Chapter 4
My garden suite turned out to be a low building set back from the main path, half swallowed by flowering vines that smelled like a candle store. It took me three trips to get all the luggage inside, during which Finn sat on the bed and offered commentary instead of help.
“You’ll not need most of that,” he said, watching me line my shoes up by the door out of habit. “You realize that, right? You’ve brought hiking boots to a place where the dress code is a tan.”
“I’m not discussing the dress code.”
“You’ll have to eventually. There’s a dinner tonight, a welcome reception.
Says so on the card.” He waved the little welcome card at me.
“And before you ask, yes, you can wear clothes to it. No, you don’t have to.
And I’d pay real money to watch you try to read a menu while pretending very hard to maintain eye contact with a naked waiter. ”
“I’m going to unpack,” I said as emotionless as possible.
“You’re going to unpack three suitcases for five days?
Of course you are.” He stood, stretched, and tossed the card onto the dresser.
“I’m going to go be a person. There’s a swim-up bar, and I intend to introduce myself to it personally.
Come find me when you’ve finished arranging your socks by season. ”
And then he was gone, off into the bright afternoon in a T-shirt and a pair of trunks that were, I noted, well within the legal limits of his Clearwater pool incident, leaving me alone in a beautiful room.
So I unpacked.
It took twenty minutes and made me feel briefly like myself, like a man with a system in a world that rewarded systems. Then it was done, and I found myself standing in the middle of the room with nothing to organize and nowhere I was needed and the specific hollow panic of a man who had run out of tasks.
At home, I’d have found something to do: a drawer to fix, an email to send, a thing to measure.
Here, there was only the candle-store smell and the sound of the water and the knowledge that somewhere on this property Finn was making friends without me.
So I put on a fresh polo and a pair of cargo shorts, because I am who I am, and I went to find the swim-up bar.
I did not find the swim-up bar.
I found him first.
He was set up at the far end of the pool deck, in the shade, his camera mounted now on a tripod and pointed out at the water, where the late sun was doing something admittedly spectacular.
He’d changed nothing about himself since the lobby, wearing the same gray henley, the same forgotten sunglasses, and the same look of a man at war with his own equipment.
He was crouched behind the viewfinder. As I strode up the path, he muttered something at the camera that I was fairly sure was more curse than compliment.
I should have kept walking.
I am not, by nature, a man who approaches strangers.
The size of me usually does the approaching for me, and it tends to send people the other way. So, over the years, I’d learned to hold still and let the world come to me, which it mostly didn’t.
But aside from Finn and the reception clerk, this camera dude was the only other clothed man I’d seen since the airport, and there’s a kind of solidarity in that, the way two people will nod at each other in the rain when everyone else has an umbrella.
“It’s the light,” I said.
He didn’t look up from the viewfinder. “What?”
“Whatever you’re swearing at. It’s not the camera.
The camera’s fine. It’s the light. It’s too high and too hard right now.
Everything’s going to blow out white where the sun hits the water, and there’s nothing you can do about it for another hour, maybe two.
” I stopped, because he’d gone still behind the camera.
I suddenly realized I’d just walked up to a stranger and told him how to do his job, which is one of the rudest things a person could do.
I quickly corrected, “Sorry. I don’t know anything about cameras. ”
Finally, he looked up.
Amber eyes blinked up at me. They were pale brown gone gold at the edges, set in a face that was all weather and good humor under its stubble.
“You don’t know anything about cameras,” he said slowly, “but you just diagnosed my exact problem in one sentence.”
“I know about light. I build things. You spend twenty years watching a job site and you learn what the sun does to a surface at every hour. It’s the difference between a wall that looks finished and one that looks like garbage.
” I shrugged, which on a man my size is a larger gesture than I sometimes intend. “Same sun, different surfaces.”
The guy straightened, a slow grin spreading across his face. That smile rearranged his whole expression in ways I felt land somewhere I wasn’t expecting—and definitely wasn’t ready for.
“A contractor,” he said. “Who reads light?”
“How’d you know I was a contractor?”
“Lucky guess.” He nodded at my chest, where DELGADO CONSTRUCTION lay stitched over my heart like the confession Ineeda Phalis had accused it of being.
“That, and you’re the only other man on this entire island who packed a shirt with a collar.
I clocked you in the lobby, figured we should form a union. ”
“A union.”
“The Amalgamated Brotherhood of Men Who Did Not Read the Brochure.” He stuck out a hand. “I’m Wes, Wes Calloway. I shoot travel and food, mostly. I got hired to make this place look like paradise. Nothing in the contract mentioned I’d be the only person here wearing pants.”
I took his hand. It was warm and rough.
He held on a beat longer than a handshake strictly required.
Or maybe that was me. Maybe I was the one who held on.
“Mark,” I said. “Delgado, apparently, per the shirt.”
“Mark Apparently. Good to have you in the union, brother.”
I laughed. Then startled. Then clamped my lips shut.
It surprised me, the way it came out, easy and unforced, because I am not a man who laughs readily with strangers, or anyone, really.
I’m a man who waits to see what people want from me, but I was pretty sure Wes Calloway didn’t want anything except to not be the last clothed man standing.
There was something about being recognized across a crowd by another person who was hiding in the same place that took the weight off of my shoulders.
“So,” he said, turning back to the camera but not crouching this time. “An hour, you said, for the light?”
“Hour, maybe an hour and a half. Once the sun drops behind that headland, you’ll get the gold instead of the glare. Everything should go warm. That’s your shot.”
“You want to wait it out? I’ve got a flask in the bag and a professional obligation to stand here regardless.” He glanced at me sideways. There was something careful in it under the ease, like he’d put the offer out and was bracing for it to be declined. “Unless you’ve got somewhere to be.”
I thought about Finn at the swim-up bar, almost certainly three drinks deep into a new friendship by now.
I thought about my unpacked, organized, finished room with nothing left in it to need me.
I thought, distantly and for the first time in hours, about the framing inspection and was mildly amazed to find I didn’t care.
“I’m on vacation. I’ve got nowhere to be,” I said, and realized as I said it that it was the truest thing I’d told anyone in a very long time.
Something moved across Wes’s face at that, maybe a flicker of recognition, like I’d said a password he knew.
“Yeah,” Wes said, quieter. “I know that feeling.” Then his easy grin returned, and he dug a battered steel flask out of his camera bag and offered it over.
“Sit down before you make the rest of us look bad, Mark Apparently. We’ve got an hour to kill and a sunset to wait on.
You’re the only man here qualified to tell me when it’s worth photographing. ”
I sank onto the edge of a lounger that was built for a smaller man than me and took a pull off a stranger’s flask. Across the pool somewhere, I heard a laugh I recognized as Finn’s, big and delighted, wrapped in a hobbit’s merriment, floating up over the water. If he’d seen me, he didn’t come over.
For once in his life, Finn O’Brien left well enough alone.
I’d find out later it was the opposite of leaving it alone.
I’d find out he’d seen the whole thing from the bar, had watched me walk up to a stranger and sit down and stay, and had ordered himself another drink and toasted the back of my head from across the pool—the meddling, satisfied, smirking bastard.
But I didn’t know that yet.
All I knew was that the light was about to get good, and that for the first time on this ridiculous trip, I was exactly where I wanted to be.