Chapter 10
Ishould have known I was in trouble the moment I walked into the dining room, because Finn took one look at me and dropped his fork.
It hit the plate with a clatter that turned heads three tables over.
He didn’t apologize, didn’t pick it up, didn’t so much as glance at it.
He just sat there, with the dawning rapture of a man watching a lottery number get called one digit at a time, as I crossed the room toward our table.
By the time I sat down across from him, his whole face had become a sunrise.
“Oh,” he breathed.
“Don’t.”
“No?”
“Finn.”
“You absolute legend.” He said it loud enough that the relaxed older couple from the pool, now two tables over, turned and beamed at me without yet knowing what they were beaming about.
“Look at you. Look at you,” Finn continued. “You’re walking different. You’ve got a different walk, Mark! You came in here like a man who’s been somewhere wonderful and isn’t planning to apologize for it.”
“I went for a walk.”
“You did not just go for a walk.” He pointed at me with the betrayed fork he’d retrieved from his plate.
“I know your walking face. This is not your walking face. This is a completely different face. This is a face I’ve never once seen on you in four years, and I’ve seen you drunk, hungover, food-poisoned, and that one time you cried at a dog food commercial. ”
“I didn’t cry at the—”
“You misted, Mark. I was there. You misted at a golden retriever.” He waved the subject away. “But never this. This is new. This is a man who has been thoroughly and comprehensively—”
“Finn.”
“—relaxed.” He coughed through the word as though masking a public curse.
I picked up a menu and held it in front of me like a shield.
It didn’t work.
Nothing worked.
Finn O’Brien in full flight is a force, and I was a man with a laminated dinner menu bracing himself against the oncoming tide.
“So,” he said, lacing his fingers together and leaning in. “Tell me everything. Start at the beginning. You walked down to the cove—”
“I’m not telling you anything.”
“You walked down to the cove,” he continued, undeterred, “the two of you, alone, no camera between you for once—”
“How do you know there was no camera?”
His eyes lit up like I’d handed him a wrapped present. “I didn’t know. I guessed. And your face just confessed its truth.” He cracked his knuckles. “Oh, this is going to be even better than I hoped.”
I groaned and rubbed my face, the useless menu returned to the table.
“So, he put the camera away. The man whose entire personality is shown through a lens, put the camera away. For you. Mark, that’s practically a marriage proposal in photographer.”
“It’s not—”
“What happened next?”
“We swam.”
“You swam.” He nodded slowly, the way a detective nods at a suspect who’s just said something gloriously stupid. “And after you swam?”
“We talked.”
“You talked.” He was savoring each word now, rolling it around. “And during this swimming and this talking, at any point, did the two of you happen to—”
“I’m getting the fish.”
“—because here’s the thing, Mark,” he barreled on, “you’ve got sand in places a man only gets sand if he’s been lying down somewhere he had no business lying down.
I can’t see it, but I can sense it. You’ve got a mark on your neck that you are very pointedly not covering with your collar, which means either a jellyfish attacked you with remarkable precision or—”
I clapped a hand over my neck.
This was, I realized a half second too late, another confession.
Finn’s resulting noise of triumph was loud enough that Esteban looked over from the bar. Apparently, the guy switched bars like guests switched dining locations.
“HE’S COVERING IT!” Finn announced to the dining room at large. “Esteban! He’s covering his neck! It’s true! It’s all true!”
“I knew it!” Esteban called back, abandoning his post entirely. “Brenda! brENDA, it happened!”
And that was the exact moment I realized the full scope of what I’d walked into.
Brenda materialized from somewhere near the dessert station with the speed of a woman who had been waiting all day for exactly this news, trailed by the two honeymooners from Toronto. Within the span of about ten seconds, my quiet dinner for two had become a town hall.
“Oh, honey bear,” Brenda said, sliding into the chair beside me uninvited and patting my forearm with both hands. “Look at your face. You’re glowing. Isn’t he glowing?”
“He’s absolutely glowing,” confirmed the taller of the Toronto men, dragging over a chair.
“I said he’d glow,” said the shorter one. “Dale, didn’t I say that? I said by Friday he’d glow like a lightning bug.”
“You said Thursday,” Dale corrected.
“I said by Thursday, which includes Friday, so I win the pool.”
“There was a pool?” I choked out, still trying to process being compared to an insect with a blinking ass.
“Yes, dear, there was a pool,” Brenda said, not the least bit ashamed. “Esteban held the money. I picked Friday afternoon. I’d like to say I’m a good enough person not to profit off your happiness, but I’m seventy-one, and I’ve stopped pretending. Mama needs a new sarong.”
“You bet on—” I looked around the table at the assembled faces, every one of them lit with the particular joy of people watching someone else’s love life unfold like a soap opera they’d personally been cast in. “You all bet on whether I would—”
“Not whether,” Finn said gently, as if correcting a small but important error. “When. Whether was never in question. We’re not animals.”
“The whether was settled day one. I already collected a twenty for that one.” Dale grinned. “You should’ve seen yourself in that lobby mooning at the photographer over your three suitcases.”
“I was not mooning.”
“You mooned, baby doll,” said Brenda. “You mooned magnificently.”
“It was the mooning of a lifetime,” Finn said, dabbing at an imaginary tear. “The only people mooning louder were on the beach enjoying the optional end of the brochure. I’ve never been prouder.”
Esteban arrived with a tray of drinks nobody had ordered, distributed them around the table with the efficiency of a man who’d clearly anticipated this gathering, and pulled up his own chair, the bar abandoned to fate.
“So,” he said, settling in, propping his chin on his hand. “Is he a good kisser, this Wes?”
“I’m not—”
“Because I have eyes,” Esteban went on, “and that man has a very good mouth. I’ve thought so all week. Professional observation only, of course.”
I blinked rapidly, unable to form words.
“He’s got the mouth of a man who knows things,” Brenda agreed solemnly.
“I’m . . . I’m not discussing his mouth,” I stammered, “with a table of people at dinner, while a woman who just won money off my—”
“Sixty dollars,” Brenda said serenely. “American. The pot grew with stakes, lucky for me.”
“—off my private life sits here asking me about his mouth.”
There was a pause.
The whole table stared at me.
And then Finn, very quietly, with the timing of a man who had spent years learning exactly where my edges were—and exactly how to walk right up to them—said, “So it is a good mouth, then.”
And the table erupted.
I want to tell you I held the line.
I want to tell you I maintained my dignity.
I would love to reiterate that I’m a serious man, a businessman, a man with crews and trucks and a reputation.
I want to tell you I sat there stone-faced and unmoved while six near-strangers and one Irishman cackled at my expense in a dining room on a clothing-optional island.
But in truth?
I started laughing, too.
I couldn’t help myself.
It bubbled out of me the way the laugh had come up that first evening on the pool deck, easy and unforced and from somewhere I usually kept locked.
Once it started, I couldn’t stop it. So I sat there in the middle of all of them, red-faced and caught and ridiculous, laughing at myself and the sixty dollars and the mooning like a bug and the whole absurdly impossible week.
Finn watched me do it with his hand pressed to his chest like he was witnessing something sacred.
“There he is. Did you all see that? That’s the man. That bloke’s been in there the whole time. I’ve been digging for him for years, and a fella with a camera found him in four days.”
“To Wes,” said Dale, lifting the drink Esteban had brought him.
“To the camera,” said the shorter one.
“To the good mouth,” said Esteban, mournfully, because he’d had Thursday.
“To sixty dollars,” said Brenda triumphantly.
“To Mark,” Finn said, hefting his own glass high above the table.
The way he said it cut clean through the noise, all his teasing drained out of it for just a second, leaving something underneath that he rarely let me see.
He looked at me across a table full of people who’d known me for days and somehow loved me already, and his blue eyes were deliriously bright.
“Who finally, finally jumped into the pool.”
I looked at him.
Then at all of them.
“I jumped in the pool,” I agreed, and lifted my glass. My voice had gone a little rough.
“To getting in the pool!” the table roared, loud enough that other diners turned and raised their glasses, too, without knowing why.
Somewhere across the resort, I hoped Wes could hear it, because it was, in the end, entirely his fault.
I never did order the fish.