“An excellent choice,” the clerk said, and I couldn’t for the life of me tell whether or not he wasmocking me, which I respected.
Finn handed me my key card. I’d come this far, flown four hours, and wrestled three suitcases off a shuttle. I’d held my ground in a lobby full of strangers’ bodies, and I’d decided, in the stubborn way I decided most things, that I was going to wring one good week out of this if it killed me.
That was the exact moment I turned around and froze.
A man stood near the entrance to the pool deck, half in shadow under the overhang. The first thing I noticed, the thing that caught my eye out of all the bright, bare chaos of the place, was that he was fully clothed. He wore a soft gray henley pushed up at the sleeves, dark shorts, and scuffed canvas shoes that had clearly walked a lot of places.
He was lean in the way of a man who moved for a living rather than lifted, all rangy economy, maybe an inch or two under my height but built on a different blueprint entirely. Dark hair, a little long, was shoved back off his forehead by a pair of sunglasses he’d nested up there and forgotten. His jaw was covered by a few days of stubble that didn’t look planned so much as allowed. Everything about him said he’d packed for work and ended up somewhere that didn’t want any.
He held a camera in both hands, a real one, heavyand serious, and he was frowning down at the little screen on the back of it with the particular furrow of a man whose work wasn’t cooperating.
Sensing someone staring, he glanced up. He took in my polo and my cargo shorts and the three suitcases stacked at my feet, the full catalog of a man who had clearly not read the brochure.
And he smiled.
Just slightly, just at one corner of his mouth. It was the helpless, private smile of one overdressed person recognizing another across a sea of the undressed.
I forgot, briefly, about the framing inspection.
I forgot, more briefly and more alarmingly, about being the most overdressed man on the island, because all at once I wasn’t.
There were two of us.
“Mark.” Finn was at my elbow, following my gaze. I heard the precise moment he understood. I heard the grin climb back into his voice, twice as wide as before. “Oh. Oh! That’s interesting.”
“Don’t,” I growled.
“Wouldn’t dream of it,” he lied.
Chapter 4
My garden suite turned out to be a low building set back from the main path, half swallowed by flowering vines that smelled like a candle store. It took me three trips to get all the luggage inside, during which Finn sat on the bed and offered commentary instead of help.
“You’ll not need most of that,” he said, watching me line my shoes up by the door out of habit. “You realize that, right? You’ve brought hiking boots to a place where the dress code is a tan.”
“I’m not discussing the dress code.”
“You’ll have to eventually. There’s a dinner tonight, a welcome reception. Says so on the card.” He waved the little welcome card at me. “And before you ask, yes, you can wear clothes to it. No, you don’t have to. And I’d pay real money to watch you try to read a menu while pretending very hard to maintain eye contact with a naked waiter.”
“I’m going to unpack,” I said as emotionless aspossible.
“You’re going to unpack three suitcases for five days? Of course you are.” He stood, stretched, and tossed the card onto the dresser. “I’m going to go be a person. There’s a swim-up bar, and I intend to introduce myself to it personally. Come find me when you’ve finished arranging your socks by season.”
And then he was gone, off into the bright afternoon in a T-shirt and a pair of trunks that were, I noted, well within the legal limits of his Clearwater pool incident, leaving me alone in a beautiful room.
So I unpacked.
It took twenty minutes and made me feel briefly like myself, like a man with a system in a world that rewarded systems. Then it was done, and I found myself standing in the middle of the room with nothing to organize and nowhere I was needed and the specific hollow panic of a man who had run out of tasks.
At home, I’d have found something to do: a drawer to fix, an email to send, a thing to measure.
Here, there was only the candle-store smell and the sound of the water and the knowledge that somewhere on this property Finn was making friends without me.
So I put on a fresh polo and a pair of cargo shorts, because I am who I am, and I went to find theswim-up bar.
I did not find the swim-up bar.
I foundhimfirst.
