Chapter 6
The place the brochure got right turned out to be a cove.
We reached it by a path Wes clearly already knew.
It meandered past the maintained part of the resort where loungers thinned out and manicured sand gave way to something rougher and more natural, a curve of beach tucked behind a shoulder of black rock where the water went still and clear and almost embarrassingly blue.
There was nobody there.
After a full day of being surrounded by more humanity than I’d bargained for, most of them naked, the emptiness of the place landed like a held breath finally let go.
“Staff told me about it my first day,” Wes said, picking his way over the rocks with the surefooted ease of a man who spent his life on uneven ground.
“It’s technically part of the property, but it’s a hike, so the all-inclusive crowd doesn’t bother.
It’s too far from the bar.” He chuckled as he set his camera bag down in the shade of the rock.
“I come down here when the light’s no good and I just need to not be working at anything. ”
“You come here to relax.”
“I come here to fail to work, which for me is the same thing.” He flashed me a shy grin, as though he was checking to see if I approved his correction. “We’re more alike than your shirt suggests, Mark Apparently.”
I’d slipped on my polo again. Of course I had. But the sun was high and the walk had been warm and the water in that cove was doing something to the light that even I, who knew nothing about cameras, could see was rare.
Wes pulled his henley over his head in one unhurried motion, the way a man undresses when he’s done it in a hundred strange places and stopped thinking about it. He dropped it on his bag without glancing in my direction.
I’d had him pegged as lean.
His henley had been telling a polite version of the truth.
Out of it, he was all economy and use, sporting the kind of body that gets made by doing rather than lifting, lean through the waist and propped on a swimmer’s shoulders.
There was a delicious, long ridge of muscle down each side of his spine that moved when he bent to toe off his shoes, and he was tanned everywhere clothes covered him—and paler everywhere they didn’t.
There was a line low on his hips where the sun had clearly never been invited and a scatter of dark hair across his chest that thinned to a line and kept going.
On one shoulder spread a puckered old scar.
It was faded white with age, and looked like the kind one gets from a fall rather than a fight.
A tattoo I couldn’t read scrawled on the inside of one forearm, also faded like something he’d gotten young.
He wasn’t built to stop a room the way some men are.
He was built to make you keep looking, which was worse, because you didn’t notice you were already entranced.
He kicked off his canvas shoes and walked straight into the water until it was up to his waist without so much as testing the temperature, and stood there with his back to me and his face tipped up to the sun like the whole point of being alive had just occurred to him.
The muscles of his back shifted as he raised his arms and dragged both hands through his hair. I, who had spent two days insisting to Finn that I was looking very specifically at the sky, discovered I was not looking at the sky at all.
“You coming in?” he asked, not turning around, “or are you going to guard the bags like a very large, very nervous German Shepherd?”
“I’m thinking about it.”
“You’re not thinking about it. You’re building a case against it.
” He turned then, water sheeting off him.
His grin was there, but it was softer than before.
“There’s nobody here. There’s no schedule.
There’s no Finn to perform your reluctance for.
It’s just water, and it’s just me. I’ve already seen the worst thing about you, which is that shirt. ”
I glanced down at my shirt, shrugged through a grin, then stripped it off in one smooth motion, nothing like the cluster back at the pool.
Suddenly, there was just a man standing waist-deep in clear water who’d asked me to come in with him.
The simple, terrifying fact was that I wanted to.
The even more terrifying fact was that he was looking at me, all of me, all my size and gray and chest hair going silver and the whole intimidating bulk of me that sent most men politely in the other direction.
And he wasn’t going anywhere.
He was, if anything, looking like he liked what he saw.
That didn’t happen to me.
Men found me handsome enough from across a room, but alarming up close. Somewhere in the gap between those two things, most of them excused themselves. I’d stopped expecting the looking to last.
Wes’s looking lasted.
“There he is,” he said, and I startled.
Unsure what else to do, I waded in.
The water was the temperature of nothing, that perfect blood-warm level where you stop being able to feel the line of it on your skin and became one with the sea.
I stopped an arm’s length from him, close enough to see the salt drying at his hairline and the way the amber in his eyes went almost translucent in the direct light.
“Better?” he said.
“I’m not generating my own weather system anymore.”
“Finn again?” His eyes smiled with his words.
“Finn again.” I huffed something that wasn’t quite a laugh. “He’s not wrong often. It’s his worst quality.”
We stood there in the water a while.
He didn’t fill the silence, which I noticed, because most people did.
Most people met the quiet of me with chatter to cover their nerves.
But not Wes. He just floated and let the cove be quiet.
Every so often, he said something that wasn’t about anything.
He remarked on the water’s perfect temperature or a fish he’d seen or the way the rock changed color where the water hit it.
I found myself answering and then saying things back unprompted, which I generally don’t do.
I told him about the Hargrove job, and why it was three weeks behind.
He asked about drywall like the answers mattered.
I told him about my father and the tile and the three counties, which I had told approximately two people in my life, one of them Finn.
He told me he’d grown up everywhere and nowhere, an Army kid, then a man who’d simply never stopped moving once he had the choice.
He told me he owned almost nothing that didn’t fit in two bags, and that he’d shot weddings in six countries and food in twenty and had not slept in the same bed for more than three weeks in longer than he could remember.
“Doesn’t that get lonely?” I asked, before I could decide whether it was rude.
Something passed over his face. It was quick, but I caught it, the same flicker I’d seen the first evening when I’d said I had nowhere to be.
He gazed out at the water instead of looking at me as he spoke.
“You’d think I’d know,” he said. “Honestly, I stopped asking myself a long time ago. It’s easier not to.” Then he turned back, and his grin came up like a shutter snapping open on his camera. “Anyway, you want to see something amazing? Watch the rock, there, where the next wave comes in.”
I squinted at the rock.
The wave came in.
It did something with the light and the spray that was, I’ll grant him, genuinely beautiful. He watched me watch it instead of watching it himself, and when I looked back at him, he didn’t bother pretending he hadn’t been.
The space between us in that warm, clear water was about a foot and a half. I was aware of every inch of it the way you’re aware of a deadly fall when standing too close to an edge.
Neither of us closed it.
Not then.
But I felt the whole afternoon tip, the way I’d felt the light tip golden the evening before.
Something changed temperature while we stood inside it.
I understood with the slow certainty I brought to load-bearing walls that I was in trouble, the good kind, the kind I hadn’t been in for longer than Wes had slept in one bed.
We swam until our fingers went soft, then wrinkled.
We walked back when the light turned, because he had mangoes to redeem and a job to do. At the top of the path, he stopped and looked at me with the sun behind him.
“Same time tomorrow, Mark Apparently?”
“I’ve got nowhere to be,” I said.
“You keep saying that like it surprises you.”
“It does. Every time.”
He laughed. It was a good laugh, lower than Finn’s.
He headed off toward the resort with his camera on his shoulder, and I stood at the top of the path a moment longer than I needed to, watching him go, my reliable blue polo balled up forgotten in my fist.
I didn’t put it back on.
That, more than the cove or the water or anything Finn had lectured me about, was the day I understood something had come loose in me. A man who forgets to put his armor back on is a man who’s decided, at some deep level, that he doesn’t need it.
At least, I didn’t.
Not any longer.