Available Light Cycle · Book One
Available Light
He reads every room for a living. Nobody has ever read him back.
Evan Reed can see what a room is hiding. The father's hand that hesitates on the back of a chair. The bride gripping her bouquet too tight. The grief tucked inside a laugh. He was a medical researcher once. Now he photographs weddings, and he is good enough at reading people to be frightened by it.
Nobody has ever looked back. He under-charges, he over-edits, and he leaves every room the second someone might actually see him. Then a conference in Prague puts him on a stage he never wanted, in front of the one audience trained to look as hard as he does. Her name is Sofia Duarte.
She listens to the most honest talk he has ever given, and afterwards she hands him the word he spent forty slides trying not to say. Over three days he photographs her three times. Colleague. Desire. Morning. Each frame costs him a layer of hiding.
Then, at a party, he takes a fourth that nobody asked him for, and what he does about it decides whether there is a third at all.
A complete novella. Explicit, unhurried, nothing fades to black. Adults only. First book of the Available Light Cycle.