Chapter 23
Anna
The next morning, I found a camera on the kitchen counter with a note.
Let me see the world from your lens. — Jace
I read the words and held them close to my chest. The camera sat beside it, a professional-grade body with two lenses in the soft light.
I picked it up and my hands remembered before my brain did. The weight. The grip. The way my index finger found the shutter button without looking, muscle memory from ten thousand photographs taken in another life.
My hands remembered everything.
I turned it over. Checked the lenses. My hands knew what to look for before my brain caught up: the weight of the glass, the smoothness of the barrel, the clarity when I held one up to the light.
These were lenses I used to stand outside camera shops and stare at through the window, back when I had a secondhand body and ambitions my bank account couldn't keep up with.
I ran my thumb across the focus ring and the motion was so familiar it made my eyes sting.
I looked toward the bedroom where Jace was still asleep. He’d left this here without a word.
I took it to the porch. The Gulf was barely moving, pale blue near the shore and deepening to navy where it stretched toward the horizon.
Morning light skimmed across the surface in long, warm streaks that turned the water into something a painter would have stopped for.
Pelicans lined the dock, still as sculptures, their reflections rippling underneath them.
I hadn't seen any of this yesterday. Not as a composition. Not as light and shadow and depth. Yesterday I didn't have a viewfinder.
I raised the camera, then looked through it. The world narrowed to a single frame, and everything that didn't belong fell quietly away. Just the water, the birds, the light. And for the first time in months, I was the one choosing what to keep.
I photographed everything.
The pelicans in morning light, wings spread, suspended above the water in the second before the dive.
The wooden houses along the shore, their paint faded to pastels by decades of sun, clotheslines strung between porches with sheets catching the breeze.
The fishing boats bobbing at the dock, their hulls streaked with salt, nets piled on the decks in tangles that somehow looked intentional.
The café at golden hour. Diane behind the counter, laughing at something Marcus said, her limp gone when she was standing still and happy. Marcus chasing crabs on the wet sand, his feet leaving prints the waves erased behind him like the beach was playing a game only he understood.
I didn't notice the sun dropping until the light changed in my viewfinder.
The sky over the Gulf layered itself in tangerine and rose, deepening to violet at the edges, colors no filter could replicate because some things only exist in the moment you see them.
Sea oats bending on the dunes. A heron in the shallows, motionless, patient, waiting for something only it could see.
I photographed Jace.
He didn't know it at first. On the porch, barefoot, reading, his hair curling in the humidity in ways he hadn't surrendered to yet.
His hand drifted to the back of his head every few pages, smoothing it down, failing, giving up, returning to the book.
I shot him through the screen door, the light falling across his profile soft and golden, and I held my breath so the shutter wouldn't give me away.
At the general store, he picked up a jar of local honey, held it at arm's length, and read the label front to back with absolute focus.
Turned it over, held it up to the light, then set it down.
Picked it up again. The woman behind the counter watched him over her glasses, half amused, half fascinated, and I got the shot before either of them noticed.
At the water's edge, I almost didn't raise the camera.
He'd taken his shoes off and rolled his trousers to his calves.
His bare feet were on the wet sand and his face was turned toward the horizon, and whatever I saw in his expression stopped me mid-step.
I lifted the viewfinder and shot three frames before he turned around.
In every one, he looked like a man seeing the ocean for the first time. Not from a penthouse window. The real thing. Salt on his lips, water at his feet, wind in his ridiculous curling hair, and the whole vastness of it pressing gently against him.
Every frame was the best photograph I'd taken in years.
Not because he was beautiful, though he was.
Because he was trying. The sand bothered him.
I could see it in how he brushed his hands on his trousers, how he laid his towel with geometric precision before sitting on it.
The shared spaces pressed against him: the café where strangers sat close, the beach where children kicked sand into the air, the store where the owner handled every item before bagging it.
All of it pressed against his edges. And he was here anyway. Letting Marcus grab his sleeve with sticky fingers and not pulling away. Not once.
Jace trying was the most beautiful thing about him.
We sat by the beach later, side by side, the water stretching out in front of us in blues that layered like watercolor. I was scrolling through yesterday’s photos on the camera screen.
He was beside me, legs stretched out, bare feet buried in the warm sand.
The Gulf breeze carried the scent of salt and coconut from someone’s sunscreen down the beach, and the palm trees behind us ticked softly in the wind.
It was the kind of afternoon that felt like it could last forever if you didn’t look at a clock.
I glanced at his feet. At the sand between his toes. Jace Hunter, the man who sanitized light switches and wiped down elevator buttons, sitting in sand voluntarily, his face relaxed, his shoulders loose, the sanitizer bottle in his pocket staying exactly where it was.
"You don’t mind the sand," I said.
He looked at his feet like he was noticing them for the first time. Wiggled his toes experimentally, considered the sensation with analytical focus, like he was taking in a new experience.
"I suppose I don’t," he said.
"Why?"
He turned to me. Those gray eyes looked more captivating here in the Gulf light, almost silver. The wind pushed his hair across his forehead, and he didn’t fix it. "Maybe it’s because of you."
I leaned over and kissed him. Warm, slow, tasting like salt air and the iced tea we'd been drinking all morning. His hand came up to my jaw and held me there. The kiss was unhurried, easy. Neither of us had anywhere to be, nothing to prove. The whole afternoon was just for this.
I pulled back. "It’s not because of me. It’s you. You’re the one sitting in the sand."
"It’s you."
I chuckled. "It’s you, Jace."
"It’s you." He kissed me again. Stubbornly, his mouth warm and insistent against mine. "It’s always been you. I was perfectly content avoiding sand for years and then you sat in it and my brain decided sand was acceptable. That’s not personal growth. That’s you."
I started laughing against his mouth. He kissed me through it, which only made it worse, and then his shoulders were shaking too and neither of us could stop.
His nose bumped mine. My teeth caught his lip by accident.
We didn't care. We sat there on the beach, sun-warm and ridiculous, grinning too wide to kiss properly and kissing anyway.
A couple walking past on the shore gave us a look and I didn't care about that either.
He pulled back and looked at me, and the smile was there.
Not the twitch. Not the almost. The real one, full and unguarded, and it changed his entire face.
The sharpness went soft. The lines around his eyes deepened.
He looked like someone who'd been carrying something heavy for years and had finally set it down.
My chest ached with it. Too much feeling in too small a space.
I wanted to photograph it, but my hands were on his face and I wasn't letting go. So I just looked at him instead. Let my eyes do what the camera would have done. Memorized the light on his skin, the crease at the corner of his mouth, the gray of his eyes gone almost silver this close.
Filed it somewhere safe, deep in my heart.
"You have sand on your nose," he said.
"You have sand in your hair."
"Do I?" He touched his head, felt the grit. His face went through a brief internal negotiation. But he left it be.
I kissed his nose. Because I could. Because we were on a beach in Cedar Key and nobody was watching except the pelicans, and they didn't care.
The local kids found him the next afternoon.
He was on the beach with his laptop, the Hunter Interactive logo glowing on the screen, and three teenagers appeared out of thin air, drawn by the magnetic pull of a screen displaying something interesting.
"Hey, I recognize you. Did you make Ethereal Vanguard?" The tallest one, a girl around sixteen with braids and sand on her knees.
Jace looked up from his screen. "Yes."
Three teens lost their minds. The girl grabbed the arm of the boy next to her.
The youngest, maybe fourteen, said "no way" four times without pausing for breath.
Within minutes there were five of them. Then six, because Marcus had migrated from the café with his crayon box, and they were all sitting in a half circle around Jace in the sand, and he was showing them the character design interface.
He drew diagrams in the sand with a stick, precise little flowcharts that the wind was already erasing, and used words like procedural generation and dynamic difficulty scaling and the teens nodded with the grave seriousness of students attending a lecture they were determined to understand.
The fourteen-year-old raised his hand, like he was in a classroom. Jace pointed at him and said "yes" as though recognizing a colleague at a board meeting.
"Why does the dragon in level twelve breathe ice instead of fire?"