He was set up at the far end of the pool deck, in the shade, his camera mounted now on a tripod and pointed out at the water, where the late sun was doing something admittedly spectacular. He’d changed nothing about himself since the lobby, wearing the same gray henley, the same forgotten sunglasses, and the same look of a man at war with his own equipment. He was crouched behind the viewfinder. As I strode up the path, he muttered something at the camera that I was fairly sure was more curse than compliment.
I should have kept walking.
I am not, by nature, a man who approaches strangers.
The size of me usually does the approaching for me, and it tends to send people the other way. So, over the years, I’d learned to hold still and let the world come to me, which it mostly didn’t.
But aside from Finn and the reception clerk, this camera dude was the only other clothed man I’d seensince the airport, and there’s a kind of solidarity in that, the way two people will nod at each other in the rain when everyone else has an umbrella.
“It’s the light,” I said.
He didn’t look up from the viewfinder. “What?”
“Whatever you’re swearing at. It’s not the camera. The camera’s fine. It’s the light. It’s too high and too hard right now. Everything’s going to blow out white where the sun hits the water, and there’s nothing you can do about it for another hour, maybe two.” I stopped, because he’d gone still behind the camera. I suddenly realized I’d just walked up to a stranger and told him how to do his job, which is one of the rudest things a person could do. I quickly corrected, “Sorry. I don’t know anything about cameras.”
Finally, he looked up.
Amber eyes blinked up at me. They were pale brown gone gold at the edges, set in a face that was all weather and good humor under its stubble.
“You don’t know anything about cameras,” he said slowly, “but you just diagnosed my exact problem in one sentence.”
“I know about light. I build things. You spend twenty years watching a job site and you learn what the sun does to a surface at every hour. It’s the difference between a wall that looks finished and onethat looks like garbage.” I shrugged, which on a man my size is a larger gesture than I sometimes intend. “Same sun, different surfaces.”
The guy straightened, a slow grin spreading across his face. That smile rearranged his whole expression in ways I felt land somewhere I wasn’t expecting—and definitely wasn’t ready for.
“A contractor,” he said. “Who reads light?”
“How’d you know I was a contractor?”
“Lucky guess.” He nodded at my chest, where DELGADO CONSTRUCTION lay stitched over my heart like the confession Ineeda Phalis had accused it of being. “That, and you’re the only other man on this entire island who packed a shirt with a collar. I clocked you in the lobby, figured we should form a union.”
“A union.”
“The Amalgamated Brotherhood of Men Who Did Not Read the Brochure.” He stuck out a hand. “I’m Wes, Wes Calloway. I shoot travel and food, mostly. I got hired to make this place look like paradise. Nothing in the contract mentioned I’d be the only person here wearing pants.”
I took his hand. It was warm and rough.
He held on a beat longer than a handshake strictly required.
Or maybe that was me. Maybe I was the one whoheld on.
“Mark,” I said. “Delgado, apparently, per the shirt.”
“Mark Apparently. Good to have you in the union, brother.”
I laughed. Then startled. Then clamped my lips shut.
It surprised me, the way it came out, easy and unforced, because I am not a man who laughs readily with strangers, or anyone, really. I’m a man who waits to see what people want from me, but I was pretty sure Wes Calloway didn’t want anything except to not be the last clothed man standing. There was something about being recognized across a crowd by another person who was hiding in the same place that took the weight off of my shoulders.
“So,” he said, turning back to the camera but not crouching this time. “An hour, you said, for the light?”
“Hour, maybe an hour and a half. Once the sun drops behind that headland, you’ll get the gold instead of the glare. Everything should go warm. That’s your shot.”
“You want to wait it out? I’ve got a flask in the bag and a professional obligation to stand here regardless.” He glanced at me sideways. There was something careful in it under the ease, like he’d putthe offer out and was bracing for it to be declined. “Unless you’ve got somewhere to be.”
I thought about Finn at the swim-up bar, almost certainly three drinks deep into a new friendship by now. I thought about my unpacked, organized, finished room with nothing left in it to need me. I thought, distantly and for the first time in hours, about the framing inspection and was mildly amazed to find I didn’t care.
“I’m on vacation. I’ve got nowhere to be,” I said, and realized as I said it that it was the truest thing I’d told anyone in a very long time.
