at home in his own skin.
After half an hour, he asks if he can take photos, and Gaz only shrugs.
“If you can find anything in here worth photographing,” he says, and Soap has to bite down on his tongue to keep himself from answering ‘you’.
The light shifts as the sun sinks lower, turning everything gold-orange and luminous. Soap photographs the sweat at the nape of Gaz’s neck, his hands working the fryer. Then a salt shaker casting a long shadow across the counter, an old radio. Then Gaz again. His eyes. That careful, half-formed smile. The dimples in his cheeks.
They don’t talk much, but it isn’t uncomfortable. Soap loves losing himself in his work, and it’s been far too long since he’s been able to do it like this, undisturbed. Gaz lets him, even waves him behind the counter, shows him the small kitchen, even allows him to take a picture in front of the white door, where the emergency exit sign casts an otherworldly green glow across his face.
Soap wants to tell him he could get paid for this, but he doesn’t know how to say it. He’d have to ask Gaz if he could show a selection to Price, whether the magazine might be willing to print them, but he can’t bring himself to break that strange, almost melancholic calm between them just to talk about money. Especially not after Gaz already shut him down once, when Soap had rambled on about those bloody soaps.
The sun slips beneath the horizon. Neon signs take over, warping the light so completely that Gaz’s eyes shift from teak to a beautiful dark brown that’s close to black. Soap sets the camera down and watches him closely.
“I could pay you,” he says after all, slowly and carefully, “if I can sell the photographs.”
Gaz has been wiping the stainless-steel prep surface with a cloth for several minutes now, almost meditatively, over and over again. He stops and turns around. His jaw is clenched, and for the second time in twenty-four hours, Soap sees anger in his eyes, barely held in check.
“Is that why you’re here? Because you think you can make money?”
“No,” Soap says at once. “I’m here because I wanted to photograph you.”
Gaz braces his elbows on the counter and leans forward. He’s close. Soap doesn’t step back, but he’s distracted by the fullness of his lips, by the pores of his skin and the precision of his hairline…
“Why?” Gaz asks.
Soap can’t look away from him. They’re close enough that they could kiss, that they could… That’s not a thought Soap should ever be having, not if he wants to preserve even the faintest trace of professionalism.
“Because you’re beautiful,” Soap says without thinking.
Gaz stares at him, opens his mouth, closes it again, and then gives him an infinitely gentle, almost uncertain smile.