Comped!

Chapter 3

The first sign that something was wrong came in the airport parking garage when Finn looked at my luggage and stopped walking.

“No,” he said.

“What?”

He pointed at the three suitcases I’d lined up behind the truck, the big one, the medium one, and the hard-shell one I used when I didn’t trust the contents not to get crushed.

“How many of those are yours?” he asked.

“All of them.”

“All of them?” He squinted up at me against the morning glare, blue eyes narrowed, his one bag slung over one shoulder.

His bag was a single duffel, stuffed to bursting, the zipper straining.

From the shape of it, I’d have bet money there wasn’t a serious garment in the whole thing. “Mark, it’s only five days.”

“You never know.”

“I do know. I know exactly. I packed in eight minutes.” He hefted the duffel to demonstrate, and something inside shifted with the soft weightlessness of a bag containing nothing but cotton and bad decisions.

“T-shirts, trunks, and the little swim briefs that got me banned from a pool in Clearwater. That’s a holiday wardrobe.

That’s a man who understands the assignment. ”

“You packed a bag of underwear and called it luggage.”

“I packed a bag of freedom. You packed for a siege.” He crouched and unzipped my big suitcase right there on the garage floor. I objected loudly. He ignored me completely. “Sweet mother of God, is this a first aid kit?”

“It’s the good kind with antibiotic and gauze.”

“Why do you have bug spray, sunblock, after-sun, a second sunblock, and”—he held up a small bottle and squinted at it—“calamine lotion. We’re not even leaving the country, and you’ve planned for the rash.”

“Feet get wet. Skin burns. Things happen.”

“To you, maybe. Things happen to you because you go looking for them.” He held up a folded blue polo, then another behind it, then a third. “And how many of these did you bring?”

“I—”

“They’re the same shirt, Mark. You’ve packed the same shirt three times and called two of them spares.”

“They’re a reliable shirt.”

“Reliable?” He nearly spat the word. “They’re a uniform.

You’ve packed your own surrender.” He dropped the shirts with the disgust of a man who’d seen enough.

He zipped the bag and stood, dusting off the knees of his jeans.

“But I haven’t the time or the strength to fix you in a parking garage, so you’ll bring all three coffins and you’ll haul them yourself.

Somewhere around day two, when you’re sweating through the third identical shirt, you’ll understand what I was trying to tell you. ”

I did bring all three.

I hauled them myself.

And I want it on the record that at no point did Finn offer to carry so much as the small one on the principle that a man should “feel the full weight of his choices.”

“Did you bring the laptop?” he asked at the gate.

“No.”

“Look me in my Irish eyes and tell me that again. I’ll know if you’re lying. It’s a potato famine thing. It’s in my genes.”

I told him I hadn’t, which was true, because I’d spent forty minutes the night before talking myself out of it and another twenty hiding it in the trailer so I couldn’t change my mind.

He studied my face the way airport security studies a man who claims he packed his own bags, decided I was honest, and reached up to clap me on the shoulder.

“Good lad. There may be hope for ya yet.”

The flight included four hours of Finn narrating the in-flight movie into my ear while I pretended to sleep so I wouldn’t have to think about Reyes running my site.

By the time we landed, the air coming through the jet bridge was thick and warm.

It smelled like salt and flowers. Even I had to admit, somewhere under the part of me still doing math about framing inspections, that it was nice.

I peeked out the window to find the sky was a clean postcard blue, and the resort shuttle waiting planeside was a van with its top cut off and seats the color of a parrot.

I spent a good portion of our shuttle ride wrestling three suitcases into a luggage rack built for the kind of person who travels like Finn.

He spent it with his face tipped toward the sun and his eyes shut, grinning like a man collecting on a long-overdue debt.

His duffel remained tucked under one arm like a pillow.

“You could help,” I said.

“I could,” he agreed, but didn’t even open an eye.

Once I’d wedged the last bag in, I watched the water slide past. He’d been right about the color. It really was the shade of mouthwash, that impossible blue-green. For one unguarded second, something in my chest loosened without my permission.

Then we pulled up to the resort, and I started to understand that I had not read the brochure.

The lobby was open air, all dark wood and ceiling fans and a long front desk made of something that had probably once been a single enormous tree. It was beautiful. It was also, I registered slowly, full of a great many people who were not wearing a great many clothes.

One man crossed the lobby in front of us wearing sandals, sunglasses, and a pina colada.

That was the complete inventory.

He nodded at us pleasantly, the way you’d nod at someone in an elevator, entirely at ease, and drifted off toward the pool.

I nearly missed a step.

Finn didn’t.

Because Finn had walked directly into the back of me, which is what happens when a narrow man follows a large one without looking.

“Why’ve you stopped?” he said into my spine. Then he stepped around me, followed my line of sight, and went quiet in a way that, in four years, I’d heard maybe twice.

“Finn.”

“I see it.”

“Finn, that man is—”

“I see it, Mark.”

Two more guests drifted past the desk, equally unburdened by fabric, deep in conversation about brunch.

Behind the desk, a clerk in a crisp linen shirt, blessedly and fully clothed, smiled at us with the practiced warmth of a man who had watched this exact realization land on a thousand faces and had either stopped finding it funny or started finding it so funny he’d had to go professional about it.

“Welcome to Cayo Verde,” the clerk said. “Checking in?”

I didn’t answer.

I was busy reading the small brass sign mounted tastefully beside the desk. It was the kind you’d walk past without a second look if you weren’t standing very still and beginning to sweat.

CLOTHING OPTIONAL THROUGHOUT THE RESORT.

Beneath that, in a smaller and somehow more devastating font,

GUESTS ARE KINDLY REMINDED TO CARRY A TOWEL FOR SEATING.

“Clothing optional,” I said.

“It would appear so,” Finn said.

“A clothing-optional resort.”

“It’s a popular format, I’m told.”

“You told me it was a beach.”

“It is a beach.” He gestured helplessly at the view past the lobby, where, indeed, there was a beach. On said beach were many people. The people were, as a strong general rule, availing themselves of the clothing-optional option. “It’s a beach with extra honesty and a strong sense of self.”

“Finn,” I growled, unable to pull my gaze from a pair of men walking—and dangling—nearby.

“Mark, I swear on my mother, I never read past the photos. The photos had clothes.”

“Of course the photos had clothes. It was a charity auction. There were nuns.”

“There were drag nuns. That’s different—”

“Checking in?” the clerk repeated with the serene patience of a man who got paid the same whether or not we ever finished this conversation.

It suddenly occurred to me with fresh and terrible clarity that Finn had packed a duffel of T-shirts and tiny trunks for this trip. He’d done it in eight minutes. Some part of me had assumed he was just being Finn.

He hadn’t been just being Finn.

He’d packed correctly.

He’d packed for the resort that actually existed, while I’d packed three suitcases for one I’d invented in my head. The gap between his luggage and mine was, I understood now, the whole joke of the situation rendered in canvas and nylon.

I’m a large man, and when I’m upset, I get larger.

I watched the realization of exactly how upset I was cross Finn’s face.

To his credit, he didn’t back off. He set his jaw and held his ground, all five-foot-eight of him, chin lifted at me like we were the same size, which had been his way since the first week I’d known him.

“We can leave,” he said quietly. “Say the word and I’ll have the van turn around. We’ll find a normal hotel with a continental breakfast, and you can keep every stitch of all three suitcases on for a week. I dropped you in this. I’ll get you out of it.”

There it was.

It was the thing about Finn that made it impossible to stay angry at him, which was that the second he saw he’d actually hurt me, every ounce of mischief drained out and left behind a man who’d genuinely turn a van around in a foreign country to spare my feelings.

I looked back at the lobby, at the ceiling fans and the tree-sized desk and the impossible water past it. I looked at the man with the pina colada, settling into a poolside lounger with his towel responsibly deployed.

Nobody was looking at me.

That was the thing I hadn’t expected.

Not one person in that whole open-air lobby was paying me the slightest attention.

They were on vacation. They were happy. They had, every one of them, let go of the exact thing I’d spent my whole life unable to put down, which was what other people made of my size and my gray and the general looming look of me.

I’d had three months to take this trip. I’d picked the one week the world could spare me. I’d hidden my own laptop, and the prize was worth more than my truck.

I couldn’t let a thing of value go to waste. It went against my very being.

Moreover, I couldn’t disappoint Finn, and the way his lower lip was pooching in that moment made my decision for me.

“Don’t turn the van around,” I said, my voice growing firmer with each word.

“What?” Finn blinked. “You’re sure?”

“This is paid for.” I got a better grip on the three suitcases I would now apparently be living out of like a man who’d fled a house fire. “And I packed enough clothes for the both of us, since you brought a bag of swimming costumes and good intentions.”

The relief that broke across his face was so complete I nearly forgave him on the spot. “Now that’s the spirit. And you’ll be glad of those shirts when I lose half my trunks to the pool. We’ll share. It’ll be beautiful.”

“You’re not wearing my shirts.”

“I’ll be in them by Wednesday, and you know it.”

He turned to the desk before I could argue. “Checking in,” he told the clerk grandly, sliding our confirmation across the wood. “Two rooms, under O’Brien, though the winner’s the big, sad one behind me with the moving truck.”

The clerk, who had clearly decided we were his favorite arrivals of the day, slid two key cards across the tree. “Mr. O’Brien, we have you in one of our garden suites. And may I say, the optional part is genuinely optional. Nobody here will mind whatever you choose.”

“He’s choosing cargo shorts,” Finn said, loudly. “He brought a great many of them.”

“An excellent choice,” the clerk said, and I couldn’t for the life of me tell whether or not he was mocking me, which I respected.

Finn handed me my key card. I’d come this far, flown four hours, and wrestled three suitcases off a shuttle. I’d held my ground in a lobby full of strangers’ bodies, and I’d decided, in the stubborn way I decided most things, that I was going to wring one good week out of this if it killed me.

That was the exact moment I turned around and froze.

A man stood near the entrance to the pool deck, half in shadow under the overhang.

The first thing I noticed, the thing that caught my eye out of all the bright, bare chaos of the place, was that he was fully clothed.

He wore a soft gray henley pushed up at the sleeves, dark shorts, and scuffed canvas shoes that had clearly walked a lot of places.

He was lean in the way of a man who moved for a living rather than lifted, all rangy economy, maybe an inch or two under my height but built on a different blueprint entirely.

Dark hair, a little long, was shoved back off his forehead by a pair of sunglasses he’d nested up there and forgotten.

His jaw was covered by a few days of stubble that didn’t look planned so much as allowed.

Everything about him said he’d packed for work and ended up somewhere that didn’t want any.

He held a camera in both hands, a real one, heavy and serious, and he was frowning down at the little screen on the back of it with the particular furrow of a man whose work wasn’t cooperating.

Sensing someone staring, he glanced up. He took in my polo and my cargo shorts and the three suitcases stacked at my feet, the full catalog of a man who had clearly not read the brochure.

And he smiled.

Just slightly, just at one corner of his mouth. It was the helpless, private smile of one overdressed person recognizing another across a sea of the undressed.

I forgot, briefly, about the framing inspection.

I forgot, more briefly and more alarmingly, about being the most overdressed man on the island, because all at once I wasn’t.

There were two of us.

“Mark.” Finn was at my elbow, following my gaze. I heard the precise moment he understood. I heard the grin climb back into his voice, twice as wide as before. “Oh. Oh! That’s interesting.”

“Don’t,” I growled.

“Wouldn’t dream of it,” he lied.