Red Hot Rebel - Olivia Hayle Page 0,38
excitement is obvious, and it’s infectious, even as I listen to the two of them talk. She asks endless questions. So this is a national park? Are there rangers? When was the last time you saw cheetahs? Lions? Leopards?
I shoot from the side of the car. It’s not difficult to, not with these landscapes. A horde of gazelles. A giant vulture on the side of a carcass. My entire being itches with the desire to camp out here for a night, to photograph animals up close. To lie in wait with my camera the only tool.
Joy leads us to a group of elephants, and for nearly half an hour we sit in silence and watch the graceful giants move. The only sound is the clicking of my camera.
We finally park on a large patch of grassy area, with the savannah behind us. The light is excellent—so we start shooting. Ivy is grinning as she climbs onto the hood of the Jeep. “You want me like this?”
“Yes,” I say, pointing back. “On your elbow… like that.” I back up to photograph her, watching through my camera as she adopts her posing face. The one that’s casual and relaxed, but displaying all the right angles.
She breaks in five minutes. “Look at me,” she says, “just reclining on my Jeep. Come travel with Rieler and you can recline on a Jeep, too!”
I lower my camera. “Ivy,” I say, but there’s no real annoyance in my voice.
She grins at me. “Sorry, I can’t help it. Joy?”
“Yes?” our guide calls back, standing to the side with a book in her hand.
“Is this how most of the guests go on safari?”
Joy laughs. “This has to be a first.”
Ivy looks down at her pants. “White has to be the most commonly worn color, too, when in nature.”
I snort. “That’s on the agency, not on me.”
“Oh, absolutely. The same agency that thought it was important I wore a push-up bra for this.” Ivy leans back on both of her elbows and arches her back, her hair spilling down. She might be joking around, but this is a great shot. I grab it, the Jeep in the foreground, the wide-open savannah in the background. Perhaps I’ll be able to edit the horde of elephants into the back…
Ivy turns to look straight at me. “Should I act more like a wildebeest?”
I’m grinning now. “No.”
“You sure? Perhaps a giraffe, then?” She makes a show of sticking her head up high, as high as she can, looking at me from the corner of her eye.
I put my camera down. “You’re jet-lagged.”
“Yes. I don’t know what time it is. Not a clue.” She looks up at the sky and closes her eyes, and I take a picture of that too, because… Ivy. “But I’m in a place I’ve always wanted to see and that’s enough, even if I want to see lions and not sit on a Jeep. But then again, you want to photograph said lions and not me, so perhaps we’re even.”
“You’ll do,” I say, grinning. “The Jeep’s not comfortable?”
She puts a hand down on the metal. “Oh, this is the comfortablest Jeep hood there ever was.”
I roll my eyes. “Get off there, you idiot.”
She jumps off and puts a hand to her forehead, like the clown she’s acting. It’s a far cry from the determined, fierce model I’d seen on the beach in St. Barts, despite her dedication for the rest of the shoot. She poses next to the Jeep, under a gigantic tree, walking through the bush. I grab a beautiful picture of her standing in the Jeep, watching the landscape through a pair of binoculars.
I film us driving through the landscape. My drone is a whirl above the Jeep, and I’m so focused on getting all the material I need that I barely notice when Ivy sits down next to me in the car.
“You okay over there?”
“Yes,” I say, my eyes on the camera. The drone is capturing the surrounding landscape. I need to get the lodge, too… perhaps in the morning?
“I was thinking,” she says, “that we can shoot on the balcony too. In our house? Same as we did in Paris.”
“Good idea.”
“You two work so well together,” Joy comments from the driver’s seat. “I always thought it would be difficult to work with your partner, but you have proved me wrong. Me? I could never work together with my husband.” She laughs at that. “I’d demand a divorce by noon!”
My thumb stops flicking through images I’ve