A Shot in the Dark: A Novel

by Victoria Lee

Genres: Contemporary Romance; LGBT & Pride; Women's Fiction; LGBT Lesbian

Synopsis

A passionate and powerful romance featuring a transgender man and an ex-Orthodox woman who find each other through their devotion to art, and fall in love despite all odds, from bestselling author Victoria Lee

“A sensual love story about art and passion . . . emotional and heart-aching.”—Ashley Poston, New York Times bestselling author of The Dead Romantics

Elisheva Cohen has just returned to New York after almost a decade away. The wounds of her past haven’t fully healed, but four years of sobriety and a scholarship to study photography with art legend Wyatt Cole are signs of good things to come, right? They could be, as long as Ely resists self-sabotage. She’s lucky enough to hit it off with a handsome himbo her first night out in the city. But the morning after their mind-blowing hookup, reality comes knocking. When Wyatt Cole walks into the classroom, Ely realizes the man she just spent the night with, the man whose name she couldn’t hear over the loud club music, is her teacher.

Everyone in the art world is obsessed with Wyatt Cole. He’s immensely talented and his notoriously reclusive personal life makes him even more compelling. But behind closed doors, Wyatt’s past is a painful memory. After coming out as transgender, Wyatt was dishonorably discharged from the military and disowned by his family. Since these traumatic experiences, Wyatt has worked hard for his sobriety and his flourishing art career. He can’t risk it all for Ely, no matter how attracted to her he is or how bad he feels about insisting she drop his class in exchange for a strictly professional mentorship. Wyatt can help with her capstone photography project, but he cannot, under any circumstances, fall in love with her in the process.

Through the lens of her camera, Ely must confront the reason she left New York in the first place: the Orthodox community that raised her, then shunned her because of her substance abuse. Along the way, Wyatt’s walls begin to break down, and each artist fights for what’s right in front of them—a person who sees them for all that they are and a love that could mean more than they ever imagined possible.

 

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Release date: September 5, 2023

Publisher: Dell

Print pages: 310

Sample

1ELY

My problem, generally speaking, is that I care too much.

I’m an artist, so maybe I’m supposed to. That’s the stereotype, right? The prodigy obsessed with perfection, shivering in a frigid garret, huddled over their masterpiece, bourbon drenched and brilliant. If I didn’t care so much, maybe I wouldn’t be able to see the true shape of things, how lines and shapes smudge together perfectly in the light. I wouldn’t be willing to spend hours in the darkroom with my lungs full of chemicals or waiting in the park with my tripod for hours until that split second right before the sun goes down when the world is cast in shades of rose and red, shadows stretched out long and skinny like bones.

I should have listened the first time someone told me it was a problem, that time Chaya Levy and I had our big fight when we were fifteen and she told me that I was a threat to her Yiddishkeit and we needed a friendship break. You’re just a little too intense, she said, and the accusation flung me into the kind of immediate, reactive rage that pretty much proved her point.

I can’t stop myself from caring, though, no matter how many times it gets me in trouble. Which is why it’s incredibly stupid of me to be here at all, standing at the baggage claim in LaGuardia with my backpack digging into my shoulder, watching the carousel grind by. I’ve been waiting over half an hour already, long enough that I’m starting to worry my luggage didn’t make it, because the baggage guys at LGA are nothing if not efficient and it’s just me and this one family left waiting. Their five-year-old keeps trying to climb onto the moving belt, and judging from the pained look on the mother’s face, she’s thinking about giving up and just letting him cycle through.

I never thought I’d be back here. When I left New York for LA nearly a decade ago, I had every intention of never stepping foot in this place again. I was gonna be all tan lines and margaritas. No more subway. No more bodega cats. And most important, no more bad memories. It’s amazing how easily I was seduced by a big, fat art scholarship.

The screen still says LAX—Arrived, so I figure my bags have gotta be coming sometime soon. Or not. Because this is what I get for arriving at the airport just forty minutes before my scheduled departure time. Parker is the most prestigious arts program in the country, and I still had to gamble with my flight, like, Well, if I miss the plane, maybe it was never meant to be. I’m not sure how to fit lost luggage into that calculus. If I make my flight but arrive without my portfolio, or my lenses, or any of my clothes, am I only half-destined for greatness?

Maybe my problem isn’t caring too much after all. Maybe it’s that I take every possible opportunity to gamble away the things I care about on high stakes for stupid prizes.

Or as my sponsor would put it: “Ely, you sure do like to fuck around and find out.”

A normal person would probably choose this moment to go up to the booth and ask after their luggage. Maybe provide the little sticker receipt they so intelligently kept, make arrangements for their belongings to be shipped to them on the next flight out. That’s what the family does. I, however, stand there while the area fills up again with the passengers from a flight from Berlin, chattering in German as their practical drab-colored luggage begins to rotate around the carousel—as if I’ll find my mint-green suitcase with the Ripped Bodice sticker among them.

“Sorry” is the first thing I say when I finally, reluctantly drag myself to the luggage

counter. “I think…I think maybe my bags got lost on the flight over?”

“Tag.”

I might have been born and raised in New York, but the past eight years in LA have made me weak. I flinch. “Sorry?”

“Your luggage tag,” the woman says, holding out an expectant hand.

“Sorry,” I say—and holy fuck, if I say “sorry” one more time, I will personally eviscerate myself—“but I think I threw it away.”

The woman fixes me with a flat, unimpressed look, even though I’m pretty sure most people throw their luggage receipts away the first second they get. “Did you throw away your boarding pass too?”

We manage to muddle our way through the process, although most of the muddling happens on my end. I leave the airport sweatier than before, skin chafing where my backpack straps rest, and trudge toward the taxi queue. I look longingly after the bright, perky young things heading toward the Uber and Lyft pickup zone; I demolished my rating on both apps within six months of moving to LA. I’m pretty sure if I logged on to Uber, it would present me with an individualized pop-up message reading Don’t even bother.

I wonder what it’s like to exist in the world as someone who didn’t ruin their life when they were eighteen.

I get into an anonymous yellow cab, like a tourist.

“No bags?” the driver asks, meeting my gaze in the rearview mirror.

I shake my head. “Just me.”

I tried to memorize my new address on the flight over, but I don’t trust myself to get it right after the whole luggage debacle, so I read it off my phone just to be safe.

“Astoria,” the driver says as we peel away from the curb. “Why?”

“What do you mean?”

“Tourists usually stay in Manhattan. Maybe Brooklyn.”

Good to know my disguise is impenetrable. “I’m not really the Brooklyn type,” I say, which is very much underselling it.

“I like Astoria,” the man says with a solid nod. “Greek food.”

The rest of the ride proceeds in silence, which is one thing I will always appreciate about New York. In LA everyone wants something: a connection, a hustle, a hookup. You can’t go half a mile in a cab without hearing about somebody’s real estate ventures or upcoming EP. And to be fair, I was part of that—always switched on and looking for a chance to get my art in front of the right pair of eyes. In New York, everyone just wants to get where they’re going.

I’m staying in an apartment I found on Reddit, two strangers seeking a roommate for their three bedroom. Risky move, but I couldn’t bring myself to fly back here to see places in person. I figure if it’s a bust, well, I only paid the first month’s rent up front; that cost less than an extra flight out here plus a hotel would have. The building is unassuming from the outside, four stories high with a flat brick façade. I loiter on the stoop, backpack resting against the wall—no one tells you how fucking heavy a Nikon and some film are when you’re just getting started—and text Ophelia that I’m here.

She responds almost immediately: Be right down.

I arch my back against the railing behind me, as if that could work out the kinks in my spine. It does nothing, of course, except make me feel a little ridiculous when someone walks by.

It’s only two or three minutes, though, before the front door of the building swings open and Ophelia appears. She’s short—no taller than my shoulder—and plus-size, dressed in a trendy crop top and jeans, her hair done up in a cascade of lilac braids that contrast perfectly with her dark skin.

She’d look incredible on film, I think—because apparently I can’t help viewing everyone through a mental camera lens.

“Hi!” she says. “Are you Elisheva?”

“Hey,” I say, pushing off the railing and stepping toward her, holding out one hand to shake hers. “Yeah, I’m Ely. Ophelia Desmond, right?”

“That’s me! Where’s your stuff?”

“Lost.” I grimace. “They said they can get it to me by tomorrow, but I guess we’ll see.”

She makes a face. “Yeah, good luck with that. It’ll be at least three days.” She pauses. “Come on. I’ll show you the apartment.”

We climb three flights of stairs to get there. We lived in a fourth-floor walk-up when I was growing up in Crown Heights, but that was a long time ago; it’s May, it’s hot, and I’ve been living in an elevator building for almost a decade. I hate it, and my thighs hurt by the time we step out onto the final landing. On the upside, by the end of summer, I’ll have an incredible ass—just in time to cover it up with heavy winter coats.

That’s another character flaw of mine: I’m perennially pessimistic.

I should probably try to get over that.

The apartment has a green-painted door, and the welcome mat outside reads OH, HI MARK—a reference to the cult-classic best/worst movie ever made, The Room.

Somehow I gravitate to a very specific kind of person, even if that person is a Reddit stranger

living on the opposite coast. It’s a talent.

“I like the mat,” I say as Ophelia lets us into the apartment.

She arches a brow at me. “You’re my favorite customer.”

“Anyway, how’s your sex life?” I quote back, and my timing, as ever, is impeccable, because the shirtless guy draped over the living room sofa moans, “Nonexistent,” and covers his face with a throw pillow.

“Aaand now you’ve met Diego,” says Ophelia. “He still thinks it’s 2006 and emo is cool.”

“Emo is cool,” Diego mumbles from behind the pillow.

I smile despite myself; whatever Reddit Ely was thinking, she made good choices. I can already tell we’ll all get along just fine.

“Diego, make yourself useful and put some tea on,” Ophelia commands, then moves deeper into the apartment, gesturing for me to follow. “Ely, your room is back here. It’s a little small, which is why we were advertising it for lower rent, but our ex-roommate didn’t complain too too much, so I presume it’s livable.”

“I’m sure it’s just fine,” I say, although when she shows me the room in question, it turns out she’s right. The place is about the size of my bathroom back in LA, barely large enough to fit a twin bed and a tiny desk shoved against the window. There’s no space for a dresser and no closet; I’ll have to use a portable wardrobe, one of those metal contraptions on wheels with a bar and hooks.

But it’s kind of cozy too. I can imagine it in candlelight, warm and flickering, the bed draped in a pile of blankets, and pillows littering the floor. It’ll be even nicer if—god willing—I do well enough at Parker that they ask me to stay here past summer and into the fall, into winter.

“You know what?” I say to Ophelia. “I fucking love it.”

“You better,” she says, but when I look at her, she’s grinning; she has a gap between her two front teeth, I notice, and it serves to make her even prettier than she looked before.

When we emerge back into the living room, Diego has acquired a shirt and is standing in the kitchen, assembling a cheese and charcuterie plate.

“I know you’re moving in here,” he says, “but this seems hospitable.”

“I love cheese,” I admit, and he stabs a cube of Gouda with a toothpick and holds it out to me.

For a moment I feel the reflexive twinge in my gut, from some old and buried part of my mind. I stare at the plate for a moment, at the cheese cubes nestled right up against the soppressata. But as I decided after two

years in LA, what’s a little treif when you’re already so far off the derech as to be swimming in the metaphorical ditch?

Of course the guilt’s back, now that I’m in New York. That makes sense. But it still makes me feel fucking weak.

I eat the cheese.

“You should try this properly,” Diego tells me, and begins layering a cracker with a fruit spread and prosciutto and Brie. I eat that too.

It’s been a long time since I kept kosher. Almost as long as it’s been since I felt bad about breaking kosher—which says a lot, I think, about how nervous it makes me to be back in New York. But it’ll be worth it, of course. It’s got to be. I’ll have the chance to work with Wyatt Cole, who is only my single most favorite photographer of all time.

And it’s easy, here with Ophelia and Diego, to forget everything else I’m afraid of. I used to dream about living in a place like this, with people like this. I sat through classes with my books open but my mind among the stars, fantasizing about eating cold pizza on the floor and watching bad sitcoms with friends who didn’t care what religion the protagonists were or what gender they preferred to kiss. But even in my most florid fantasies I didn’t imagine Diego’s hot-pink stiletto nails or Ophelia’s taste for ambient music that sounds like a slowly evolving minimalist tone but turns out to be the Windows start-up chime played in slow motion.

“This is the sound they play when you die,” Diego says.

“You’re fucking weird,” says Ophelia.

They’re both fucking weird, but it turns out I like that. “Fucking weird” is what I thought I’d be when I moved out to LA—as if living on the West Coast would somehow transform me into a svelte and sun-glazed bohemian with too much style and too little money. Instead I just turned into one of the emaciated Venice Beach junkies who used to beg me for cash when I first moved there.

It took me four years to crawl my way back out of that hole. But ever since getting clean, I’ve existed in this liminal space where I’m afraid to have a personality, like if I think too hard or feel too deeply I’ll find myself spiraling down, down, and this time I won’t come back up again.

“It’s the sound that Quicksilver hears when he starts up his computer,” I suggest, and

Ophelia smacks both hands down hard on the island, the sound loud enough that I jump.

“Oh my god,” she says, her voice rising in pitch. “Finally. Finally.”

“Um…?”

“Ophelia’s been pining for an X-Men nerd to come into her life for like three years,” Diego informs me.

Ophelia nods effusively. “Yes. Diego literally couldn’t tell you the difference between Magneto and the Juggernaut. I’ve been dying here.”

I lift a brow, and—in the end—I just can’t help myself. “One’s a tormented antihero fighting for social justice,” I say. “And the other is the Juggernaut, bitch.”

This earns me another screech from Ophelia and a hearty eye roll from Diego, who covers his face with both hands like he’s in physical pain.

“Sorry, Diego, normies wouldn’t get it,” Ophelia declares. “So exactly how many arguments did you get into on Tumblr about whether or not Erik could have controlled the direction of the bullet that paralyzed Charles in First Class?”

“At least three,” I say. “I also wrote a forty-chapter Phantom of the Opera crossover fan fiction starring Magneto as the shadowy opera ghost.”

“Wait, I’ve read that one,” Ophelia says, jabbing a finger toward me. “That was you? No shit!”

I make a face. “To my great shame.”

“No, shut up. I commented on like every update. You aren’t allowed to be embarrassed.”

Diego groans loudly. “Please stop talking about bad comic book movies. I literally cannot stand another second of this.”

“We’re actually talking about a fan fiction crossover of great comic book movies and Broadway musicals—” Ophelia starts, but she’s interrupted by a piece of prosciutto flung in her face.

Dinner ends up being a mishmash of Diego’s cheese-and-pork towers plus some leftover lo mein and a rather impressively green salad that Ophelia concocts out of lettuce, scallions, cucumber, and a slightly overripe avocado. I’ve never been happier to consume what I imagine “college food” would have looked like if I’d ever actually attended college and explored its culinary idiosyncrasies.

“We have to go out,” Diego declares once dinner is finished and the dishes are cleaned and it’s getting close to the time that I would normally start making excuses to turn in, especially with tomorrow being my first day at Parker. “It’s Ely’s first night here; she needs to go to Revel.”

“Right,” Ophelia says, “it’s Ely’s first night here. She does not need to go to Revel.”

“What’s Revel?” I ask from my spot on the sofa, where I have beached myself for the past half hour, still waiting for my overstuffed stomach to

deflate.

Diego fixes me with his laser gaze, which is extra piercing thanks to his lime-green mascara. “You’re gay, right?” he asks.

“I…”

Ophelia grimaces and says, “You don’t have to suffer the Inquisition if you don’t want to, Ely. Say the word and we can punt Diego safely back into his bedroom where he can’t bother anyone.”

“Do you like guys? Girls? Hot nonbinary people with lots of piercings? All of the above? None of the above?”

Diego says it so matter-of-factly, so easily. I wish I could do that. It’s not like I haven’t been honest with myself. It’s not like I haven’t had relationships. But I’ve never felt the need to label myself before now—that felt like it would have been claiming something that didn’t belong to me. Even though that doesn’t make sense, because identity is something you belong to, not the other way around.

But apparently I’m giving off major gay vibes, at least per Diego’s radar, so.

“I guess…Well, I’ve dated both girls and guys,” I venture at last, which seems like the safest answer. “But gender doesn’t really matter much to me. It’s more about the person.”

Don’t overthink it, I order myself, but of course it’s too late; I’m overthinking it. What I said is true, but I worry it comes across as pandering. That maybe Diego and Ophelia can tell how badly I want them to like me—and if they can tell that, they might think I’m making this up to seem tolerant or whatever.

Only I shouldn’t have worried, because as it turns out, most people don’t have my habit of being bitterly suspicious of everyone they meet. Ophelia and Diego simply exchange looks, some silent conversation passing between them that my anxiety desperately wants to hyperanalyze, and Diego rubs his hands together like a Disney villain. “I knew it. You’re coming to Revel with us, pansexual icon."

 

2

Revel, as it turns out, is a gay club.

A queer club, to be more accurate, as the crowd mingling out on the sidewalk is a mishmash of genders, not the standard flock of cis gay dudes I associated with places like this in LA. No, these are New York queers—painfully, effortlessly cool queers—and…I can’t relate. I tried the baggy jeans trend once, and it made me look like Gumby. The only style I typically muster is best described as “grunge meets cottagecore.” Not that my day-old airport clothes even rise to that level.

Diego’s brought a flask, which he surreptitiously offers to me as we stand in line. I shake my head and one of his eyebrows flicks up. “Don’t like tequila?” he asks.

“Not my favorite,” I say, because I don’t drink, period is always a bombshell to drop on people. As soon as you admit you’re sober, they start asking questions. Worse, they start insisting that you should loosen up. Have a drink. Or three. Or six. What, are you watching your figure?

Half the time they don’t let up until I lose my temper and snap that I’m clean, I’m in recovery, my brain literally wants to kill me and I cannot be trusted with the weapons of my own destruction.

Which tends to put a damper on things, and I want these people to like me. So, personal-disclosure hours can wait.

But to Diego’s credit, he just shrugs and passes the flask to Ophelia instead, and by the time we’re at the front of the line, they’re both slightly tipsy. I’m better than I used to be; I can be around drunk people now. Good thing, considering the nature of the photography social circuit out in LA, a booze-drenched, drug-fueled fuck fest where the quantity and lethality of the drugs you consumed while creating a given work were treated almost like accolades. I heard she went into rehab right after the gallery opening, someone would whisper. Heroin. And they’d all hum discerningly and make comments about artists and their vices.

We make it through the line faster than I expected. The bouncer up front barely even glances at our IDs before letting us in.

Stepping into Revel is like stepping into the past. Forty years into the past, specifically; the décor is firmly eighties chic, all neon lights patterned like the zigzag slashes on vintage dad jackets, everyone dressed in polyester and denim. Some guy with bleached-blond hair has taken over one of the poles and is doing an impromptu show up there, and he’s wearing overalls for some reason. The DJ plays a mash-up of Madonna and Hayley Kiyoko, and honestly, it kind of slaps.

Being here wakes me up, as if I’ve been underwater for years and have finally surfaced into the sun. It’s the feeling I used to chase with whiskey and drugs and the bodies of strangers. I take a breath and my lungs expand. My head clears.

And for the first time since I got off the plane, I think maybe being here—maybe New York itself—will be okay.

“Come on,” Ophelia says, and she grabs my hand, pulling me deeper into the club.

She and Diego get shots at the bar. I make an excuse to go to the bathroom, and when

I come back, they’re already dancing. It’s easy to slip into the crowd alongside them, to let our bodies become fluid and anonymous. I end up with Ophelia, my hands on her plush waist and her hips grinding against mine. It’s not even sexual, not really; it’s the kind of hyperphysical flirtation queer girls get into sometimes, where movement becomes its own language. It’s special. It’s something I worried I wouldn’t find when I left LA and its queer-lit bookshops, as if people like us only exist in the spaces I’m familiar with. I knew I was wrong, of course, that this was just me being self-absorbed and navel-gazey about my own experience, but still.

I thought I wouldn’t be able to make friends anywhere else. That if I left the people who’d been putting up with me for the past eight years, I’d find I was in fact an intolerable person to be around.

We dance until the heat gets to be too much and I have to excuse myself to catch my breath and find something cold to drink. I end up at the bar, leaning in past the crowd of brightly colored gays, trying to get the bartender’s attention. Which is kind of difficult when you’re the only one present who isn’t plastered in glitter and glow stick goo. ...