11. Sunday #5
Finally, almost six hours into their trip, a thought came that settled her nerves.
Whatever happened with Ren—whether he befriended her, or flirted with her, or remained entirely professional and hurt her that way—he was going back to Nevada at the end of this trip.
There was no possibility of anything happening, so she wasn’t at risk of getting her hopes up.
There was nothing to get her hopes up for.
She could be present for this trip, with its music and milkshakes and scenery and jokes. She could enjoy it and move on.
They arrived at their hotel at sunset and climbed out of Ren’s rental car slowly, shaking out stiff legs. Sarah felt like someone had folded her in an envelope and shipped her overseas.
“This place looks fancy,” she said in surprise as she took in the three-story shingled hotel nestled into the top of a hill.
Somehow, she hadn’t expected they’d be staying anywhere especially nice.
Most of the province kept things simple, but this was Newfoundland’s version of a mountain chalet, curved around a driveway with wings outstretched towards stunning views of a distant bay.
Ren nodded. “Remember what I said about Silicon Valley tech guys? They can rough it, but they prefer not to. We’ll do one night of sleeping under the stars at the end of the week, but otherwise there’s room service.”
When they walked up to the desk, a young woman in a hotel uniform greeted them with a grave expression. “Mr. Durand,” she said. “I left a message on your phone. You requested an extra room?”
“Yes,” he said, glancing down at his phone in puzzlement. “Sorry. My cell service is terrible here…”
“Unfortunately, we couldn’t find one for you. I called around to the other hotels, but this is the busy season and the whole area is pretty booked up. The nearest I could find was a place forty-five minutes down the road. Something should open up by Wednesday.”
Ren frowned and glanced at Sarah. “Oh.”
“I do want to warn you,” continued the young woman, “that our restaurant kitchen is closing soon, so if you haven’t eaten, I would recommend doing that first and then we can help you to book a room at a different hotel if you would like one.”
“I am so sorry,” Ren began, looking at Sarah. “I can take the room down the road.”
“Let’s eat something,” Sarah offered. “Then we can see about the room situation.”
They were grown-ups, Sarah thought as they followed a hostess into the hotel’s dining room. Everything would be fine, even if they shared a room. They were just friends, sitting down to dinner over candlelight while looking out at one of the most spectacular sunsets she had ever seen.
“So later tonight,” Ren said, his eyes intense.
Sarah looked down, embarrassed. He continued, “We should go out to do a little test shoot and talk more about camera settings.” She relaxed again.
What had she thought he was going to ask her?
“There will be a classroom lesson for the attendees who are newer to night photography tomorrow, so you can pick up more then. But I’d like to take you out for an hour, and then I can drop you back at the hotel and I’ll go scout a few locations. ”
“Don’t you need to sleep at some point?”
He lifted one shoulder and gave his crooked half-smile. “I don’t really sleep much during these workshops. I usually stay up until about five or six a.m. helping folks, then I wake up at ten or eleven in the morning. Some people like to keep shooting until dawn.”
“That doesn’t sound healthy.”
“It’s only for a week at time, so I can push through.
I never needed that much sleep anyway.” He looked at her, concerned.
“But you don’t need to stay up that late.
We usually have a group of people who are happy to shoot for a few hours and go home around midnight and then a smaller group who want to push through all night.
So we’ll figure it out.” She watched as he fidgeted with the watch on his wrist.
“It’ll be fine, Ren. And the hotel room—let’s just see what the situation is. It would be fine to share if we have to. We can get a cot or something.”
He gave her a quick smile and then fixed his gaze out the window as the sky turned a heavenly pink. He didn’t say anything until the check arrived.
They stopped by the hotel room after dinner to drop off their luggage.
There were two beds, Sarah saw right away, which was helpful.
All the same, stepping into a hotel room with him brought her back to the last time they’d stepped into a room like this.
They had kissed in the doorway, a passionate kiss that she could still replay in her memory, even though part of her would rather erase it.
Now he was standing next to her in a similar position and she had to carefully moderate her voice.
“I think we can share,” Sarah said lightly, stepping into the room. “It’ll be fine.”
“Okay, good,” he agreed, his eyes on the floor. “And you don’t have to come for a lesson tonight if you’re too tired.”
“No. It’ll be helpful. I’ll be teaching this to people tomorrow night, right?”
“Right,” he said quietly. “Right.” He looked up. “Let’s go. It’s clear skies, at least.”
There was something eerie about driving with Ren at night through the lonely hills of the Gros Morne area.
The region itself was lovely: sharp hills rushing down to fjord-like bays, intervals of large empty rock, stretches of pristine fields and forests.
They were driving up a hill at night, the road lit only by their headlights and the last sliver of a moon, a haunting song about lost love playing quietly.
The world seemed painted in shades of grey and blue.
She looked at him in the half-light, his moody cheekbones and curly dark hair, and thought that he looked like an idealized memory rather than a person.
Even being here with him, she could imagine looking back on this later on, wondering if it had actually happened or if she had dreamed it.
Ren glanced at her with an intense, serious look before his eyes went back to the road.
When they finally climbed out of the car in a small parking area, Sarah found that they were next to a field of large rocks, scattered like the dropped pebbles of some ancient god.
The waving grasses stretched out to either side of them, while hills in the distance were silhouetted against the last touch of twilight before true darkness.
Ren grabbed his camera bag and tripod from the back seat as Sarah looked up at the sky.
He handed Sarah an extra headlamp to put on her forehead as a flashlight. She put it on before grabbing her gear.
“How did you find this place?”
“Recommendations,” Ren said. “I spend a lot of time on local message boards. Not too many professional photographers make it all the way out here, though. It’s not like Yosemite, where you can’t throw a rock without hitting another photographer. It’s one reason I’m excited for this.”
They started walking along a wooden plank path into the field together, their feet thudding softly in the stillness.
There was the faint, hushed sound of the breeze stirring the grass around them, and the occasional buzz of an insect in her ear, but otherwise the quiet was nearly total.
They could hear a distant truck on a road that must be two miles away, and then the truck was gone, and there was nothing but the murmur of the wind touching green things.
She looked up and thought of the theory the ancient Greeks once had that the stars and moon were singing in a silent harmony. It felt true tonight. Then came the faraway call of an animal, and she froze for a moment. Ren looked back at her.
“Coyote, right?” he asked. “I forgot to check if there were wolves.”
“No wolves in Newfoundland,” she said. “Sometimes one or two turn up, but it shouldn’t be a problem.”
“Good. I could easily fight them off, of course, but it would be inconvenient while I’m carrying all this gear.”
She smiled at his tone. “You should charge your clients extra if wolves attack. Then it becomes a wildlife photography workshop.”
“I’ll put that in my contract.”
He stopped a hundred meters down the trail and paused, looking around with a considering gaze. “Turn off your headlamp,” he said after a moment. “Once we’re in place, we should start to let our eyes get adjusted to the dark.”
She flipped it off and stood still, waiting for the objects around her to solidify as her eyes adjusted.
Ren was busy setting up his tripod and framing a shot.
With their flashlights off, the skies seemed so vast and empty that it felt like she was going to fall upwards into the stars and disappear.
“Okay,” he said after a moment. “Come have a look at the test shot.” Ren had framed a shot on his camera LCD screen that perfectly arranged the arc of the Milky Way over a portion of the path in front of them.
It would be a gorgeous shot, the hiking path on the ground seeming to continue upwards into the path in the sky, but the foreground would probably need light added to it.
He explained some of the settings he was using, then showed her the app on his phone that anticipated the rising and setting of the moon and stars.
Then he stepped even closer to her and slid a flashlight into her palm, his hand warm in the cool night.
“Ready to do some light painting?”