“Finn.”
“You absolute legend.” He said it loud enough that the relaxed older couple from the pool, now two tables over, turned and beamed at me without yet knowing what they were beaming about.
“Look at you. Look at you,” Finn continued. “You’re walking different. You’ve got a different walk, Mark! You came in here like a man who’s been somewhere wonderful and isn’t planning to apologize for it.”
“I went for a walk.”
“You didnotjust go for a walk.” He pointed at me with the betrayed fork he’d retrieved from his plate. “I know your walking face. This is not your walking face. This is a completely different face. This is a face I’ve never once seen on you in four years, and I’ve seen you drunk, hungover, food-poisoned, and that one time you cried at a dog food commercial.”
“I didn’t cry at the—”
“You misted, Mark. I was there. You misted at a golden retriever.” He waved the subject away. “But neverthis.Thisis new.Thisis a man who has been thoroughly and comprehensively—”
“Finn.”
“—relaxed.” He coughed through the word as though masking a public curse.
I picked up a menu and held it in front of me like a shield.
It didn’t work.
Nothing worked.
Finn O’Brien in full flight is a force, and I was a man with a laminated dinner menu bracing himself against the oncoming tide.
“So,” he said, lacing his fingers together and leaning in. “Tell me everything. Start at the beginning. You walked down to the cove—”
“I’m not telling you anything.”
“You walked down to the cove,” he continued, undeterred, “the two of you, alone, no camera between you for once—”
“How do you know there was no camera?”
His eyes lit up like I’d handed him a wrapped present. “I didn’t know. I guessed. And your face just confessed its truth.” He cracked his knuckles. “Oh, this is going to be even better than I hoped.”
I groaned and rubbed my face, the useless menu returned to the table.
“So, he put the camera away. The man whose entire personality is shown through a lens, put the camera away.For you. Mark, that’s practically a marriage proposal in photographer.”
“It’s not—”
“What happened next?”
“We swam.”
“You swam.” He nodded slowly, the way a detective nods at a suspect who’s just said something gloriously stupid. “And after you swam?”
“We talked.”
“You talked.” He was savoring each word now, rolling it around. “And during this swimming andthis talking, at any point, did the two of you happen to—”
“I’m getting the fish.”
“—because here’s the thing, Mark,” he barreled on, “you’ve got sand in places a man only gets sand if he’s been lying down somewhere he had no business lying down. I can’t see it, but I can sense it. You’ve got a mark on your neck that you are very pointedly not covering with your collar, which means either a jellyfish attacked you with remarkable precision or—”
I clapped a hand over my neck.
This was, I realized a half second too late, another confession.
