That landed somewhere under my ribs and stuck.
We stayed at the cove until the light went gold and then gray.
We didn’t fight, because there was nothing to fight about. There was no villain, nobody who’d done anything wrong, just two men sitting against a warm rock watching a clock neither of them could stop.
He took my hand at some point, lacing his fingers through mine. We sat like that and said nothing, and the nothing was the saddest thing I’d felt in years.
When we walked back up the path, he stopped at the top, where the light from the resort started, and he didn’t ask, “Same time tomorrow?” because tomorrow there’d be a van.
“For what it’s worth,” he said, “you’re wrong about the math; but you’re the only man I’ve ever met who’d be brave enough to be a coward out loud about it.” He kissed me softly, once, and it tasted like an ending. “Good night, Mark Apparently.”
I watched him walk off toward his room with his camera slung over his shoulder.
I stood at the top of the path a long time after he was gone.
For the first time all week, I had nowhere I wanted to be, because the only place I wanted to be was walking in the other direction, and I’d just talked myself out of it with a number.
Finn was waiting up when I got back to the room. He took one look at my face and every ounce of the giddy went out of him at once.
“Ah, no,” he said softly. “Mark, what did you do?”
“The sensible thing.”
“The sensible thing,” Finn repeated. There was no teasing now, none at all. He set down the drink he’dbeen holding and looked at me the way he’d looked at me across that drag show table a lifetime ago, like a man getting ready to fight me for my own good. “Sit down. We’re going to talk about the sensible thing, you and I, and you’re not going to like it.”
Chapter 12
Isat down, because when an Irishman usesthatvoice, the one with no music in it, you sit down.
He didn’t start right away.
He took his time, which wasn’t like him, screwing the cap off a bottle of water and handing it to me instead of the fruity vodka drink in his other hand. Then he sat on the edge of the other bed, elbows on his knees, and looked at me across the gap between them.
“Tell me what you said to him,” he said. “All of it. Don’t tidy it up for me.”
So I told him about the cove, Wes’s broken shell, his question about Saturday.
I told him about the sensible answer, the math, about Tampa and the foundation you can’t carry to Lisbon.
I told him all of it, laid out the way I’d laid it out for Wes, clean and reasonable and load-bearing.
I expected Finn to argue with the logic, but Finnnever argued the logic. That was his whole genius. He waited until I’d finished, and then he was quiet for a moment, and then he said something that took the floor out from under me.
“Do you remember,” he said, “what you told me the night we stopped dating?”
My whole face scrunched in confusion. “Finn—”
“Humor me. Do you remember?”
Of course I remembered.
Four years ago, six weeks into a thing that was never going to work, two men who loved each other wrong sat in a truck outside an old apartment. “I said we were better as friends.”
“You did, and you were right. God knows, I’d have driven you into the sea inside a year.” He almost smiled. “But that’s not the bit I mean. You said something after. You said, ‘I’m not built for the other kind of love, the big kind. I think some men just aren’t, and I’m one of them, and it’s better to know it than to keep disappointing people.’”
He let that sit there in the room between us. Outside our window, a couple strolled by, laughing in the way vacationers do when there’s no stress and a brilliant sunset.
“You’ve believed that about yourself for four years, Mark, probably longer. You still believe it. I can see it in your eyes and how you walk and everyword you speak. I’ve watched you build your whole life around your work, early mornings, staying late, never reaching for anything you weren’t certain you could hold. You decided a long time ago that the big kind of love wasn’t for you, and you arranged your entire existence so you’d never have to test it.”
