And the table erupted.
I want to tell you I held the line.
I want to tell you I maintained my dignity.
I would love to reiterate that I’m a serious man, a businessman, a man with crews and trucks and a reputation.
I want to tell you I sat there stone-faced and unmoved while six near-strangers and one Irishman cackled at my expense in a dining room on a clothing-optional island.
But in truth?
I started laughing, too.
I couldn’t help myself.
It bubbled out of me the way the laugh had come up that first evening on the pool deck, easy and unforced and from somewhere I usually kept locked. Once it started, I couldn’t stop it. So I sat there in the middle of all of them, red-faced and caught and ridiculous, laughing at myself and the sixty dollars and the mooning like a bug and the whole absurdly impossible week. Finn watched me do it with his hand pressed to his chest like he was witnessing something sacred.
“There he is. Did you all see that?That’sthe man. That bloke’s been in there the whole time. I’ve been digging for him for years, and a fella with a camera found him in four days.”
“To Wes,” said Dale, lifting the drink Esteban had brought him.
“To the camera,” said the shorter one.
“To the good mouth,” said Esteban, mournfully, because he’d had Thursday.
“To sixty dollars,” said Brenda triumphantly.
“To Mark,” Finn said, hefting his own glass high above the table. The way he said it cut clean through the noise, all his teasing drained out of it for just a second, leaving something underneath that he rarelylet me see. He looked at me across a table full of people who’d known me for days and somehow loved me already, and his blue eyes were deliriously bright. “Who finally,finallyjumped into the pool.”
I looked at him.
Then at all of them.
“I jumped in the pool,” I agreed, and lifted my glass. My voice had gone a little rough.
“To getting in the pool!” the table roared, loud enough that other diners turned and raised their glasses, too, without knowing why.
Somewhere across the resort, I hoped Wes could hear it, because it was, in the end, entirely his fault.
I never did order the fish.
Chapter 11
The trouble with getting something you didn’t know you wanted is that it often comes with a clock attached.
I’m a man who has never in his life been able to ignore a clock.
Wes and I went back to the cove the next afternoon. It was Friday, our last full day, though neither of us said that out loud, as if not naming it might keep it from being true. Wes brought his camera this time but only used it to snap images of me when I wasn’t paying attention. The snaps brought my head around, had my hands and arms flying up to cover my face. He only laughed and insisted I let him capture the moment. So I did. I would’ve given him anything he asked for in that moment.
I’d spent the morning before the cove doing math.
I hadn’t meant to. It just happened.
I’d woken up happy, which was its own kind of alarming. Then my brain had done the thing italways did, the thing that made me good at my job and bad at most other things. It started counting. First it counted hours, then miles, then the distance between a man who lived in two bags and a man whose entire life was bolted to the ground in Tampa.
When we got to the cove, my brain wouldn’t stop.
Wes felt me doing it.
