16. Friday #2
“You gave me that homemade card.” Ren had made her a birthday card out of folded watercolor paper with a quote on the front that he had hand-written in ink-pen: Being afraid is the worst sin, which he admitted he had paraphrased from Godard’s Breathless.
Inside he had written: Happy 20th to someone who deserves to never be afraid.
Ren. She still had it somewhere, tucked in a box of precious things from her university years.
“I was so furious at him for forgetting your birthday and so furious at you for letting him get away with it. So I was complaining to Joel about it.” Joel had been Ren’s roommate at McGill; he was a friendly, easygoing athlete who always seemed like a mismatch for Ren’s intellectual snobbery but who had lived with him for their entire time at school.
“And after I’d been going on and on about it for a while, Joel said to me, ‘So you like this girl.’ And I said, ‘No, not at all. I’m just annoyed on her behalf.’ And he said, ‘You’ve been annoyed on her behalf for a week.’ And I thought, Oh, no.”
Sarah smiled. “I had no idea.”
“Half of me thought you did,” he said. “Kristie knew. I would have asked you out, but I was terrified you’d reject me, and I wasn’t sure I believed in dating in the first place.
And I also had this fear that if you wanted to date me, it would only be because you thought I was a jerk and you were attracted to jerks. ”
“I didn’t want to go out with jerks,” Sarah said. “It wasn’t like a philosophy or something. I was in love with Ivan before I figured out that he wasn’t very nice to me. But by then I felt like I had to stay because I could heal him if I loved him enough.”
“And then you picked Liam, who was so smug. We went out for drinks once and he didn’t ask anyone else a single question, just talked about himself in a monologue, like the rest of us had signed up for his podcast. I didn’t understand why you couldn’t see it.
But now that I’ve met your mother, it makes more sense. ”
She nodded against his shoulder. “She’s very self-doubting, and she transfers it onto me. I don’t blame her, though. We have similar personalities, but I fight it harder than she does. She lost her optimism when my father died. I don’t think she ever got it back.”
“She’s wrong, you know,” he said quietly. “I would marry you. I know it’s too early to bring it up, but I absolutely would.”
Sarah leaned into his arm and said nothing, too afraid of ruining the moment to speak.
“So what will you do when you get back to Toronto?” he asked. “Are you in trouble at your job?”
“I got fired.”
“What?” He sat up straighter.
“It’s okay. My boss was a nightmare. I’ll be okay.”
He frowned. “Sarah…”
“No, it’s good,” she insisted. “Because I need time for my own work. I have an idea for a new photo series.”
“You do? Can I hear about it?”
When she told him about her My Divorce series, his eyes lit up.
“That photo of you in a bathtub,” he said, “will you redo that one? Because that one is burned in my brain forever.”
Their last classroom meeting had a casual, joking atmosphere; everyone was a little giddy from lack of sleep and more closely bonded after their night in the woods.
Sarah and Ren reviewed everyone’s photos from the night before and discussed post processing techniques for making them look even better.
“I want to see all Sarah’s portraits,” Cole said.
“I still haven’t gotten Kyle and Elka,” Sarah said. “They wandered too far away. So I’ll get them tonight and then I’ll email everyone the full set.”
Sarah noticed Rita looking down. She wondered if Rita was regretting her choice just to shoot her face—not because it wasn’t a pretty shot, but because of the rationale behind it. Dismissing yourself was the kind of thing that could feel right in the moment and haunt you later.
“We can retake some, too, if anyone didn’t like theirs,” Sarah said lightly. “Maybe some people might want to bring a swimsuit.” She smiled at Rita.
They went out for dinner at the local pub, joking over beers and not worrying too much about whether they were losing time to shoot. The plan was to go out and do a final night of shooting along a beach to the north. Several people planned to turn in early because they were flying out the next day.
Sarah watched Elka watching Ren during dinner.
She looked so unhappy that Sarah felt for her.
She had hoped Elka might find sympathy in the arms of Kyle, but it didn’t seem to have happened.
Kyle, meanwhile, was looking at Sarah with a strange, curious expression.
She wondered if he could sense something had shifted between her and Ren, or whether Ren had said something to him.
“Ideas for your portrait, Kyle?”
He shrugged. “We’ll find a location,” he said. “We’ll know it when we see it.”
Dark had fallen by the time they arrived at their last shooting destination, a pebbly beach that stretched beneath rocky, striated cliffs. Sarah spotted a rock outcropping that rose up from the tide pools in strange, architectural towers.
“Kyle,” she called. “That spot is you.”
She posed him in a way that she knew would make him look bold and heroic, since that was Kyle’s whole thing, and borrowed Fred and Tanjul to help paint him and the rocky outcropping with flashlights. Kyle examined the photo and had thoughts, so they took three more versions before he was happy.