Chapter 2
“Take your shirt off,” I told Rafe.
His grin arrived before the fabric cleared his head. “Finally. A professional who understands the brand.”
“The brand is surf instruction. I need to see what your shoulders do when you paddle.”
“That is the nicest thing anyone has ever said about my shoulders.”
“I didn’t say they were nice. I said they were operational.”
Behind me, Gray made a sound that might have been a laugh if someone had put it through industrial compression. Cole just took another drink of coffee.
It was eight twelve in the morning, my first official workday in Cape Mercy, and I had already learned three things.
First, the coffee in the beach house was strong enough to alter bone density.
Second, three single fathers could get three children out the door for school with less shouting than Evan had required to leave for a wedding with a packed camera bag.
Third, Rafe considered clothing an obstacle to both commerce and self-expression.
The Tide & Timber yard sat behind a weathered marina storefront a few blocks from the house.
Beyond it, docks reached into bright blue water chopped by a steady southwest breeze.
The place smelled like fuel, salt, sunscreen, coffee, wet rope, and fresh-cut wood from Gray’s open repair bay.
Boats rocked against their lines. Gulls screamed at tourists with the confidence of organized crime.
I had been there twenty-three minutes and already wanted to photograph everything.
Which was good, because that was literally why they were paying me.
I crouched in the sand beside Rafe’s board and checked the frame on the back of my camera. “Walk it down like you’re about to teach someone who has never touched a surfboard. Don’t pose.”
“I am physically incapable of not posing.”
“I’ve noticed. Fight through it.”
He tucked the board under one arm and started toward the water.
I shot three frames and stopped. “No.”
Rafe turned. “I barely had time to disappoint you. That’s usually date two.”
“You’re carrying it like you’re carrying a surfboard for a photo. Carry it like you’re carrying a surfboard for work.”
Something shifted in his face. Not offense. Attention.
He adjusted his grip, glanced at the water, and started again. This time his body settled into purpose. Board balanced against his hip. Bare feet finding the packed edge of wet sand without looking. Head turning automatically toward the break.
There.
I held the shutter through six quick frames.
“What changed?” Cole asked from behind me.
I lowered the camera. “He stopped trying to be attractive.”
Rafe looked wounded. “You could have let me keep one thing.”
I checked the last image. Sun hit the wet edge of his shoulder and picked up the line of water below his feet. He looked strong, relaxed, and competent instead of like a man auditioning to sell me aftershave.
“Unfortunately, you’re still attractive. We’ll fix it in post.”
Rafe’s laugh was immediate and unguarded.
I shot that too.
He pointed at me. “Sneaky.”
“Efficient.”
Cole’s mouth did that almost-smile again.
I was beginning to understand that photographing these men was going to require three completely different forms of psychological warfare.
Rafe wanted the camera to like him, so my job was to catch him forgetting it existed.
Cole distrusted anything he could not assess for risk, including apparently having his picture taken.
Gray looked at the lens like it was a poorly installed cabinet hinge he had not decided whether to repair or remove.
Excellent.
Easy subjects were boring.
We moved from the beach to the marina because I wanted a first-pass library of each man’s actual work before I started building the larger campaign. No staged sunglasses. No pointing at blank horizons. No crossed arms in front of the company sign like a regional plumbing website.
Real work first. Then I could decide what the visual story needed.
Cole’s boat was a twenty-six-foot center-console tied along the inside dock. He stepped aboard, checked the lines, and looked at me where I stood on the finger pier with a camera body against my chest.
“Before you climb down here,” he said, “deck isn’t dry yet. Shoes have grip?”
I looked at my sneakers. “Yes.”
“Bag zipped?”
“Yes.”
“Strap secure?”
“Cole,” Rafe called from shore, “she has survived thirty years without your safety briefing.”
Cole did not look away from me. “And I’d like the streak to continue.”
That should not have done anything to me.
It did something to me.
Not a lot. Just a small, annoying internal click, like my body had quietly checked a box my brain had not authorized.
I stepped aboard after he gave me room. “Anything else, Captain OSHA?”
“Don’t step on the gunwale.”
“I wasn’t planning to.”
“Good.”
“Was that flirting?”
His eyes met mine.
There was a pause long enough to become interesting.
“No,” he said.
From the dock, Rafe shouted, “Coward.”
Cole kept looking at me. “That was.”
Heat went through me so fast I nearly missed focus.
I lifted the camera before he could see what he’d done. “Stand at the helm.”
“I do that most days.”
“Today you do it photogenically.”
He was terrible at being photographed on command.
Not because he looked bad. The man could have been photographed through a dirty windshield at a county landfill and still come out unfairly attractive.
The problem was that the second he knew I was watching, his face shut down into neutral competence.
I took four frames of Captain Respectable Brochure and lowered the camera.
“What’s the wind doing?” I asked.
His gaze went past me to the flags at the marina entrance. “Southwest, twelve to fifteen. Building later. Storm chance after lunch if the heat keeps climbing.”
“How can you tell without checking your phone?”
That got me a look.
“I checked my phone.”
I laughed.
His expression changed, just slightly, in response.
Click.
I caught it.
“Again,” I said. “Tell me what would make you cancel a charter.”
He forgot to hate the camera for almost four minutes while he explained wind, lightning, visibility, and the difference between a customer being disappointed and a captain making a stupid decision because money was attached to it.
I photographed his hands on the wheel. His profile against the windshield. The way he glanced at the sky before he glanced at his instruments. The lines at the corners of his eyes when Rafe yelled from shore that safety was bad for social media.
By the time Cole realized I had stopped asking questions just to keep him talking, I had the shot.
Not a handsome man on a boat.
A captain.
I showed him the frame.
He stared at it for a second.
“I look tired.”
“You look like you know what you’re doing.”
“Those aren’t mutually exclusive.”
“Exactly.”
His thumb rested near mine at the edge of the camera screen. Not touching. Close enough that I noticed anyway.
He looked at the image again.
“Use it,” he said.
That should not have felt like trust.
It did.
Gray’s repair bay was cooler than the dock and somehow dirtier in a way that felt organized.
Tools lived on shadow boards. Clamps hung in rows.
A half-restored wooden skiff occupied the center of the space, its hull sanded pale where old finish had been removed.
On one bench sat labeled containers of fasteners, resin supplies, gloves, respirators, and three sharpened pencils lined up with military intent.
“You alphabetize screws, don’t you?” I asked.
Gray looked at me. “By type and size. Alphabetizing would be stupid.”
I loved him a little for that answer.
Not romantically. Probably.
“What are you actually doing this morning?”
“Repairing a cracked rub rail and replacing a section of trim somebody previously fixed with filler and optimism.”
“Perfect.”
“The failed repair?”
“The honesty.”
His gaze sharpened.
I set one camera on the bench, switched lenses, and moved to the opposite side of the skiff. “Ignore me.”
“That seems unlikely.”
“Pretend I’m an invoice.”
“I never ignore invoices.”
“You people are making my job difficult in very specific ways.”
Gray went back to work.
He was easier than Cole because he did not perform for the lens at all. He also did not help me. If I wanted the angle, I had to find it around his actual task.
Good.
I watched his hands.
That was a professional decision for almost seven seconds.
His fingers were broad, scarred in small places, precise around the edge of the damaged wood. He marked a line, checked it twice, then shaved a thin curl from the replacement piece with a block plane. The motion was controlled and patient. No wasted force.
My brain, recently betrayed and apparently seeking fresh opportunities for humiliation, supplied several non-boatbuilding applications for that kind of patience.
I changed my angle.
Gray glanced up. “Problem?”
“No.”
“You made a face.”
“I am an artist. We make faces.”
“That wasn’t an art face.”
I brought the camera up. “Keep talking and I’ll make you smile for the website.”
He looked genuinely alarmed.
I won.
Ten minutes later, I had detail shots of wood shavings, scarred hands, the Tide & Timber logo on the breast of his navy work shirt, and one frame where Gray leaned close to sight down the trim line with such absolute concentration that the rest of the shop fell away behind him.
I checked the histogram, then the doorway.
The light had changed.
Outside, the clean morning blue was developing a bruise along the western horizon.
“Cole,” I called.
He appeared at the bay opening almost immediately, which told me he had been watching the same sky.
“Yeah.”
“How much time?”
“Dock gear comes in now. We can keep working inside.”
Rafe materialized behind him. “We could get five minutes on the paddleboards first.”
Cole said, “No.”
Rafe looked at me. “Creative director?”
Every old instinct I had told me to squeeze it in. Be flexible. Make the client happy. Get the extra shot. Prove I was worth the money.
Then I looked at the sky again.