“He’s in love,” Finn wheezed, pointing a dripping finger at me, “and it’s the funniest thing that’s ever happened to me. Carlos, keep going. Don’t stop on his account. Make him do the invisible chair again. I want him to suffer beautifully.”
Carlos made me do the invisible chair again.
Wes took another picture.
And I stood there in chest-deep water surrounded by nude strangers and a drowning Irishman, being photographed mid-squat by a man I could not stop thinking about.
That’s the exact moment I realized, with the slow structural certainty I brought to the things I was most sure of, that I was done for. I abruptly understood that whatever this was had stopped being a vacation thing. I was going to spend the rest of this trip, and possibly some meaningful stretch of my life beyond it, thinking about Wes Calloway.
“You’re doing it again.” Brenda elbowed me gently.
“I know,” I said, startled by my own admission.
“It’s nice, dear.” She patted my arm with a wet hand. “Took me till I was fifty. You’re early.”
Across the pool, Wes packed up his tripod, slung the camera over his shoulder, and pointed up thebeach path with a questioning tilt of his head.
“Go on, then!” Finn called after me from the steps, recovered enough to be insufferable again. “Go for your walk! Mind the light!”
I didn’t hesitate.
I climbed out of that pool and went for my walk.
I did not mind the light.
I minded nothing at all.
For a man who had spent thirty-some years minding everything, it was the strangest and best feeling in the world.
I chased that feeling down a beach path, toward a man with a camera and a flask and a grin that rearranged his whole face, and I didn’t look back at the pool even once.
Chapter 8
We didn’t talk on the walk down. That was new.
The first time we’d made this trip, Wes had filled the path with easy chatter, the kind a person uses to put another at ease. Somewhere over the last day, we’d stopped needing it. Now, we just walked. His camera bag bumped against his hip. The sound of the water grew louder as the path dropped toward the cove.
The quiet between us had slipped from a thing I tolerated to a thing I’d begun to want.
The cove was ours now. By some unspoken arrangement, the universe had kept it empty both times we’d come. Only the black shoulder of rock and the still blue water and the shade where Wes set his bag down with care surrounded us.
This time, though, he didn’t reach for the camera.
That was the second new thing.
The other time we’d come down here,his camera had been our excuse, the reason a working man could justify an afternoon at a beach. Today, he left it zipped in the bag and turned to face me instead.
I think we had both finally stopped pretending this was about the light.
“You’re not taking pictures?”
“Nothing down here I want to photograph today.” He held my eyes when he said it, and the meaning sat there in the open between us, unhurried and inviting. I felt the back of my neck go warm in a way that had nothing to do with the sun drenching my skin.
I’ve never been good at this part. I want that on the record. I spent twenty years being the largest, quietest thing in any room. Somewhere along the way, I decided—consciously or not—that it was safer to wait than to reach out. Reaching meant a man could step back. Most of them did. I had a whole architecture built around not reaching.
Wes had spent four days quietly dismantling it without ever once making me feel the walls come down.
“Then what do you want to do?”
