13. Tuesday
TUESDAY
When she woke in the morning, though, Ren was asleep in the bed next to hers.
The sight made her happy, which she knew was a warning sign.
Nothing could happen with him, she reminded herself.
After this week, she might not see him again for years.
She got up, showered, and then went to the breakfast buffet in the hotel restaurant.
After eating a quick meal with Binita, who had also turned in somewhat early the night before, Sarah selected some fruit and a croissant for Ren and returned to their room, leaving the food by his bed for whenever he woke up.
She sat on her bed and opened the laptop she’d brought with her, then began collecting reference images for the My Divorce photo series she was thinking of. She also put her website back online, because Kyle’s smug insistence that she wasn’t a real photographer rankled.
Ren finally stirred at a little after eleven in the morning. He sat up and looked at the food next to him, then gave her a sleepy, affectionate smile that she couldn’t look at for more than a moment.
“How did it go with the dawn crew?” she asked.
“We got some good stuff. Is this for me?”
“Of course. The coffee and tea should still be available in the lobby but they were taking the rest of the food away.”
“Thank you.” He slid up and looked at her. “How was your evening?”
“It was fun,” she said. “It was good I went back with them. Their sense of direction would have put them somewhere in the Atlantic.”
“Thanks for helping with those two,” he said. “I got a lot of questions from some of the more experienced folks, so you being able to help the novices was tremendous.”
“We got some good stuff, I think.”
“With a flash?” he asked, grinning now. “I have one rule, Sarah. One rule.”
“Wait and see. You’ll love it.”
Ren sat the rest of the way up in bed and watched her for a moment. “Kyle told me he invited you to have dinner with him. Is that okay?”
She waved a hand. “I think I gave him a vague enough answer that I should be able to dodge that,” she said, her eyes back on her laptop.
“Do you want to dodge it?” He was watching her closely, like he was trying to read her thoughts.
“He’s not my type.”
“Millionaires with private planes aren’t your type.” Ren’s mouth crooked up at one corner.
Sarah dropped her voice in an imitation of Kyle: “‘I push through until dawn. It’s my triathlon training.’ He’s probably one of those guys who asks you how many books you’ve read this year just so he can point out that he’s read more.”
“It’s just interesting,” Ren said.
“What’s interesting?”
“You told me that you weren’t dating right now, and you didn’t say that about him. You didn’t say, ‘I’m not dating right now.’”
Right. Sarah had forgotten about her ‘no dating’ policy. “Well, the difference is that I couldn’t have anything real with him, so it didn’t matter.”
He looked at her curiously, and something inside her twinged with nerves; there was something in Ren’s expression that she couldn’t put a name to. She looked away when her phone buzzed.
“It’s Rita,” Sarah said. “They wanted me to go on a boat tour with them today.”
Ren was still watching her. “Sarah—”
“I’ll go meet them in the lobby.”
She fled the room.
When she arrived in the lobby, she was pleased to find that Selassie and Rita had talked Binita into coming on their boat tour as well.
“I don’t need as much sleep as my husband does. It is from being a surgeon. I learned to cope with no sleep, but Tanjul is a lawyer so he is soft,” Binita explained with the deadpan humor that Sarah was realizing was her trademark.
They drove down the hill to one of the docks on the bay, getting in line for a small cruise boat that held about thirty tourists. Soon they were aboard, cruising around past small houses, out into the Atlantic, and then back again.
The day was lovely and cool, a perfect, breezy summer afternoon, aside from…
“Clouds,” Binita observed.
There were fingers of clouds reaching across the sky—nothing serious in terms of spoiling the weather—but clouds would be a problem when photographers were trying to get pristine shots of the Milky Way.
“Can’t Ren do something about those?” Rita joked. “I’m going to be demanding my money back.”
“I’ll see what we can arrange,” Sarah promised. “We’ll make some phone calls.”
She stood alone on the deck for a while, thinking about how she was fired and how she ought to be more worried, and then let the thought drift away with the wind. She hadn’t gone on a trip like this in a very long time.
The whole group met after lunch to review everyone’s photos from the night before.
Kyle’s shots—on his ten-thousand dollar camera—were compelling but without a lot of heart, Sarah thought, like he wanted to get in as much of the space and the sky as possible, using wide lenses to exaggerate the vastness.
Jack seemed frustrated with his output, though none of it looked especially bad: he had gotten one shot of the Milky Way arcing down towards a rocky outcropping that was quite beautiful.
Seemingly boring Silicon-Valley Cole had a surprisingly clever eye for lovely foreground elements like plants and flowers against his backdrops of stars and sky.
His were among her favorites. That was one of the magical things about visual art, Sarah had always thought.
You couldn’t always match people’s work to their external personality. Sometimes people showed hidden depths.
Then they reached Sarah’s shot of Selassie, posed like a sea siren on the boulder, and the room burst out in a mixture of amusement and delight.
“That is fantastic,” Ren said decisively.
On the big conference room screen, the photo was even better.
Selassie was arching backwards on the rock, one leg kicked up, and from her toes the whole Milky Way seemed to rise like a magical mist. Around her on the rocks were a tangle of seaweed and scattered seashells.
She was lit from the side with Sarah’s pop flash, emphasizing her long torso, but Rita had also given her side light from the flashlight to give her more depth.
She looked like a queen of the stars, Sarah thought.
“That goes above your fireplace!” Binita said.
“I want one of those for me,” Tanjul announced. “But I will have both arms up like the Milky Way is shooting from my hands.”
“I want one, too,” Cole said, grinning.
Ren gave Sarah a look filled with pretend horror. “What have you done to my workshop? This is a night sky workshop! We don’t shoot people!”
Sarah laughed. “How about this? I will do one portrait of everyone by the end of the week. I want to get one of Rita rising naked from the sea.”
Rita laughed, but Grisha practically snorted, which irritated Sarah; he seemed like one of those men who didn’t believe women should bother trying to be sexy once they had passed the geriatric age of thirty.
Ren gave a weary sigh. “Fine,” he said. “Breaking my heart with flash photography. This is the problem with bringing someone along to help who has actual artistic opinions.”
The most fun part of the afternoon was that Ren kept asking for her feedback about the various shots everyone had taken.
He often deferred to her on questions of composition, even though his own eye was excellent.
She got to talk about photography and debate with him for over an hour.
She had forgotten how much she missed it.
“Given the weather coming in, let’s meet a little earlier than sunset tonight,” Ren suggested as they finished the discussion.
“We’ll put off some of the classroom stuff until Wednesday when it will probably be rainy.
Tonight, I think everyone should eat dinner at five, and we’ll go out to a fjord and get some sunset shots looking west. It’s going to turn cloudy by nine and rainy by midnight, so we might as well take advantage of it and use the clouds to get some nice color. ”
When the group broke apart for dinner, Elka waved her over.
“Can I talk to you?” Elka’s voice was low and serious.
“Yes, of course.” Sarah couldn’t fathom a possible topic of conversation between them, but she nodded politely.
“Outside, maybe? I’d like it to be private.”
Sarah followed Elka out onto the hotel’s large deck with its view of the distant, sparkling bay. The trees dropped away a few feet below them, so they could see an expanse of tumbling hills and pristine forests.
“Sorry to bother you,” Elka began. “I had a question about Rene.”
Of course she did. “Yes?”
“Are you and Rene…”
Sarah shook her head. “No. We’re just friends.”
“Good, yes. Because the truth is,” Elka said, “that I think I have fallen in love with him.”
Sarah grimaced. She really didn’t want to be having this conversation.
Elka continued. “He and I…we met on one of his workshops. Two years ago. And when I meet talented, handsome men, they are usually so arrogant. But Rene is so patient and kind. I haven’t been able to get him out of my head. Please don’t tell him this.”
“I promise,” Sarah replied flatly. Ren did have that effect on people. She knew that from personal experience.
“And I think there is something between us,” Elka said. “I mean, I hope there is.”
“Honestly, Elka,” she began, “you should talk to Ren about this. Just remember that he’s at work.”
Elka frowned. “Of course. I’m not going to harass him.” She looked a little offended at the suggestion. “I just wondered if you could tell me, as a woman, whether you think he is over Freya yet.” The words felt like a kick in the gut.
“It’s not something we’ve discussed,” Sarah said truthfully.
“So you and Rene aren’t close?”
Sarah wanted to argue the point, but it seemed easier to concede it. “I suppose not about that kind of thing.”
“Okay. The way he talked, I thought you knew him well.”
Sarah shrugged. “We mostly talk about photography.”