Page 25 of How to Belong with a Billionaire

I blinked. “And that made you want to be a photographer?”

“Towards the end of book, Barthes is looking through pictures, trying to find what he calls ‘the air’—the truth or the spirit—of his mother within these collected images of her. Eventually he finds what he’s looking for in a photograph of her in a winter garden, taken in 1898. And he weeps.”

“Oh wow. Maybe I shouldn’t have pretended I had a stomach bug when we did the post-structuralists.”

“It moved me.” George gave a clumsy shrug, given she was lying down and I was plastered against her. “It still does. The vulnerability in that work. And in that moment, when critical objectivity—when the discipline he himself helped shape—gave way to the subjectivity of pure emotion. I would love to make someone feel like that. Even if only for a moment.”

I opened my mouth, then closed it again, slightly overwhelmed. A huffed breath from George could have just been, well, a huffed breath. Or a sign she’d revealed more than she’d entirely intended—a state of affairs I was far too familiar with, albeit usually from the other direction.

“So,” I said slowly, “what you’re basically saying is: You want to fuck people in the heart.”

She let loose a great bark of laughter. “Yes. Yes. That’s it exactly. I want to fuck people in the heart.”

Then I was being unceremoniously tumbled out of her arms, pinned down, and kissed hard and rough and just the way I liked it. I emerged, a few minutes later, breathless, with stinging lips, and watering eyes, and found George staring at me with unabashed ferocity.

“I’d like to photograph you, Arden.”

I made an uncertain giggle-hiccough-type noise. “Haven’t you already?”

“For a book.”

“A book? One ofyourbooks? Me?”

“Yes, you. Yes, one of my books.”

“You mean like”—I glanced over towards her bookshelf—“there’d be anArden?”

“There’s already an Arden. But yes.”

My mind was a haze ofomigodomigodomigod. “Are you serious?”

“I never joke about art.”

“But I’m…I’m not art.”

She bit the edge of my jaw, not exactly gently, and I was too dazed to even yelp. “Don’t say stupid things, poppet.”

“Sorry. It’s just—actually, I don’t know what it’s just.”Breathe. Do some breathing.“What do you…I mean, how does it work?”

“I spend time with someone. And I take pictures.”

“But isn’t us spending time together, y’know, sex?”

“Yes. I was rather hoping you’d noticed.”

It was at that moment that I apparently chose to rememberLuis. In all his very intimate glory. “Does that mean they’d, um, be sexy pictures?”

“They could be. As long as you weren’t uncomfortable.”

“Uncomfortable?” I repeated. “Why would I be? The Internet is already covered in photos of me looking goofy as fuck.”

“It can feel quite different, though—to move from private subject to public object.”

I shrugged. “Maybe. But honestly, it’s the idea that you think I’m good enough that I’m having trouble getting my head round.”

“If you can’t find faith in you—which you should have, by the way—at least have faith in me.”

“Oh my God, I do,” I cried. “What I’m trying to say here is…if you think I could be, y’know, not terrible, I am in. I amsoin.”

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