“Sorry,” he muttered. “I just didn’t want her to think—”
“That you’d ever deign to date anext level ballet bratlike me,” Carly said. She saw his mouth drop open a little in what looked like shock and shame as she repeated his words back to him, but she was too annoyed to care. “That would be so embarrassing for you. You’re lucky they’ve already printed all the stuff, or she’d probably put some obscene typo on it as revenge. ‘Welcome to the wedding of Heather and Mucus,’ or something. You’d better apologize to her when she gets back.”
He nodded, avoiding her eyes. His cheeks were still pink. They stood in unfriendly silence for a few minutes, and then the woman returned from the back room holding a large box with HAYS+ CAMPBELLscrawled on the side in black marker. She placed it on the desk.
“Here you go,” she said quietly to Carly. “Do you want to take a look and make sure it’s all correct and accounted for?”
“No, thanks, um, what’s your name?” Carly asked.
“Geraldine,” the woman said uneasily, keeping her eyes on Carly, as if she wasn’t very eager for Nick to know her name. Carly couldn’t blame her.
“I trust you, Geraldine. And I’m sure it all looks great. I helped Heather pick the New York theme, you know,” she said proudly. “The street sign table names were my idea.”
Instead of numbered tables, each table would be named for a different place in New York City, like Lincoln Center or Washington Square Park. It would be a little taste of Heather’s home here in Sydney, surrounded mostly by Australian guests. Carly had joked that anyone Heather and Marcus didn’t like could be assigned a seat at Port Authority Bus Terminal, or at A 4 Train Car Full of Drunk Yankees Fans. Heather had rejected the suggestion, saying that last one would be hard to fit on a mocked-up street sign. But now Carly wished there was a table called Fifth Avenue at Christmastime When You’re Running Late for Something Important, so they could seat Nick there.
Geraldine pushed the box aside so she could check something on her computer. “It’s already paid in full, so you’re all set,” she said.
“Thank you,” Carly said, lifting the box and holding it against her hip. She waited for a moment, then cleared her throat and glanced over her shoulder, giving Nick a pointed look.
He ducked his head again, then took a few steps toward the desk until he was almost level with her.
“Euh, I’m very sorry,” he said to Geraldine. “I was rude, and I’m sorry. It was an easy mistake to make.”
She looked up and nodded at him warily. “No worries,” she said quietly. Carly gave a small, satisfied nod—and then decided that actually, no, she wasn’t satisfied.
“Nick actually doesn’t date at all. He’s never had a girlfriend,” she stage-whispered to Geraldine, ignoring Nick’s glower. “He’s got a rare congenital condition. You see, he was tragically born without a personality, and it makes life very difficult for him. Doctors have tried everything, but it’s incurable. There’s a foundation named after him and everything.”
Carly gave Geraldine a sly smile and arched one eyebrow, and Geraldine pressed her lips together, suppressing a smile. Carly could practically feel Nick’s irritation raking down her back, but it was worth it. She hoisted the box against her hip and turned, feeling the heat of his gaze between her shoulders all the way down the stairs.
Chapter 6
The next morning, Nick met Marcus at the beach early again, but this time he had no intention of going in the water. As Marcus carried his board down the sand and paddled out into the waves, Nick opened his camera bag and pulled out his Canon 70D and a wide-angle lens. It had been the first camera he’d bought, before he’d officially retired but long after he knew the end of his dancing career was approaching. He’d started bringing it to the ballet studios every day, and whenever he had a free hour between classes and rehearsals, he’d stick his head into a rehearsal studio and ask whoever was dancing in there if they minded him taking a few photos. Before he knew it, he’d taken hundreds and hundreds of shots of his colleagues, capturing them in blurry mid-flight and laid out flat on the floor in exhaustion. Of those hundreds of shots, he’d actually managed to take a few he loved.
It had been months now since he’d taken a photo he loved. Or maybe it was that it was harder to love them when he knew almost no one else would. Still, yesterday, when he and Marcus had been out on the water, he’d been struck almost breathless by how beautiful this place was, and by how much he’d missed it without even realizing it. He raised the camera and took a few warm-up shots of the cliffs that hugged the south side of the beach, where an ever-growing number of luxury homes hung precariously over the water. Then he turned and faced straight out to the ocean, adjusting his focus to try to capture a single surfer with the vast Pacific stretching out behind her and the long horizon on either side of her board. He’d had plenty of practice photographing around the Seine, but a roiling surf beach was more challenging to capture than a river.
He kept an eye on Marcus’s bright green board as he walked this way and that along the sand at the water’s edge, trying to capture each surfer as they clambered onto their boards. They were strong and graceful, not unlike dancers, and it seemed to him that the only way they stayed upright on their boards was by attuning their bodies to the waves, the way a dancer in a pas de deux learned to read their partner’s body. When they became unattuned, out of sync with the wave, they toppled off their boards and crashed into the surf. Unlike Marcus, he’d never learned to do more than bodysurf, but he made a mental note to ask his friend about his theory on the similarities between dancing and surfing.
After about fifteen minutes, he checked the screen and scrolled through the photos he’d taken so far, then sighed and turned the camera off. They were shit shots. Utter shit. For perhaps the hundredth time, he heard Delphine’s exasperated sigh echo in his head.Putain, Nick, on n’est pas photographe simplement parce qu’on achète un appareil photo et se declare photographe!
He shook his head and put the camera back in its bag, and, slinging the case over his shoulder, strode back up the beach. His plan to spend the morning taking photos seemed stupid now.
He thought of the confidence he’d feigned for the hotel waitress the other day, how easy it had been to pretend that he was steady and successful and turning down jobs left and right. He could keep doing that. Fake it til you make it, right? As far as anyone here was concerned, as far as Marcus, Heather, and any random waitresses had to know, he was a professionally successful photographer. As far as Carly had to know, he was the Annie Liebovitz of dance photography.
Carly. She’d thoroughly shamed him at the printer’s office yesterday. He’d seen her angry before—several times, in fact, and they’d barely known each other a few days. But it turned out that Carly angry on her own behalf was nothing compared to Carly angry on someone else’s. The look on her face when she’d reprimanded him for being rude to the receptionist was something to behold. Before, when she’d been angry about something he’d said to her, she’d been indignant and loud and her anger had flared quick and hot, like a match catching and burning out a few seconds later.
But when she’d demanded an apology on the other woman’s behalf, he was reminded of the blue flames at the very base of a fire, the hottest and longest-burning ones. Her voice had gone quiet and threatening, and her face had become eerily calm and still. As if she already knew that she was going to extract an apology from him and the only question was how well he was going to grovel. If she was a brat, he’d thought grudgingly at that moment, she’d also figured out how to use her brattiness for good. What would it be like, he’d wondered, to have someone that fierce willing to demand justice on your behalf? Not someone like Carly, obviously; she’d burn down an entire city block just to avenge him if another car cut him off in traffic. But, someone. And just as he had when they’d been staring each other down across the beach, he’d felt something long-dead stir to life in his chest. A flash of colour in the vast grey expanse that had been his life lately. So he’d apologised, and she’d seemed mollified—and then she’d turned around and embarrassed him in front of that woman for no good reason.Tragically born without a personality?Better than way too much personality.
And he had to spend today with her, again. Their task today was to pick up the wedding bands from the jeweller, a job Carly didn’t want to miss and that Nick didn’t trust her to complete alone. So later that morning, he presented himself outside her apartment building, showered and shaved, fed and caffeinated, and ready to drive into the city. When he pulled up, he saw Carly sitting on the front steps of the building in a short, sleeveless khaki-green dress and sneakers. He honked the horn, and she glanced up and then made a show of reluctantly standing and walking to the car.
“Good morning to you, too,” he said, after she had thrown herself into the seat, slammed the door, and crossed her arms tight across her chest. She said nothing.
“Can you buckle your seatbelt, please?”
“Just drive, okay? We’ve got errands to run.” Her voice was scratchy and she sounded exhausted.
“I’m not going to drive until you buckle your seatbelt,” he said. “Come on. Click clack, front and back.”
She rolled her eyes and pulled the belt across her body, and he heard the sharp metallic snap over the sound of her sigh.
