Sarah smiled. “No.”
“Good,” Kyle said. “Because I think Elka is going to get him into bed. I’ve been on about ten of his workshops, and I don’t think I’ve ever seen him successfully fend off a very beautiful woman except when he was with Freya. And she started as a workshop attendee.”
Sarah’s heart sank a little…not that it should, because she didn’t care one way or the other. “Honestly,” she said, “it’s none of my business.”
The location for the night’s shoot was different from the place she had scouted with Ren the night before—they would not be returning to that rocky field quite yet. Tonight, they were at a trailhead that led to some cliffs looking out over the ocean, with a narrow trail down to the beach. It was a pretty spot, glowing like a creamsicle in the last light of sunset.
Ren approached their car from where he had just arrived with Elka, and Sarah tried and failed to interpret the atmosphere between them.
“Can you look after Rita and Selassie tonight?” Ren said. “Binita and Tanjul have a lot of specific questions, and Jack asked if I could talk him through things again. But Selassie and Rita seem like they’ll need help with just using their cameras if you’re up for it. They asked me if they needed a tripod tonight,” he added, rolling his eyes.
Night photography was pretty much impossible without a tripod because the camera shutter stayed open for so long that handheld work always looked blurry. That was rule number one, which meant that the women would need a lot of guidance.
“Of course,” Sarah replied.
Fortunately, Rita and Selassie seemed very content to be handed off to Sarah for the evening. They all put on headlamps and followed Ren and the rest of the group along the rocky trail about a kilometer down to a portion of the beach that Ren had selected as the location for the shoot. The sun was just disappearing into the sea.
“So Ren,” Kyle said in his take-charge voice, “you and I talked about going south, right?”
“Yes, we did,” Ren agreed. He addressed the group. “We can divide up the group, half north, half south. Everyone should stay on the beach, but you can spread out. High tide is in four hours so we may need to move to higher ground then. Make sure you tell me or Sarah and whoever drove you here if you decide to turn in early or leave in a different car. No photographer left behind, eh?”
The group scattered over about a kilometer of beach, but all roughly within sight of each other, pointing their cameras at the cliffs and the stars and the sea. Sarah helped the two women put together their gear in the fading light of magic hour.
The evening continued pleasantly enough as Sarah reviewed the basics with the women. Selassie and Rita weren’t a couple, Sarah discovered; they were two best friends who had started taking a yearly trip together three years ago, when Rita’s children were moving out of the house to go to college. Now they made a habit of doing something cool together each summer.
“This was Selassie’s year to pick,” Rita said. “My year was scuba diving.”
“The first year, we worked on a ranch,” Selassie called. “And my ass was sore for weeks.”
The nice thing about the women was that they weren’t too picky about the content of their shots. In fact, they seemed to be thrilled with all the photos they took: first some photos of the Milky Way and the sliver of moon (which would be a new moon the following night), then photos of the ocean in long exposure. If you left your shutter open long enough, the water started to look like it was pouring over the rocks like a veil, a technique that Sarah could teach them easily. They took photos of a cliff-face while Sarah helped them graze it with the gentle touch of a flashlight. They took photos of the moon reflected in a tiny tide pool. The women needed everything explained to them three times, but they were having a great time laughing and complimenting each other’s work.
“Did you think about my mermaid idea?” Sarah asked at last.
“We brought swimsuits!” Selassie said. “But we didn’t put them on. Come on, Rita. Let’s get changed.”
“It’s cold!” Rita said with a sigh. Sarah found them an area protected by rocks to change into their swimsuits. When they emerged, though, only Selassie had changed.
“She’s going to do it first,” Rita explained. Sarah inwardly sighed but then walked Selassie over to a large boulder about four feet tall that was close to them on the beach. Sarah helped Selassie find a comfortable position on the boulder while she sent Rita to collect some seashells and seaweed to decorate the area around her. In the background, the Milky Way arched up as the moon began to set behind the cliffs. Selassie laughed as she shivered in her swimsuit in the darkness but then draped herself dramatically backwards. Sarah encouraged her to shake her dark hair loose so that it covered part of her face, and Selassie spent a moment combing it out with her fingers. Then Sarah set up Rita to give some fill light from one side with a soft, battery-powered handheld light, while Sarah pulled out her flash, set up the tripod, and took a shot with a quick flash of light.
Just as she was leaning over to check out the result, she heard Ren’s horrified voice from fifty meters away.
“Did someone just use aflashin my workshop?”
“It was me!” Sarah called. “It’s going to look amazing! Wait and see!”
“You’re killing me, Drakenberg!” he called back.
Sarah and Rita rushed over to check out the shot. It looked rather fabulous, Sarah could acknowledge: Selassie was arching over a rock with seaweed draped around her like some legendary sea siren, the sparkling trail of the Milky Way curving above her to the heavens. It just needed a few adjustments.
So Rita and Sarah took the shot again. And again. And again.
By one a.m., the women both announced that they were exhausted.
“Long day flying in from Toronto,” Rita said. They lived in the city only thirty minutes from Sarah, it turned out.
“I just hope we can find our way back to the hotel,” Selassie said. “She almost made three wrong turns coming here and we were following someone.”
“I can lead you back to the hotel in Ren’s car,” Sarah said.
