His Lens Never Had Room For Me Chapter 09

His Lens Never Had Room For Me Chapter 09

Early the next morning, Everett sent Sienna home.

He tore up every shooting plan and put the woman who only knew how to create light pollution on a flight back to Connecticut.

He stayed in Fairbanks alone.

That afternoon, as I stepped out of the magazine’s darkroom, I caught sight of him through the lobby’s floor-to-ceiling windows.

Everett was standing outside in the snow, wearing nothing but a thin black overcoat, no gloves, no gear.

His bare hands hung limply at his sides, completely exposed to the biting sub-zero air.

He was punishing himself, trying to replicate the agony I had endured in the Denali backcountry when I dug through the snow with my bare hands to salvage his batteries.

I held my coffee cup and watched him in silence for one minute.

Then I turned around and walked back to my workstation.

He stood in the snow for four full hours.

Only when finally lost patience and went out to chase him away.

When I pushed open the magazine’s front door after work that evening, Everett was still there.

His face was deathly pale, and frost clung to his eyebrows.

But the most glaring sight was his hands.

His fingers had swollen into a deep, angry purple, and the edges of his nails had begun to show a dark, necrotic blue-black.

The moment he saw me come out, a faint light flashed in his eyes.

He forced his stiff legs forward and walked up to me.

“Elena,” he said, his voice hoarse, rough as sandpaper.

He lifted his frostbitten hands with a tremble.

“It hurts.” Everett looked at me.

“That night in Denali, it hurt this much for you too, didn’t it?”

He was trying to play the martyr, using this calculated display of suffering to evoke the soft-hearted woman who had doted on him for five winters.

I looked at his purple fingers.

“Everett, you should go to the hospital. Turn right at the next intersection,” I said, pointing in that direction.

“I’m not going to the hospital.” Everett stubbornly blocked my way.

With difficulty, he reached into the pocket of his coat and pulled out several brown paper strips with scorched black edges.

They were the scraps of ash he had dug out piece by piece from the apartment trash can before he left.

“I read them. I pieced them together and read them all.”

Everett’s eyes reddened.

“You wrote that I should wear more layers. That I should take care of my stomach.”

“You wrote so much. Why didn’t you ever tell me?”

I looked at those blackened scraps of ash.

“Because you told me your world didn’t have room for even a flicker of my light.”

I stepped around him and kept walking.

Behind me, Everett dropped hard into the snow.

For five years, he had been the untouchable top photographer, a man too proud to lower his rigid artistic standards.

Now, he was breaking down on a freezing sidewalk in a foreign place.

“Elena, I was wrong. I accept all five years of light pollution. Give me one more chance. Let’s start over.”

He was nearly begging.

I stopped.

I did not turn around.

“Everett, do you know how long it takes for the stars in those glass jars to burn into ash?”

Everett said nothing. All I could hear was his heavy breathing.

“Ten minutes.” I said quietly.

“Five years of devotion. One thousand and ninety-six nights of waiting. It took ten minutes to reduce it all to nothing. My love for you burned out just as fast.”

I stepped through the thick snow, walking toward the corner at the intersection.

“Go home. There’s no aurora for you here, and there’s no place for you either.”

I hailed a cab.

As the car started moving, I glanced once in the rearview mirror.

Everett was still in the snow.

Those hands, born to press a shutter and once praised as the steadiest in the industry, were now cradling a handful of cold black ash in despair.

Frostbite never truly healed in the Alaskan wind.