Harder than Steel Read online

  She was ignoring him, briskly clicking through the images on her viewscreen, just casually scrolling through her power over the situation, over him, over the money to be made off other people’s lives. He started toward her, not entirely sure of what he was about to do, when a screeching thud turned end over end on itself, sounding like a semi jackknifing through traffic. Jax saw it before he heard construction workers hollering at each other.

  One of the steel beams had come loose and was coming down.

  He took a running start off of nothing and threw himself headlong, tackling Reyes in a dive. The girder slammed onto a flatbed trailer parked next to where she’d been standing, crumpling the cab.

  Jax’s head rang. He’d rolled at the last second to avoid throwing his whole weight onto her, and now Reyes was twisting around underneath him to get loose. She had more muscles than her loose, nondescript clothing suggested, hard and compact, but still curving where she ought to. Jax wished she’d give him just a minute, for the dust to clear, and finally stood, breathing hard. Reyes came up to her feet, and he saw why she’d been squirming—she wanted to make sure her camera had survived being pressed between the two of them.

  The Butler Did It—Jax Assaults Photographer After Alley Affair Shocker, the headline would read, and the Steel Knight toy marketing executives would haul him into their offices for another lecture.

  “Jesus Christ,” he said to her. She was inspecting the lens and hadn’t even bothered to check herself for damage. Or him. “Really? Now?”

  Reyes frowned down at her camera, but instead of lining up another shot, she gingerly twisted the focus to feel for damage.

  “I can’t believe you managed to do that without breaking it,” she said. “Or me.” He could hear construction workers shouting to one another, footsteps in the distance.

  They stared at each other for several moments, and she let the camera drop to the strap on her neck.

  “Um,” said Reyes. “Should I—How can I—Thanks? You?”

  “How can you thanks me?” said Jax. Reyes’ mouth opened and closed several times, and her eyes shut for a moment, only to open on Jax holding out his palm.

  “By deleting those photos.” When she didn’t move, he flexed his hand. “Come on, lemme see it.”

  Reyes drew the strap from around her neck carefully, as if it were heavy.

  “I’m only interested in the ones of me,” he said, quiet, but her strange expression didn’t change. Jax went into the image review and removed every shot involving him, even the one of his apartment building rising up to loom over the street. He paused and moved his thumb off the delete button on the picture before that: a plump older woman striding through a zebra crossing with one arm flung out as if to welcome or guide, looking directly into the lens. Jax flicked the power off and handed the device back to Reyes.

  She stood for a moment as distant sirens echoed off the buildings, and they looked at one another.

  “You okay?”

  “Yeah.” Her dark eyes flicked back and forth across the pavement in front of him, and her throat moved when she swallowed. “You okay?”

  “Uh… yeah. Sure.”

  Reyes nodded.

  “Okay,” said Jax. “I have to go be on TV now.” He turned and went back into the apartment building through the metal doors.

  Across the checkerboard patterned lawn, Dirk Masterson, billionaire playboy, venture capitalist, and angel investor, strode in linen pants toward one of the white tents that had been erected along the back side of his waterfront estate. The one on the West Coast. Inside, waiters circulated platters of amuse-bouche discreetly among the politicians and businessmen in spotless casual uniform, absent of even the slightest evidence of work or strain.

  He raised the glass of Scotch that had been slipped into his hand over a few heads to greet Senator Gleason, who returned the salute with a smile that went deep. The oceanfront view out the back of the tent was uncompromised, waves rolling in white peaks and foaming along the firm sand. It was always a gorgeous day when Dirk Masterson threw a little get-together.

  “There you are,” he said, turning to the one person in the room who didn’t belong. It was unclear if 17-year-old Mark Fossa had actually made an effort to look decent, or if a neon green polo shirt and cargo shorts were the norm in Silicon Valley, but Dirk put an arm around the kid’s shoulder and guided him to the bar. “I hope you’re enjoying yourself; one day this will be old hat. Get it while you can, I mean.” Dirk quirked an eyebrow, and the bartender began making a gin and tonic.

  “It’s probably too much to thank you again,” said Mark, and a grin came quickly over his youthful features. “It’s just not every day someone gets VC funding their freshman year.”

  “I told you.” Dirk held his glass out for Mark to clink. “It’s all about the best ideas, the ones that’ll change the world. You should get out there and meet some new friends,” he continued while Mark knocked back the rest of the cocktail. “It’s your day, and everyone is here for you.”

  Mark took this to heart and wandered off in search of networking opportunities. Dirk nursed his Scotch and tried one of the coconut ceviche served in a white spoon.

  “So what is it this time?” Senator Gleason faced the bar and tipped his finger up for another round.

  “Medical imaging software.” Dirk’s mouth barely moved.

  “Hmm. How viable is it?”

  “Fairly. Outdated within two years; I figure it’s a safe sunk cost to absorb for now.”

  The senator chuckled.

  “An investment on an investment,” he said, and moved away.

  Dirk’s smile didn’t last long after that.

  Chapter Two

  He’d just deleted the pictures, but he hadn’t thought to format the card, which meant the photos were still in there somewhere. It would take just a little work to get them back. It was funny how the more insistent someone was, the dumber they got. Cops, self-righteous celebrities—unless they walked away from her with the memory card from her camera, all the anger and outrage accomplished nothing. Well, it made them feel better for a bit. That consistency of human nature kept her warm on cold nights, or whenever a driver called her a cunt if she lane-split in traffic. Something about a young woman with brown skin on a secondhand bicycle actually moving through gridlock just pissed people off.

  Vanessa Reyes didn’t hate celebrities on principle, but she didn’t like Jax Butler. He was attractive—her sister Claudia would probably say so hot—with his olive skin and thick coif of black hair, but he didn’t seem to really appreciate how to play the game between tabloids and celebrities. You could be willing and gracious when it suited you, or publicly resigned to tolerate it, or even desperate and grasping for fame. Those were the easiest people to get, since they wanted the attention and were a reliable sale.

  Jax Butler was just dicking around with everyone.

  One week he seemed content to be photographed on the Santa Monica beach in a bathing suit with a pretty standard pair of twenty-year-old Brazilian models, nothing out of the ordinary, and the next, he’d be leading paps on street-squealing races in a Maserati along Robertson Boulevard in the Hills, so determined to get away that he’d somehow ditched the car and actually managed to elude them. That had made the national news at 6pm. Nobody dodged the LA paps; those guys were better than bounty hunters. But Jax Butler did, and no one knew how, or why he’d bother with a car chase if he didn’t want somebody to watch. The guys out west were baffled; Butler hadn’t “accidentally” slipped and let them get a few shots like they’d been expecting. It was like he genuinely couldn’t figure out what he wanted or when he wanted it.

  Sirens were getting closer, and construction workers were passing her to check the damage, swearing and laughing, oddly, in disbelief at the sight of the beam where it had landed. She fired off the shutter at a foreman pushing his hardhat back on his head with the totaled truck in the foreground, and then got back onto the street, tucking the camera into
her padded backpack before anyone started asking questions.

  It was weird, allowing Butler, allowing anyone to touch her equipment like that—it was her entire job, her whole means of making a living, in a glass and hard plastic body, fragile and easily compromised. Kind of like her and the however-many-thousand-pound steel beam that had almost smeared her across the alley. It was nice to be alive, at least. Maybe she could return the favor and leave him alone for a day or two. Vanessa paused to slip off her shoe and adjust the back.

  Nah, not worth it. Trevor would see a glorious opportunity to cut loose the only female photographer at the agency if she showed any weakness. Maybe her resentment of Jax Butler came from the fact that her boss had assigned her to him, which was a shitty thing to do.

  She hadn’t been following Butler lately, since he’d been away from New York to promote Steel Knight. The movie’s opening weekend had broken the previous box office record, and the international receipts were already putting it head and shoulders above any other film, superhero or otherwise. The cast had been out of the country for additional premieres, then a round of press tours and interviews both to politely gloat over how well it had done and to subtly keep themselves in the public’s mind for the next movie in the franchise: Patriot’s Duty.

  Vanessa kind of hated herself for knowing all of this, because she didn’t need to, but Claudia always pestered her whenever she came home. Her sister would insist on seeing the unedited photos before they hit the gossip sites and grocery store papers, where they’d be out of context and with plenty of editorialized breathless fiction blaring over them. Claudia kept a Twitter account that managed to function as Vanessa’s backup set of contacts and tipoffs. Pap work was already competitive enough, but older guys were always grumbling about how cell phones had ruined exclusives forever, diluting the pot for everybody. Tips were all about trust and mutual favors, and smoothed the road a little. Vanessa straddled two worlds, her sister managing the new media side, and she kept her mouth shut about her secret methods.

  It was difficult enough having a standing assignment on someone who wasn’t even in the country. But the shittiest part was having to freelance on top of that: she had to come up with her own work whenever Jax Butler wasn’t at home. Which was often. She’d been papping for almost four years, taking everything that came her way to prove she could cut it, and still her boss Trevor was setting her on this asshole ghost and explaining the difference in f-stops and lenses to her like she was a little kid.

  The first time Vanessa Reyes saw a paparazzo, she was twenty-three years old and in the city, standing next to a restaurant called Rara Avis. Growing up, maybe other kids from the neighborhood had seen someone famous, had sneaked out to Manhattan by bus when their parents worked late and it was exciting to rebel. Vanessa had never had much of a reason to leave Queens, and even in adulthood it had seemed unnecessary. She kept things tight and orderly: money, hours, and the apartment where she lived with Claudia in Ridgewood. They’d grown up there, first very slow, and then all at once, and Vanessa had quickly overtaken Claudia there because she’d had to.

  Vanessa had always liked photography. Not portraits and formal poses, but people being people. Being themselves.

  When she was little, Vanessa’s father had worked reupholstering furniture. She’d tuck herself back between the bolts of fabric in the workshop down the block and watch him measure and cut, paying close attention to the way he held a needle and thread. It gave her a deeply satisfying knowledge about him, like reading his thoughts in a book. People were most real when they were alone.

  Papa had been busy, but kind, and he’d loved to read. He’d stop at the nearby public library and bring home books for her and Claudia and Mama all to read, except for one afternoon when he brought home a book and said that it belonged to them now.

  “Are you sure?” asked Vanessa. She didn’t believe her father would ever steal anything, but that didn’t sound like something the library would do.

  “They were getting rid of it, angelita,” he replied. “They do that when the books get old or nobody uses them. That way they can buy more.”

  Claudia had said how sad that was, dumpsters filled with books that nobody had loved, but Vanessa thought about the time she had visited the library with Papa to make photocopies and saw a book called Cracking the Real Estate Market—1988 Edition on the shelf.

  So they kept the new-old book, which had large black-and-white photographs of people in other parts of the world. It was called Street Photography Around the World, and Vanessa loved it. She would turn the pages one by one, memorizing every detail, from jars and chairs to shadows, the spray of water coming out of a fire hydrant on one page and from a water pump the next, and most of all the expressions that the people inside made. They never smiled, which seemed more realistic than the grinning faces on bus stop ads in Ridgewood. Who smiled at a bus stop? Not real people . She looked at the book so often that Claudia eventually gave up whining for her turn with it.

  The next Christmas, Papa bought her a camera, a solid lump of metal with textured bumps on the lens barrel. Vanessa had run her fingers over it just to get the feel of something that real, that grown-up.

  “The thrift shop didn’t have the instructions, but I bet the library has them,” he told her. She’d slept with the old camera on the pillow next to her every night that winter.

  Vanessa got her very own library card and checked out the Minolta XD11 Owner’s Manual about a dozen times before she felt sure about spending her allowance on a roll of film. When she’d finished photographing the LIRR tracks and Papa’s workshop, she sat down to read again how to carefully unwind the film from the camera, but before she could do it, Claudia popped the back and exposed the film, resulting in tears all around.

  After the appropriate period of sulking, Vanessa bought another roll, photographing the kids on her street from the fire escape of their building. Papa helped her put the prints into a photo album one at a time. She entered images in a local competition and won a few prizes and even a summer course. The teachers talked about scholarships to art school, and she saved her allowance to buy a black portfolio case, obsessing over which prints to put inside. Every year she carefully re-assessed and rearranged it.

  Vanessa entered high school. Claudia had been feeling dizzy and nauseated, and the doctor thought she’d just taken a long time to recover from a bad cold. But soon Claudia was in so much pain that she couldn’t even get out of bed to go to school, and Mama finally made the decision one afternoon to take her to the specialist that the clinic doctor had recommended.

  After a series of scans and a spinal tap that Mama refused to talk about, the doctor diagnosed her sister with lupus. The apartment was much quieter for a long time, and whenever Vanessa opened the fridge, there was another plastic tray of pre-filled syringes sitting on the shelf. When Papa brought home a wheelchair that Mrs. Anantos downstairs had given him, he and Mama argued behind their closed bedroom door, but Claudia never said anything about it.

  Vanessa graduated high school. She’d made an agreement with her father that if she could find a job, he would put together some money to help pay for half her tuition at the community college. A whole month’s wages (and the lousy tourist tips) from her waitressing at Garderia’s had gone toward a brand-new portfolio box, a softcover book she’d had custom made from a printing website, and the shipping charges to send it all off to the School of Visual Arts just a borough away. The thick acceptance packet that came back to her included a partial tuition scholarship.

  She stared at the number that SVA was offering for a long time, and after looking up the fees and equipment and everything else, she’d tucked the acceptance and scholarship letters inside her portfolio and signed up for freshman composition at Queens CUNY.

  And then her parents died. Car accident outside Myrtle-Wyckoff Avenues station.

  Vanessa took more hours at the restaurant, became the go-to for vacation or sick time coverage, sold the workshop r
emnants to the first guy who came asking about it, started bringing home the leftovers from work, canceled their cable subscription, turned off the hot water heater during the day, pawned her camera and Mama’s jewelry, borrowed money from the neighbors with red cheeks, and was about to get rid of their computer and the internet when Claudia finally put her foot down. They had a screaming match over it, and Claudia burst into tears, crying that it was the one thing that kept her sane when she actually had a good day, so it only seemed cruel to argue.

  The bills kept coming, and adding together, and getting bigger. Vanessa stacked them neatly in a drawer where they couldn’t stare at her over her sociology textbooks in the evenings. Claudia read message boards and blogs all night and didn’t leave the apartment except for her clinic visits or group therapy sessions. They never talked about the medical bills, but Claudia insisted on walking into the hospital by herself, leaving Vanessa standing in the parking lot so no one from the group might see them together.

  It had been a bad year, and it had been a bad year for much longer than just a year. Vanessa couldn’t find the words to say why she’d skipped class that fateful night and crossed the bridge into Manhattan. The third Starbucks she passed was advertising something called a smoothie bowl, and she realized that not only did she have no idea what that was, but that she was unlikely to ever know, given that it cost $12.99. The fact that it sounded like something a nurse would spoon-feed to invalids didn’t make Vanessa want it any more.

  Claudia hated her. She had no friends. All of her time went into studying for night classes and sleepwalking through her waitressing shifts, which she only stuck with to pay bills that never gave up and the slowly fading little voice in the back of her head that sometimes hinted that maybe she’d be able to save up for a camera and the tuition for a digital editing course one of these days.