Chapter 13
His room was on the far side of the property. It was a garden suite like mine. I stood outside his door at half past midnight feeling more exposed than I had in a lobby full of naked strangers.
I knocked before I could run the math on whether I should.
It took a moment.
Then the door opened, and there was Wes, wearing a T-shirt and the kind of soft, worn shorts a man sleeps in.
His hair was smushed on one side in the way only a hotel pillow can accomplish.
As he blinked bleary eyes up at me, his face went through four things in about two seconds: surprise, hope (I thought), the careful shuttering of hope (I dreaded), and finally a guarded sort of stillness.
I took that last expression as the look of a man who’d already given himself the sensible answer and didn’t want to have to give it twice.
“It’s late,” he said.
“I skipped a number,” I replied, still unsure how to even have this conversation but refusing to be put off.
He blinked.
“You what?”
“This afternoon at the cove, I ran every figure, including me living in Tampa, the company, my crews, the distance between us, all of it. I built you—well, me, really—a very good wall out of all of those things and called it sensible.” My heart was going like a nail gun.
I’d never been great at speeches. I’d rehearsed this one the whole walk over, but it was already coming apart in my hands.
“But I left one number out of the equation. I may have done that on purpose, I think, because I was more scared of things working more than, well, of them failing.”
“Mark—”
“You live in two bags.” I said it quickly before the careful part of my brain could stop me.
“Your whole life fits in two bags. You can do your job—take your camera—anywhere there’s light.
That’s actually what you’re paid to do, go wherever the shoot needs you.
I sat in that cove doing arithmetic about a foundation I can’t move, but I never once ran the only number that really mattered, which is that you don’t actually need me to move anything.
You just need somewhere to point the two bags. ”
He’d gone very still in the doorway.
The amber of his eyes caught the path light.
“I’m not asking you to land or settle or whatever,” I said.
“I know better than that. A man can’t ask a falcon not to fly, at least not for long.
It’d bolt or fly away or whatever birds do when they’re held too tight.
” My hand found its way into my hair. I muttered, “God, I’m bad at this,” low enough I hoped he didn’t hear, then went on.
“Wes, I’m not offering you concrete or a mortgage or a future or any of the things I usually need to see the math on before I’ll say them out loud.
” I made myself slow down, made myself say the true small thing instead of the big terrifying one.
“I’m offering you a place to . . . alight.
Okay, that analogy is getting weird. Fuck.
You can come to Tampa when you’re between Lisbon and wherever’s after Lisbon.
There’s a couch, a spare room, a door that opens when you knock on it.
You don’t need to book a hotel or ask if it’s all right.
You just come see me. We don’t make any promises past that, and when you’re not flying about, you fly here, to Tampa . . . to me.”
The silence stretched long enough that I felt the old certainty start to creep back in, the one that said, “You reached, and now comes the part where he steps back.” I braced for it the way I’d braced my whole life.
“A place to land?” Wes said slowly.
“Yeah, a perch of sorts. That’s all. Definitely not a cage or .
. . shit. Just nothing serious.” I swallowed.
“We’d be testing the water. You’d be a guest, a regular one, the kind who doesn’t have to call ahead.
If the whole thing’s wrong, if I’m too much of a fixed point for a man who needs to move, you can get on the next plane.
We never have to call it a failure, because we never called it anything bigger than a trial. ”
He edged closer and leaned against the doorframe. The distance between us shrank, though I was so terrified of the moment that I forgot to measure it. Something in his face had started to loosen, the careful, sensible thing giving way to something underneath.
“You realize,” he said, “that you just gave the least romantic speech in the history of speeches. ‘You’d be a guest. A regular one.’ I’ve had frequent-flyer programs with more passionate language.”
My head lowered in surrender, and I muttered, “I told you I’m not built for the big kind of whatever we’re not calling this.”
“No.” His mouth quirked at the corner, and the amber in his eyes twinkled in the fullness of the moonlight.
It was that slow rearranging thing, and my chest did what it had done since the pool deck.
“You’re built for the true kind, which is rarer, and I should know.
I’ve shot a lot of weddings full of the other kind, the one that doesn’t last much past the reception.
” He scrubbed a hand through his flat hair, mirroring the gesture I’d made minutes earlier.
“A test? No concrete? I keep the shoots, I keep moving, and Tampa’s just—what? Somewhere to come back to?”
“Somewhere to come back to,” I agreed. “With me . . . to come back to. I’d be there. If you wanted.”
He looked at me a long moment.
Then he stepped back from the door, and for one cold second, I thought that was his answer, the step back I’d been waiting thirty-some years for.
Then I realized he wasn’t stepping away from me.
He was making room.
“Come in,” he said. “It’s late, and the van’s at ten. If we’re going to test a theory, I’d like to at least start with the data we’ve got.” His grin broke fully now. “Get in here, Mark Apparently. Bring your terrible romantic speech. We’ll see about the rest.”