Part two.  Nothing else to say really. :)  Oh, except I'm sorry for the weird formatting glitches.  I can't seem to fix them, and right now I'm too grateful that the chapters are uploading at all to care too much.  Thanks to everyone who reviewed, it's much appreciated.

Not mine.  Any of them.

II.

Mark was so deeply burrowed in concentration that he only vaguely heard the door open and close behind him.  He had a small screwdriver worked into the center of his camera and was carefully trying to fix a broken mechanism that had kept him from filming that day.  He glanced up briefly from his work to see Roger sticking his head in the refrigerator, rummaging for food that they didn't have.  Collins had moved out a little over a month ago and with him had gone their steady supply of flood.

"What are you working on?" Roger asked, screwing the cap off of a bottle of water. His nose and cheeks were red from the bitter cold outside, and he was breathing heavily from sprinting up the seven flights of stairs to their top-floor loft.

"A piece broke," Mark replied, turning his attention back to the camera on the table in front of him. "I can't get any work done until I fix it."

"I bet that's driving you crazy," Roger said, plopping down casually on the couch.

Mark looked up at him with a half smile. "Yeah."

"Are you a photographer?" Mark heard a voice ask.  He looked up to find Roger's new girlfriend standing near him.  She indicated the prints in his hand.

"Um, not really," he replied. "It's just sort of an obsessive hobby."

She smiled.  She had a pretty smile. 

"I have a few of those myself.  Mind if I look?"

She sat down in a chair near him, and he handed her the small stack of prints that had just finished drying in his makeshift darkroom.  She - April - flipped through them thoughtfully, her dark, heavy hair falling into her eyes.  She paused frequently to brush it back behind her ears.  Roger was in his bedroom changing; they were getting ready to go out.  Mark had met April briefly twice the week before, and though he hadn't exchanged more than a dozen words with her, he found himself liking her.  He had gathered from Roger that she was a graduate student at NYU, and they had met at convenience store before running into each other later the same night at a jazz concert.  Since then, Roger had disappeared almost every night with her.   

She gave each photograph lingering attention until she came to a series he had taken just a few days ago.  She skimmed over them quickly, and Mark laughed.

"Don't worry," he said when she looked up. "I don't like those either.  I was just trying to figure out what exactly is wrong with them."

She smiled.  He had rightly interpreted her indifference to the pictures.  "Try exposing the paper a little longer?" she suggested.  "It looks like the contrast could be a little higher."

                                                                                                                           

Mark looked down at the photographs carefully.  "You're right," he said, slightly surprised.  Five or ten more seconds of exposure would considerably improve the picture of an old couple he had seen in the park last week.  "You've studied photography?"

"No, but my father used to have the same obsessive hobby.  I picked up a few things I guess."

She glanced back down at the photographs in her hand, and she came upon an older print he had made of Roger several months ago.  Her eyes lingered on it, and her expression sobered.

"No wait," she said. "I've figured out your real problem.  You need to take pictures of what you know.  You can totally tell the difference."

She found several more pictures of Roger that Mark had taken at the same gig.  She seemed to favor one, a black and white of Roger half sitting on a tall stool on stage, his arms around his acoustic guitar, his eyes closed.  The lights and audience were all out of focus, the photograph centering on Roger's face as he sung.

"This is beautiful Mark," she said.  He began to shake his head, but she laid a hand on his arm. "Really."  She laughed. "No more old folks in the park, jus Roger."

Mark chuckled. "I don't think so.  Roger hates it when I take his picture.  He doesn't even know these exist."


She smiled and nodded. "Well, I think you should show him sometime."

"Oh hey, I got a gig for tonight," Roger said, interrupting Mark's thoughts.

Mark looked up from his camera. "With the band?"

"No, just me. Brad's singer cancelled, and he asked me to fill in for a couple of nights.  Want to come?"

"Yeah," Mark replied. "Wouldn't miss it."

Truthfully, Mark hated bars and was slightly impatient to get his camera fixed, but he was too surprised by the fact that Roger was going to play solo in public again and had asked him to be there to think of refusing.  He wondered what had changed inside his friend's head.  If it meant spending the entire night in a smoky bar and forsaking his camera completely, Mark was willing to do it.  And he did love to watch Roger sing. 

"Where's Maureen?" Roger asked.

Mark shrugged. "I'm not sure. She said she had some errands to run. She's been gone for a while."

*

Maureen walked through the small grocery store, pulling things off of the shelves almost without thought. The boys would never think to buy their own food, no matter how much they might complain about how hungry they were. They had probably starved themselves half to death before Collins moved in with them, and they would probably do so again if she didn't continue to go shopping occasionally. The boys.  Fuck.  They were like one entity: Mark-and-Roger.  You couldn't get one without the other.  Maureen was firmly and bitterly convinced that everything would have been fine if it weren't for Roger.

She was angry and hurt, and the groceries were feeling the effect of it as she threw them carelessly into the basket. She wasn't even exactly sure why she was angry.  She was mad at Roger for just existing, that much she knew.  The vexation in her rose at the thought of his pensive looks and tortured, downcast eyes, living in his own little world of self-pity, as if he didn't know that he had the ability to snatch Mark away from her with the slightest word or glance.  She was angry at Mark for all of the qualities that had endeared him to her, his selflessness and concern and kindness, when it seemed he only possessed them for the benefit of his brooding musician.  Mark couldn't see it, but Maureen knew something about people who kept their distance, and she saw the coldness and detachment in Roger's eyes.  He would hurt Mark, she was certain of it.  And she was angry.

But perhaps more than that, she was hurt.  Mark's deception and betrayal, however innocent and unintended, cut her deeply.  She hated knowing that he would always pick his broken, insensitive friend over her.  She hated the picture of the smiling dark haired girl with the intelligent brown eyes that had once lived on Mark's bedside table but had disappeared since she moved in.  She hated the picture he kept hidden in the pages of the battered blue notebook that he always carried around but didn't let anyone touch, a black and white photograph that he must have taken himself years before.

How could it have taken me so long to see it! But she supposed that wasn't entirely true.  She must have always suspected what was going on beneath the veneer of life in the loft.  After all, she wasn't blind, and she certainly wasn't stupid.  She had simply refused to pay attention, to question the tinges in her stomach, because this really wasn't a thing she wanted to realize.  The beginning with Mark, when his eyes were hers alone, had been so wonderful.  The shadow of Roger, and of her, had always been there, but she had been able to overpower them.  Mark had adored her, and she loved being adored.  Maybe she even began to truly love Mark the way that he loved her.

But there was no way to know now.  When she began to feel him slipping away, or began to realize that he had never really been hers to begin with, her eyes began to wander.  That's why she was really here now, shopping for them, trying to appease some of the guilt she felt for what she had been doing just an hour ago.

But I have no reason to feel guilty, she thought mutinously. I'm not doing anything different from what he is. If he can want someone else, so can I!

She could justify it almost entirely.

Twenty minutes later, she was standing in front of the seventh-story door to her new apartment, grocery bags in hand, breathing heavily from the trip up.  She opened the door to find Mark working silently on his camera and Roger sitting on the table, fiddling with his guitar.  Not an unusual sight.  They both looked up as she came in, and Mark smiled and stood as Roger turned his attention back to the string he had been tuning with no change in his expression.  Mark took the grocery bags from her arms and kissed her almost timidly before moving to unpack the bags at the kitchen counter.  Maybe she was overreacting.  Mark still loved her.  She had always found a way to sabotage every remotely stable relationship she had ever had, and that's what she was doing now.  Grasping at ridiculous straws that would allow her to give herself some distance from Mark's affections.

As she began to place the food he had unpacked in cabinets, he sidled around behind her and put his arms around her waist. Mark always held her like that, so gently, as if he feared she would break.  She smiled as he laid his lips softly against her shoulder.

"Thanks for shopping," he said.

"My pleasure," she replied. "Coffee?"

She turned within the circle of his arms to face him, holding up a new can.  He laughed, pulling her closer.

"You," he said, kissing her, "are a domestic goddess."

She turned toward the coffee maker, immediately squelching the twinge of guilt that she felt. Mark, she realized, as he returned to his camera, was so guileless that expected everyone else was as well.  He would never see it coming.

"Hey," he said, a few moments later, looking up at her. "Do you have plans for tonight?"

"No. What's going on?"

"Roger's playing a gig uptown. Want to go with me?"

Maureen's eyes flew to Roger, sitting on the table fiddling with his guitar, seemingly unaware of what was going on around him. She tensed.

No, I don't want to go! Why would I want to spend an entire evening watching you watch him the way you do?

But she heard herself agree.  She would prove how unconcerned she was by acting casual about everything.  Prove it.  To whom, she wasn't exactly sure.  But she would go to see Roger's gig to support her roommate and fellow performer and to prove that nothing was going to happen.