Ren sat the rest of the way up in bed and watched her for a moment. “Kyle told me he invited you to have dinner with him. Is that okay?”
She waved a hand. “I think I gave him a vague enough answer that I should be able to dodge that,” she said, her eyes back on her laptop.
“Do you want to dodge it?” He was watching her closely, like he was trying to read her thoughts.
“He’s not my type.”
“Millionaires with private planes aren’t your type.” Ren’s mouth crooked up at one corner.
Sarah dropped her voice in an imitation of Kyle: “‘I push through until dawn. It’s my triathlon training.’ He’s probably one of those guys who asks you how many books you’ve read this year just so he can point out that he’s read more.”
“It’s just interesting,” Ren said.
“What’s interesting?”
“You told me that you weren’t dating right now, and you didn’t say that about him. You didn’t say, ‘I’m not dating right now.’”
Right. Sarah had forgotten about her ‘no dating’ policy. “Well, the difference is that I couldn’t have anything real with him, so it didn’t matter.”
He looked at her curiously, and something inside her twinged with nerves; there was something in Ren’s expression that she couldn’t put a name to. She looked away when her phone buzzed.
“It’s Rita,” Sarah said. “They wanted me to go on a boat tour with them today.”
Ren was still watching her. “Sarah?—”
“I’ll go meet them in the lobby.”
She fled the room.
When she arrivedin the lobby, she was pleased to find that Selassie and Rita had talked Binita into coming on their boat tour as well.
“I don’t need as much sleep as my husband does. It is from being a surgeon. I learned to cope with no sleep, but Tanjul is a lawyer so he is soft,” Binita explained with the deadpan humor that Sarah was realizing was her trademark.
They drove down the hill to one of the docks on the bay, getting in line for a small cruise boat that held about thirty tourists. Soon they were aboard, cruising around past small houses, out into the Atlantic, and then back again.
The day was lovely and cool, a perfect, breezy summer afternoon, aside from…
“Clouds,” Binita observed.
There were fingers of clouds reaching across the sky—nothing serious in terms of spoiling the weather—but clouds would be a problem when photographers were trying to get pristine shots of the Milky Way.
“Can’t Ren do something about those?” Rita joked. “I’m going to be demanding my money back.”
“I’ll see what we can arrange,” Sarah promised. “We’ll make some phone calls.”
She stood alone on the deck for a while, thinking about how she was fired and how she ought to be more worried, and then let the thought drift away with the wind. She hadn’t gone on a trip like this in a very long time.
The whole groupmet after lunch to review everyone’s photos from the night before. Kyle’s shots—on his ten-thousand dollar camera—were compelling but without a lot of heart, Sarah thought, like he wanted to get in as much of the space and the sky as possible, using wide lenses to exaggerate the vastness. Jack seemed frustrated with his output, though none of it looked especially bad: he had gotten one shot of the Milky Way arcing down towards a rocky outcropping that was quite beautiful. Seemingly boring Silicon-Valley Cole had a surprisingly clever eye for lovely foreground elements like plants and flowers against his backdrops of stars and sky. His were among her favorites. That was one of the magical things about visual art, Sarah had always thought. You couldn’t always match people’s work to their external personality. Sometimes people showed hidden depths.
Then they reached Sarah’s shot of Selassie, posed like a sea siren on the boulder, and the room burst out in a mixture of amusement and delight.
“That is fantastic,” Ren said decisively.
On the big conference room screen, the photo was even better. Selassie was arching backwards on the rock, one leg kicked up, and from her toes the whole Milky Way seemed to rise like a magical mist. Around her on the rocks were a tangle of seaweed and scattered seashells. She was lit from the side with Sarah’s pop flash, emphasizing her long torso, but Rita had also given her side light from the flashlight to give her more depth. She looked like a queen of the stars, Sarah thought.
“That goes above your fireplace!” Binita said.
“I want one of those for me,” Tanjul announced. “But I will have both arms up like the Milky Way is shooting from my hands.”
