14. Wednesday
WEDNESDAY
The hotel was surrounded by a wall of grey mist when Sarah woke in the morning; she couldn’t even see down to the bay that stretched out a few hundred feet below them.
Ren was already gone. (Did he ever sleep?) There were a croissant and some fruit waiting for her on a plate. She glanced at the clock; she had a few more minutes to get breakfast in the hotel restaurant, which meant that Ren had brought this just in case she didn’t wake up in time.
She was being wooed…wooed to be his assistant.
She sat up and rubbed her face, then saw that he had left a note: Kyle wanted to grab some shots of beach at sunrise in the rain. Rest up. See you this afternoon.
She felt a brief flash of annoyance at Kyle for treating the week like some kind of macho no-sleep marathon with Ren, who couldn’t easily say no.
When she was up and dressed, she grabbed a quick cup of coffee in the lobby, where Tanjul and Binita were looking out at the view, and then returned to her hotel room and opened her work email.
Still no official email saying she was terminated.
Was she? Or had Owen just been throwing a fit as part of his ‘management philosophy?’
The ambiguity gave her a moment to think.
She could start answering work emails, responding to questions about the weeks ahead, communicating in her usual way with the corporate communications team, and she might be able to smooth things over.
Or she could take a leap and land somewhere entirely different.
She paused to look up Ren’s next three workshops on his website: the Galapagos Islands in August; Antelope Canyon in Arizona in October; Lapland, Finland in mid-December to shoot the Northern Lights.
She could go to the most beautiful places in the world with Ren and help people learn photography. Or she could go back to her safe corporate job and deal with Owen’s emails about how she hadn’t taken appropriately detailed minutes for a meeting that only involved the two of them.
She was going to say yes to Ren, wasn’t she?
She was going to get her life back and her heart broken.
She was going to say yes because it was better to feel alive and hurt than to feel safe and dead inside.
She refused to be like her mother, chained by fear.
She was going to say yes to Ren and his goddamned job offer.
Ren, who was so funny and helpful and supportive and so not interested in kissing her.
When Ren appeared in their hotel room later that afternoon, he gave her that same affectionate smile.
“Hey, sorry about taking off again,” he said.
“Don’t apologize to me. You’re the one involved in a sleep deprivation experiment with a millionaire.”
“He means well,” Ren said, though she wondered. “He’s just one of those guys who likes a challenge.”
“There are extra sandwiches in the refrigerator. Take one of those and then rest for a few minutes before we have to go set up the classroom.”
He nodded. “I will. Thanks.” As she gathered the equipment they would need to set up the workshop, she heard his voice behind her, quieter. “Thank you, Sarah.”
“Of course.”
The workshop plan was for the attendees to spend most of the rainy afternoon in the classroom, reviewing photos from their shoots and talking about techniques.
There was hope they might have a decent chance at catching a subtle aurora on either Thursday or Friday, and the possibility meant getting everyone ready.
That afternoon, Ren talked to them about locations, camera settings, and possible foreground/background options. He explained that he had locked down the plan to charter a boat to a spot on a lake where they would stay all night…and with luck, a bit of an aurora might appear.
Once again, Elka called Ren over to her table at dinner and Sarah accepted it. If she said yes to his job offer, she would get many more workshops to hang out with Ren. She would get many more days of watching women pursue him.
She excused herself from her table as soon as the meal was finished, and Kyle followed her out.
“Hey,” he said. “Want to have a nightcap? It’s pouring out there, and I picked up some wine.”
“I’m sorry. I’m really tired,” she said automatically.
Back in the room, she told herself that maybe she should hook up with Kyle; it would certainly distract her from the mess of feelings that Ren provoked.
But she didn’t work that way; she never had.
She got into pajamas and flipped on the television.
On screen was an old episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer that she had watched obsessively in her teens, so she tucked up under the covers, listening to the steady drum of the rain outside.
A few minutes later, Ren surprised her by walking in the door. She waited for him to say that he was stopping by on his way to somewhere else or heading out with Kyle for more shooting.
“I’m wiped out,” he said. “This is my night to catch up on sleep.”
“I can turn this off.”
“No need,” he said. “I’ll sleep right through it.”
She tried to ignore him when he emerged from the bathroom in the t-shirt and pajama bottoms that constituted his sleep wear.
It felt like they were having a little slumber party.
If she accepted the job offer, would they share rooms in the future?
Or was this a one-time thing? She supposed that if he wanted to hook up with pretty women, having his own space was better.
Or maybe he would assume she preferred it.
They were grown-ups, after all. But this had been nice.
She would miss this, she realized, if this was the last time they ever did it.
“Buffy? I remember this episode,” he said as he leaned back in bed, watching an attractive young teenager tearfully discussed her doomed love for an undead vampire.
“You’re kidding. You’ve seen this?”
Ren shrugged. “I watched a few episodes with Ellen.”
Sarah recalled Ren’s brief fling with uptight Ellen, whom Ren had dated for a few weeks in the middle of Sarah’s early days with Ivan.
Ellen and Ren had held intense debates about moral philosophy and feminist theory during their brief three-week relationship; Sarah felt surprised that they were also watching teen television in Ellen’s room afterwards.
“Was that your strategy for getting women into bed at McGill?” she asked. “Agreeing to watch their shows?”
“You think I needed a strategy?” he asked with a grin.
“You definitely had a strategy. Anya told me that you insisted that hooking up with you was a way of exploring her sexuality.”
“And I stand by that,” he replied with a laugh.
He leaned back on his bed and watched the show for a while, and she realized she was unconsciously waiting for him to fall asleep or to get out his phone or laptop.
Danny had done that all the time when Sarah was watching a show he didn’t enjoy, but Ren stayed focused.
“I have so many questions,” he said at last when there was a commercial break.
“Go ahead. I’ve seen the whole series.” She pressed mute to silence an enthusiastic advertisement for laundry detergent.
“So first of all,” he began, “he is two hundred years old, and he wants to date a high schooler?”
“He’s tortured. Dead inside. Until he spots the one girl who makes him feel something.”
“But why high school? If I was picking someone to break me out of my cage of loneliness, it wouldn’t be someone who still had acne medication on their nightstand.”
“She’s as powerful as he is and can kill him with a thought, which given his guilt complex, he probably likes.”
“So let’s leave him out of it. I get that he’s handsome, but why does she want a man who is at such a different point in life?”
Sarah sighed. “Okay, so this is embarrassing, but can I tell you about losing my virginity?”
Ren’s eyebrows shot up. “Sure. This was with Phil the Goth or Ivan the Terrible?”
“Philip. So…he and I decided to sleep together senior year, but we didn’t know what we were doing. So it took a few times before it stopped hurting.”
Ren grimaced and nodded.
“And after that, sex became something I kind of tolerated. I didn’t hate it, but I didn’t really… And it wasn’t Phil’s fault. I didn’t know how to speak up for myself or explain what I wanted. I was worried about hurting his feelings by admitting that I wasn’t…” She waved a hand.
“You weren’t having an orgasm.”
She nodded. “So I tried gentle hints. And he got frustrated because I didn’t know what to tell him to do, and he didn’t know what he was doing wrong, so I gave up and pretended I was. And this went on for months.”
“This is a tragic story.”
“But the thing is, when I watched this show at seventeen, the fantasy wasn’t that I wanted a much older man. It was that I wanted a teenage boy who knew what he was doing. It would have been nice to lose my virginity to someone who didn’t need everything explained to him.”
Ren considered this with a frown. “There’s a lot I don’t recommend about losing my virginity to a woman five years older than me, but I did learn what I was doing.”
“What happened there?” Sarah asked. “You changed the subject when I asked about it earlier.”