13. Tuesday #2
“Okay, good,” Elka replied. “I see. I misunderstood. I was trying not to be worried about you and him, because I know you’re not his type, but I thought you were friends because you were sharing a room.”
Not his type? Was Elka being malicious? She didn’t seem to be, which made it worse.
Elka must have caught something in Sarah’s expression, because she hurried on. “I don’t mean that as an insult, it’s just, you know. He is always with someone who is dark-haired, twenty-five. I’m worried I am too old for him.” Elka didn’t look older than thirty.
Sarah had nothing to say to that. “Well, I should get back and check in with him about tonight,” Sarah said, pointing vaguely toward her hotel room.
Elka looked confused. “Isn’t he out with Kyle right now?” Sarah tried not to react to the fact that Elka knew more about Ren’s whereabouts than she did.
“Right. I meant texting him.”
“Right.” Elka gave her a little smile, and Sarah turned and walked away, feeling sick to her stomach.
She didn’t want to, but she spent the next few minutes back in her empty hotel room searching on Google for Rene Durand and Freya anybody, until she found an Instagram photo posted by a workshop participant from a year or so ago.
Ren was grinning, his arm slung around the shoulders of a beautiful woman tagged as Freya Arnadottir; she had an elfin face and heart-shaped lips, her hair pouring over her shoulders in dark waves.
The two of them were standing in front of a spectacular glacial lake, dressed for hiking, a camera slung across Ren’s shoulders.
Ren looked so cheerful and relaxed that Sarah couldn’t help but feel glad that he had been this happy once.
But then something had gone wrong, and Ren was here with her instead.
That night at dinner, she found herself once again at a table that didn’t include Ren or Elka. This time it included Kyle, Jack, Cole, and the Dangols.
“I noticed you put your website back up,” Kyle said, which meant that he was definitely checking up on her.
“You taunted me into it,” Sarah agreed.
“Why did you take it down? The photos from your Single Life series were amazing.”
She shrugged. “I needed a break from the ‘Babies’ series after the divorce,” she said. “Probably because I realized I wasn’t having any babies. And a lot of my commissions were for that.” It was strange to talk about it so normally.
“Ah.” Kyle sat back, looking thoughtful. “I’m sorry for teasing you about it, then.”
She smiled. “How could I be an artist without a tragic backstory?”
“You know, I live in Ancaster these days,” he said after a moment. “Right outside Toronto. I travel a lot for work, but that’s my home base. If you ever want to meet there.”
That was not far from where Sarah lived. It seemed like a nice gesture, him trying to show that he lived near her.
“Maybe,” she agreed with a smile.
“My least favorite word again.”
Sarah laughed. She couldn’t help but be charmed by his persistence, even if she couldn’t take him seriously. She noticed Ren watching them from across the room.
“So tell me about your work, Kyle,” Sarah said. “It seems to give you a lot of opportunity to photograph pretty places.”
Kyle shrugged. “I’m semi-retired. My company mostly runs itself at this point. We’re building data hubs for A.I., so that’s obviously had a good couple of years.”
“What kind of data hubs?” asked Cole, and the two men launched into a discussion about hardware architecture that Sarah couldn’t follow and didn’t particularly want to. She glanced over at Ren’s table, where she saw Elka leaning towards him again.
“So Tanjul and Binita,” Sarah said, “let’s talk about what kind of portrait we could do for both of you.”
After dinner, they headed out with the workshop participants to the rocky field where Sarah and Ren had shot during the first night.
The area was truly stunning at sunset, glowing orange and peach, like the fields and sky were vibrating at the same frequency.
Clouds might be terrible for Milky Way shots, but they made the sunset look particularly impressive, a radiant ballroom of swirling movement.
She helped Rita and Selassie get some settings for their shots, and then approached Cole as the clouds turned to a carmine red.
“Have a minute for a portrait?” she asked. Sarah wanted to get a shot with him with the wildflowers in the foreground. It was a little nod to Cole’s own photos with their carefully selected foreground objects.
“I’ve got my camera doing a time lapse,” he said, “so I have fifteen minutes.”
She smiled. “Perfect. I’m going to go low angle to get the flowers and the sky.”
She posed Cole against a waving wall of wildflowers in the last glow of flaming light.
He opted to face away from her, looking at the scenery, as a single shaft of red struck out from the clouds behind him.
Sarah posed him in silhouette, his camera in his hands, a photographer at work.
When she showed it to him, he nodded once.
“I like it,” he said.
“Do you want one with your face?”
He considered for a moment. “This captures me better. At work.” He smiled and returned to his camera.
Selassie came by to ask for help with settings that would help make the trees look less silhouetted, and Sarah showed her how to do a bracketed series of photos at different exposures that she could combine in photo editing software later.
Ren approached, his jacket flapping in the wind as the sky turned grey-blue. He tilted his head towards where the clouds were blowing in ominously from the east.
“I think we have about ten minutes. You take the car back. I’m sticking around with Kyle for a bit.”
As he said the words, a warning drop of rain hit her cheek. “It’s going to pour.”
“We have ponchos,” he said. “We’ve done it before.”
“Knowing Kyle, he probably prefers it this way,” she said. “More of a challenge.”
“I’ll tell the others. You should move fast,” Ren said, as another gust smacked their faces with more droplets.
Sarah collected everyone to return back to the hotel, but Elka again insisted on staying behind. As they hurriedly packed their gear in their cars, Fred suggested a side trip to swing by a local pub on the way back.
“If we’re not shooting, we should be getting to know each other,” he insisted, ever the politician.
Sarah was pleased to discover that the pub that Fred had found nearby was a grungy little place with dartboards on the wall. It reminded her of the local watering hole in her hometown: unassuming but lively. They took over a corner table and ordered beers.
“I think Elka has her eye on Ren,” Cole observed as the drinks arrived.
Jack shrugged with his usual cynicism. “Yeah, I know guys like Ren. They don’t settle down. It’s why he gets along with Kyle. If a man is good looking enough, he doesn’t need relationships. He gets female companionship whenever he wants.”
“And sometimes when he doesn’t want it,” Binita said sagely.
Selassie shook her head. “The way he looks at you, though, Sarah… I think he’s in love with you.”
“No.” Sarah replied in a carefully gauged tone of dry amusement. “He’s just grateful I showed up last minute to help out.”
Grisha leaned back. “He liked that other one a lot. Freya.”
“How many of these have you been on?” Rita asked Grisha, and the conversation continued around her.