9. Friday #2
Sarah stood back so Abby could throw her arms around her New York friends for an extra hug. She turned to Ren, finding it difficult to meet his eyes now that it was just the two of them.
“We’ll talk later maybe?” Sarah said to him.
“Yeah, of course,” he said softly, looking her over. Sarah knew she looked different now. Her hair had gone from ash blond to bubbly blond to its current warm honey color, and she tended to iron it out into carefully constrained waves. But she knew her face looked older. Of course it did.
When Sarah stayed out late when she was in her early twenties, she would sometimes wake up with a weary, colorless pallor, light-brown smudges beneath her eyes and faint wrinkles across her forehead.
Now Sarah had discovered that this was the normal face she saw every morning before putting make-up on.
Forty looked to her like twenty-five after going on a bad bender.
Maybe that’s what her last fifteen years had been: one long, rough night.
She wished he weren’t still so gorgeous. It was a little offensive, frankly.
She forced another smile before she turned to walk towards the check-in desk at the hotel, reminding herself that Ren had hurt her.
Seeing him again had made her briefly forget.
She always did this when it came to him.
She was too ready to forgive. But this was Paul’s second wedding and she had no plans of repeating the mistakes from his first one.
And also…Ren was a professional photographer?
As soon as she got to her hotel room, she looked him up on her cell phone: ‘Rene Durand photographer.’ She didn’t know what to expect, but a website came up right away: ‘Durand Night Photography.’ The page was filled with artistic, gorgeous nature photos taken in the hours between dusk and dawn.
There were shots of the Milky Way over the desert, the Northern Lights over a snowy tundra, snow-capped mountains with shooting stars raining down above them, swirling star trails spinning through the sky in a two-hour-long exposure.
The story of his business was summed up on his website in large, high-contrast prose.
It had begun with him bringing clients on photography workshops to Zion National Park outside of Las Vegas.
Then his workshops had expanded: to the Grand Canyon, then Joshua Tree, then to Banff, to Iceland, to Norway and New Zealand.
He taught people how to do astrophotography and night photography, shooting the Milky Way and the Northern Lights in far-flung places for eye-popping prices.
He could easily be making a living entirely as a photographer, now—she could live quite comfortably on what he must be making from workshops alone.
How had Paul never told her this?
He had never told her because she had never asked, she realized. And because Paul had known it might be a sensitive topic, given that Sarah herself had quit photography entirely.
It made sense that Ren was successful, she thought bitterly, looking through the photos.
Who wouldn’t want to travel to the farthest regions of the world with a stunning man who would show you the stars?
He probably knew every constellation, could predict the next meteor shower, could plan whole trips around the phases of the moon.
He must be so happy, she thought. There he was, living in the States, raising a son while jetting around the world shooting the stars over mountains and deserts. He was probably even married again.
Gorgeous people had a right to be happy, she thought, feeling petulant. They had a right to be successful and talented and profoundly content down to the depths their souls.
Because life wasn’t fair.
She jumped a little when someone knocked on her door a few minutes later as she was taming her hair for the rehearsal dinner.
She was keeping her look simple because it was a ‘working weekend’ for her—or that’s what she was telling herself to keep from focusing too much on the wedding itself, the marriage and joy and romantic hopes.
She had offered her services to Paul as a gift primarily as an act of avoidance, so she wouldn’t have to feel quite so alone while watching the happy couple celebrating their union.
So her outfits were elegant but practical, and her hair would be up in a bun most of the time.
Her heart felt wrapped up just as tightly, knotted up and tucked away so it wouldn’t make a mess.
It was Paul at her door, and her breathing calmed a little.
“Hey, gorgeous,” he said, giving her a hug. She could tell from his mood that he would think anyone looked gorgeous. He was practically bubbling over with joy.
“Hey!” she cried, taking a step back. “It’s lovely to see you so happy. I met Abby and she’s wonderful.”
“Finally, I got it right,” Paul replied, another irrepressible grin emerging.
“And I’ll suppress any snarky comments about Trish,” Sarah replied.
He frowned as he nodded. “I hope Trish is happy. I’m just really glad she’s not trying to be happy around me anymore. You know what the lesson is, here, right? You’ll find your person. It just takes time.”
“Yeah, I know,” she lied. She was tempted to tell him that she’d sworn off romance, but she didn’t want him to try to talk her out of it. Blissfully happy people tended to do that; it was like they were drunk and wanted everyone around them to share in the collective delusion.
“You saw Ren?”
“Yeah,” she said. “You double-booked photographers.”
He looked serious again. “Is that okay? You both offered. I’d said yes to him first, but…I should have hired somebody, but I thought this way you didn’t have to get me a present, and it’s such a simple wedding…”
“It’s fine. I’m sure Ren and I will be able to divide up the work. I was just surprised to see him. It’s been a long time.”
“It has,” he said, looking thoughtful. “You should talk to him. Maybe one of you can shoot tonight and the other can do tomorrow, or one of you does the ceremony and the other does the reception.”
“Sure.”
“All right, I need to get to the rehearsal,” Paul said, grinning. “You can come if you like. Or skip it and we’ll see you at dinner.”
“Get out of here. You are annoyingly happy.”
“Feel free to slap me. I won’t even feel it.” He grinned and then headed back towards the lobby and his bride.
Sarah followed him outside a few minutes later so she could watch the rehearsal for the ceremony, since it would help her plan out her shooting the next day.
The hotel was shaped like an oversized, three-story barn, but it was fairly elegant by Newfoundland standards—spacious and quiet, with great views and a friendly staff.
The ceremony itself would be on the sloping lawn between the hotel and the sea, where a few chairs were already set up as place-markers.
The rehearsal began, and Sarah watched it to keep track of who was who: Abby’s sister Laura was the maid of honor, dark-haired and gorgeous as she walked down the aisle with Paul’s buddy Ian, who was doing an encore of his ‘best man’ duties.
Abby’s niece Hannah, who looked about nine years old, was joking like a young stand-up comedian as she walked down the aisle practicing her moves as flower girl.
“Petals for you, petals for you, no petals for you!” she said to a pretend audience, miming the tossing of flowers.
The hotel’s manager, doubling as the wedding planner, told everyone where to stand as Abby and Paul laughed and joked with each other.
They all seemed so comfortable. It all seemed so nice. Why did that hurt? She had told herself that she could be happy for Paul, but the sight of two people who were obviously in love kept clawing at her heart.
She would have to regroup. She couldn’t melt down at the first sight of people in love. She glanced over at Ren, who had arrived a couple of minutes after she had and was looking around at the sky and the ocean as if evaluating the most spectacular parts of the scenery for potential photos.
He had grown more solid over the last decade, though not in a bad way; he seemed less like a dreamy, ethereal fairy prince and more like a handsome adult man.
Still, he remained so attractive that it seemed strange she knew him personally.
His cheekbones and dark eyes made him look like some moody, brooding romantic poet, especially with a light wind whipping at his hair.
He looked over at her and smiled. She tried to wipe her sadness away and smile back, and he frowned at her expression, as if he could register the effort that was going into her halfhearted cheer.
She wondered again if he had gotten remarried and swatted the thought away like a pesky insect. Some deep part of her knew exactly why she had never asked Paul about Ren. She didn’t want to hear that he was married again. She didn’t want to think about why that would hurt.
Abby hadn’t lied about the close distance between the hotel and the restaurant where they were having a rehearsal dinner; Sarah followed a group of scattered guests on the short walk along the curve of the two-lane road to a restaurant a half a kilometer away, her camera bag slung heavily over her shoulder, feeling grateful for her practical shoes.
The road hugged close to the sea, and she was soon surrounded by the quiet wash of sound from the pounding surf, interrupted only by the occasional call of gulls or the hum of a rare passing car.
The smell of tangled seaweed brought her back to childhood: the isolation and poverty of her home province, its insularity and quiet beauty.
She had spent her teenage years driving the short trip from her town to the coast with her two best friends.
They would climb on the rocks and throw pebbles into the waves, talking about their plans to escape.
She had first kissed a boy on a rocky beach like this one, their lives feeling achingly full of potential.