Chapter 5
It started at breakfast.
Finn found me at a corner table the next morning, already showered, already dressed, already three pages into a resort activity brochure I’d picked up at the front desk because reading a brochure was the closest thing to work available to me.
“What’s that?” he asked, dropping into the chair across from me with a plate that was eighty percent bacon.
“They have a schedule.” I turned the brochure so he could see. “Snorkeling at nine, kayaking tour at ten-thirty. There’s a thing called aqua fitness at noon, a cooking demonstration at two, and a sunset catamaran at five. If we move quickly, we can do most of it before dinner.”
Finn’s fork clanked as he dropped it onto the one baconless spot on his plate. He stared at me with the patience of a man explaining gravity to a toddler. “Mark, this is a holiday, not a triathlon.”
“It’s an itinerary,” I said, waving the paper in the air.
“It’s a hostage situation you’ve drawn up for yourself.
” He yanked the brochure out of my hands and dropped it on the empty chair beside him, out of my reach, a tactic he’d perfected over our years of friendship.
“Let me give you your schedule. First, you wake up, then you eat, then you lie down somewhere warm. You get up only to eat again or to get in the water. That’s it.
That’s the whole agenda. People train their entire lives to do nothing this well, and you want to schedule it? ”
“I don’t know how to do nothing.”
“I’m aware. It might be the greatest tragedy of you, but you’ve a week to learn.
I’ve appointed myself your instructor.” He pointed his fork at me.
“Lesson one, after breakfast, we are going to lie by the pool. We will not do aqua fitness. Neither of us are aqua, and we are certainly not fitness, not this week, at least.”
I lasted, by my own honest count, about forty minutes by the pool.
It would have been less if I hadn’t spent the first twenty of them in a state of low-grade crisis about my towel situation.
The lounger Finn steered me to was beside a very relaxed older couple settled in, wearing nothing but sun hats, wrinkles, and contentment.
Finn, who had stripped down to his trunks the second we arrived, shut his eyes like a cat in a sunbeam, finding my discomfort enormously amusing.
“Nobody’s looking, Mark. Why don’t you take your clothes off and stay a while?”
“I . . . what . . . no. Damn it, Finn. I’m aware nobody’s looking. I’m not looking either. I’m looking very specifically at the sky.”
His chuckle had the woman next to me turn and grin in my direction. It took all my willpower not to look from the puffy clouds to stare her down.
“You’re so tense you’re going to pull something just lying there. That’s a new injury. You can’t file a workers’ comp claim for relaxing. You know that, right?” He cracked one eye open.
The woman snorted. I caught her head turning away again out of my peripheral vision.
“Take the shirt off, at least. You’re gonna die in that polo. You’re the only man here generating his own weather system.”
I blew out a long sigh, earning a wider grin from my bad influence of a friend.
Reluctantly, I fought my shirt off. It caught on my arm, then my head.
Before it was on the ground beside my lounger, I’d bent myself into a pretzel to remove it.
Finn avoided being tossed into the pool by chewing on his lower lip, though his smart-ass smile never left his annoying face.
It was, I’ll admit, a slight relief, and a larger surrender, and Finn had the grace not to comment on it beyond a satisfied little hum, the sound of a man watching a long-term plan advance a single inch.
I made it twenty more minutes before I was up again, because lying still with nothing to do turns out to be its own kind of torture for a man whose entire identity is built on doing.
My mind went straight to the Hargrove site, to whether Reyes had remembered to chase the inspector.
My hand went straight to the phone I’d promised myself I’d leave in the room.
The absence of said phone in my pocket sent a jolt of anxiety through me that I was not proud of.
“I’m going to walk,” I announced.
“You’re going to find a way to work,” Finn said, without opening his eyes. “I know your walks. Go on, then. But remember, it’s a clothing-optional beach, not a clothing-optional conference call. Leave the worrying here with me. I’ll mind it.”
I shook my head and stepped away from Finn and his damn lounger, and because the universe has a sense of humor that it usually aims directly at me, the path I picked led me along the pool deck and straight past the spot where Wes Calloway was working.
He had his tripod out and was shooting a breakfast spread on a long table for the resort’s website. He was crouched at an angle that could not have been comfortable while swearing softly at a plate of fruit.
“Light again?” I asked.
He jerked up, startled. I half expected a curse to fling my way, but instead, that grin happened, the slow rearranging one.
My stupid chest did the thing it had done the evening before.
“Worse,” he said. “It’s the fruit. It’s sweating.
Mango sweats under lights, and there’s nothing in the world that makes a sweating mango look appetizing.
I’ve got an hour to make this mango photogenic, and it has betrayed me.
” He sat back on his heels and squinted up at me.
“Aren’t you supposed to be relaxing? I saw you over there.
You lasted about as long as a man holding his breath under water. ”
“You were watching me?”
“I’m a photographer. I watch everything. You were lying on that lounger like it had personally wronged you.” He stood, brushing off his knees, leaving the mango betrayer to its fate. “You’re doing it wrong, you know, the relaxing.”
“So I’ve been told. Repeatedly. By a man who eats more bacon than there are pigs.”
“Then let me tell you differently.” He capped his lens and slung the camera onto his shoulder.
There was something decided in the way he did it, like he’d just chosen to stop working a beat before he’d meant to.
“The trick is, you can’t aim at it directly.
Relaxing’s like a sunset. You don’t catch it by chasing it.
You catch it by being somewhere good when it shows up.
You’ve been trying to schedule it. I bet you planned to do the aqua fitness at noon. ”
My eyes dropped to my shoes.
He shook his head. “No wonder it’s running from you.”
“Finn said almost exactly that. About the schedule, I mean.”
“Finn sounds like a wise man.”
“Finn is a pest who got me into this.”
“The best ones usually are both.” Wes started walking, slowly, in no particular direction.
Somehow, I was suddenly walking with him, the way you fall into step with someone without deciding to.
“Come on. I’ve got two hours before the light’s worth anything for the beach shots.
Let me show you the part of this place the brochure actually got right.
I promise, no fitness, aqua or otherwise. ”
Behind us, from the direction of the pool, I heard Finn’s voice lift in delighted conversation with the older couple, something about the swim-up bar’s opening hours.
I knew without looking that he’d clocked me walking off with the photographer, and that he was, at this very moment, deeply and insufferably pleased with himself.
My phone was still back in the room.
The Hargrove site was a thousand miles away.
And for the second time in two days, I let a stranger lead me somewhere with no schedule, no task, and no idea what came next.
And found I didn’t mind it at all.
That, it turned out, was the real lesson.
Not the brochure.
Him.