“Your watch.” She straightened and faced him. The wind pushed her hair across her face and she shoved it back. “I’m a tenant, Clint. I pay rent. I’m not a child you need to herd indoors.”
“Then stop acting like one.”
The rain was coming harder now, fat drops that splattered on the stone path and darkened the shoulders of his shirt. Behind him, the courtyard garden was bending under the wind, the sea oats and native grasses whipping sideways.
“Excuse me?”
“You heard me.”
“I heard a man who fixes gutters for a living telling a professional photographer how to assess risk. You want to explain the logic there?”
His expression shifted. His arms uncrossed and his hands went to his hips. “This isn’t about gutters.”
“No, it’s about control. You can’t stand that someone on this property is doing something you didn’t plan for. You’ve got your checklist and your little kingdom of maintenance tasks. Anyone who colors outside the lines makes you nervous.”
“That’s not what this is.”
“Then what is it? Because from where I’m standing, it looks like you walked out into a storm you keep telling me is dangerous, just so you could order me around.”
He didn’t have an answer for that. Or he did, but it caught somewhere between his jaw and his mouth. The rain filled the silence between them.
“You want to stand out here because it makes you feel something,” he said finally. “I get it. But that’s not a reason to risk getting hit by a flying branch.”
“You don’t know why I’m out here.”
“Sure I do.” He took a step closer. Rain ran down his face and he didn’t wipe it away. “Same reason you sit on that beach every morning for an hour and don’t take a single picture. Same reason you spent last week photographing a drainage grate like it was the Sistine Chapel. You’re looking for something to make you feel alive, and you keep picking the things that can’t.”
“That’s not fair.”
“You’ve been here for months, Melissa. Hiding behind that camera, not talking to anyone, not doing anything real.” He was almost shouting now, but it wasn’t anger. It was frustration, raw and graceless. “Maybe I’d trust your judgment if you showed any.”
The rain hit her face. She blinked it away and stared at him and felt the words rip through her. Quick and clean, gone before she could grab them.
“You don’t get to talk to me like that.”
“Somebody has to.”
“No.” She shook her head. “No, they don’t. You don’t know anything about me. You don’t know what I’ve done or what I’m dealing with or why I’m here. You just see a woman with a camera who isn’t performing her life the way you think she should, and it bugs you. That’s your problem, Clint. Not mine.”
“I know more than you think.”
“Then you should know better than to stand in the rain lecturing me about it.”
They stared at each other. The wind gusted hard enough to rattle the tripod, and she reached down to steady it without breaking eye contact. Rain streamed off both of them. The palm fronds above the courtyard were horizontal now, and somewhere down by the water, something metal banged rhythmically against something else.
Clint’s jaw worked. He looked at the tripod, at her camera, at the sky, and back at her.
“Get your equipment inside. Please.” The please was an afterthought, tacked on like a spare part he’d found in his pocket.
“I’ll come in when I’m ready.”
“The storm’s not going to wait for you to be ready.”
“Then it’ll be just like everything else.”
She didn’t know where that came from. It slipped out before she could stop it, and it hung in the air between them, more honest than anything she’d said to anyone in months. Clint heard it. She could tell by the way his expression shifted, the hard line of his mouth softening for just a second before he caught it and put it back.
“Ten minutes,” he said. “Then I’m coming back out to drag you and your tripod inside myself.”
