The flight included four hours of Finn narrating the in-flight movie into my ear while I pretended to sleep so I wouldn’t have to think about Reyes running my site. By the time we landed, the air coming through the jet bridge was thick and warm. It smelled like salt and flowers. Even I had to admit, somewhere under the part of me still doing math about framing inspections, that it was nice. I peeked out the window to find the sky was a clean postcard blue, and the resort shuttle waiting planeside was a van with its top cut off and seats the color of a parrot.
I spent a good portion of our shuttle ride wrestling three suitcases into a luggage rack built for the kind of person who travels like Finn. He spent it with his face tipped toward the sun and his eyes shut, grinning like a man collecting on a long-overduedebt. His duffel remained tucked under one arm like a pillow.
“You could help,” I said.
“I could,” he agreed, but didn’t even open an eye.
Once I’d wedged the last bag in, I watched the water slide past. He’d been right about the color. It really was the shade of mouthwash, that impossible blue-green. For one unguarded second, something in my chest loosened without my permission.
Then we pulled up to the resort, and I started to understand that I had not read the brochure.
The lobby was open air, all dark wood and ceiling fans and a long front desk made of something that had probably once been a single enormous tree. It was beautiful. It was also, I registered slowly, full of a great many people who were not wearing a great many clothes.
One man crossed the lobby in front of us wearing sandals, sunglasses, and a piña colada.
That was the complete inventory.
He nodded at us pleasantly, the way you’d nod at someone in an elevator, entirely at ease, and drifted off toward the pool.
I nearly missed a step.
Finn didn’t.
Because Finn had walked directly into the back of me, which is what happens when a narrow manfollows a large one without looking.
“Why’ve you stopped?” he said into my spine. Then he stepped around me, followed my line of sight, and went quiet in a way that, in four years, I’d heard maybe twice.
“Finn.”
“I see it.”
“Finn, that man is—”
“I see it, Mark.”
Two more guests drifted past the desk, equally unburdened by fabric, deep in conversation about brunch. Behind the desk, a clerk in a crisp linen shirt, blessedly and fully clothed, smiled at us with the practiced warmth of a man who had watched this exact realization land on a thousand faces and had either stopped finding it funny or started finding it so funny he’d had to go professional about it.
“Welcome to Cayo Verde,” the clerk said. “Checking in?”
I didn’t answer.
I was busy reading the small brass sign mounted tastefully beside the desk. It was the kind you’d walk past without a second look if you weren’t standing very still and beginning to sweat.
CLOTHING OPTIONAL THROUGHOUT THE RESORT.
Beneath that, in a smaller and somehowmore devastating font,
GUESTS ARE KINDLY REMINDED TO CARRY A TOWEL FOR SEATING.
“Clothing optional,” I said.
“It would appear so,” Finn said.
“A clothing-optional resort.”
“It’s a popular format, I’m told.”
“You told me it was a beach.”
