She shuffled towards him and he shuffled towards her and they met in the middle, the computer half on his lap, half on hers, their arms lightly brushing. The first shot on the screen was of a bunch of the kids in a huddle around the ball. It was taken looking up through their legs and put the viewer right in the middle of the action.
‘Oh wow.’ He glanced at her. ‘That’s amazing.’
Sweeney nodded. ‘They’re allsomuch better.’
They scrolled through them together, Sweeney occasionally trashing the odd picture, but most of them this time were keepers and would go into the desktop folder she’d been building.
Then they got to the ones she’d taken of him aeroplaning around the field and she knew exactly which one Mai should put up on Instagram. It was one she’d snapped after he’d leaped over her, rising above a stampede of little legs. None of the kids’ faces were visible, just their backs and the backs of their heads as Fin looked over his shoulder at them, his arms out wide in full zoom, a large patch of blue sky overhead. He was laughing, his dark hair flying from being in motion and, all around him, lifted in rock-star-like adoration, were a dozen pairs of hands reaching for him.
Just looking at it made her happy. Made her heart gokerthunk!
She’d managed to quickly snap about a dozen pics in sequence, butthisone wastheone. ‘Money shot,’ she said.
He nodded. ‘Money shot.’
She glanced at him. ‘You were really good today.’
‘Thanks to you.’
‘We make a good team.’
‘Right? I mean we obviously should have got engaged years ago. We could probably have taken over the world by now.’
Sweeney laughed, fisting her hand for a side bump, which he gave. The truth was, they’d always made a good team. But tonight, she was giving credit where credit was due. ‘Nah, it was all you. I just planted the seed.’
‘If you’re about to burst into dreadful nineties soft rock, I’m out of here.’
Well, she wasnow. ‘But, Fin…’ She batted her eyelids. ‘We walked in the garden.’
As teens the two of them had played the Heart song about a million times to giggle over the words and, in their last year of high school when home karaoke machines had become a thing to do at birthday parties, they had chosen it—to be all cool and ironic, of course—as their go-to karaoke song.
‘Sweeney. No,’ he protested.
She ignored him and sang the chorus.
‘Stop,’ he interrupted, placing a hand on his belly as he laughed. ‘I’m begging you.’
She stopped on a laugh of her own. ‘Spoilsport.’
‘Those lyrics have not improved with the years.’
‘Unlike us, who have clearly come into our superpowers.’
They laughed some more before it petered out. ‘You’re pretty chipper,’ he said, ‘for someone who’s just had her international flight cancelled.’
Sweeney shrugged. ‘Volcanos are going to volcano, I guess.’ Disruptions to her travel did sometimes happen due toacts of godor things like airline strikes and pandemics, but Veronica, her boss, always managed a workaround or was able—usually—to quickly reassign her.
She had no reason to doubt this time would be any different.
‘There’s no point being mad about something nobody has any control over. Covid travel disruptions were the worst and we got through that.’
Everything had been way trickier and there’d been many months with not a lot of jobs on offer, but she’d weathered the ups and downs of that and thankfully had enough financial reserves to hang on until the situation improved again.
He nodded. ‘Your mum didn’t seem very heartbroken.’
‘Oh?’ Sweeney cocked an eyebrow. ‘However could you tell?’
Laughing, Fin shook his head. ‘When did those two become so Machiavellian?’
