His hands were warm. In the mornings. The balcony was cold before the sun came up and his hands were warm and he put them on my face and said my name, not the name they call me in the locker room, the other one, the one that is mine, and I could feel the ocean fourteen floors below us and his hands on my jaw and the morning everywhere.
"Please." The word comes out rough and small and stripped of everything I have used to fill rooms for three months. "I need Mercy."
The room goes soft. Marchetti is on the edge of the bed. Brooks is in the chair by the window. They are talking and the words are far away.
My eyes close. The phone is on the nightstand, face-down. Blue water and white railing and palms that no one can see from this angle.
Twenty-eight.
I go under.
?
Chapter 17: Wes
THEN
The sand is warm under my feet and Luca is ahead of me, walking at the water's edge with his jeans rolled to his calves and his shoes in one hand. The beach is wide and flat and the afternoon sun is low enough to turn everything gold. He has been walking ten steps ahead of me since we hit the sand.
He turns. "Are you going to walk or are you going to photograph the sand?"
"I'm walking."
"You've been standing in that spot for a full minute. I counted."
"I'm looking at the water."
"You look at water every morning from the balcony. This is the same water."
"It's not the same water. Different angle. Different light."
I raise the camera. He is standing in the surf with the wind pushing his hair sideways and his face turned toward me. I take the frame. He doesn't pose. He just stands there with his shoes in his hand and his feet in the wet sand and the whole ocean behind him like it showed up to be in his photograph.
"Did you just take my picture?"
"I took a picture of the water. You happened to be standing in it."
"I did not happen to be standing in it. I am the focal point." He raises one finger. "Show me."
I walk to him and hold the screen out. His feet in the wet sand. The water pulling back around his toes. The light catching the tops of his feet and the sun behind him and the whole afternoon held in one frame.
"That's a nine," he says.
"The water or the photo?"
"The feet. The feet are a nine."
He looks at me and then he looks past me at the beach. The couple walking their dog. The woman under an umbrella reading thirty yards up the shore. Two men standing close together at the water's edge and the entire open afternoon not caring.
We find ourselves at a restaurant on a side street, two blocks from waterfront. Tile floors, ceiling fans turning slow, a patio that faces the ocean. Luca picks the outside table. He has picked the outside table every night since we arrived.
"The ceviche," he tells the server, "and whatever he's having."
"The grouper is fresh. I called ahead."
"You are the most thorough person I have ever been on vacation with."
"I'm the only person you've been on vacation with."
