He considered for a moment. “This captures me better. At work.” He smiled and returned to his camera.
Selassie came by to ask for help with settings that would help make the trees look less silhouetted, and Sarah showed her how to do a bracketed series of photos at different exposures that she could combine in photo editing software later.
Ren approached, his jacket flapping in the wind as the sky turned grey-blue. He tilted his head towards where the clouds were blowing in ominously from the east.
“I think we have about ten minutes. You take the car back. I’m sticking around with Kyle for a bit.”
As he said the words, a warning drop of rain hit her cheek. “It’s going to pour.”
“We have ponchos,” he said. “We’ve done it before.”
“Knowing Kyle, he probably prefers it this way,” she said. “More of a challenge.”
“I’ll tell the others. You should move fast,” Ren said, as another gust smacked their faces with more droplets.
Sarah collected everyone to return back to the hotel, but Elka again insisted on staying behind. As they hurriedly packed their gear in their cars, Fred suggested a side trip to swing by a local pub on the way back.
“If we’re not shooting, we should be getting to know each other,” he insisted, ever the politician.
Sarah was pleased to discover that the pub that Fred had found nearby was a grungy little place with dartboards on the wall. It reminded her of the local watering hole in her hometown: unassuming but lively. They took over a corner table and ordered beers.
“I think Elka has her eye on Ren,” Cole observed as the drinks arrived.
Jack shrugged with his usual cynicism. “Yeah, I know guys like Ren. They don’t settle down. It’s why he gets along with Kyle. If a man is good looking enough, he doesn’t need relationships. He gets female companionship whenever he wants.”
“And sometimes when he doesn’t want it,” Binita said sagely.
Selassie shook her head. “The way he looks at you, though, Sarah… I think he’s in love with you.”
“No.” Sarah replied in a carefully gauged tone of dry amusement. “He’s just grateful I showed up last minute to help out.”
Grisha leaned back. “He liked that other one a lot. Freya.”
“How many of these have you been on?” Rita asked Grisha, and the conversation continued around her.
Sarah took a remote sense of satisfaction from the fact that people were talking about Ren’s love life so casually; it meant that none of them suspected how much it hurt her to hear about it. It meant that she had everyone fooled. She pressed her head back against the wooden booth, her eyes on the row of lights that hung from the ceiling. The light fixtures had the familiar glossy green lampshades that she always associated with cheap beer and bored waitresses, each one sending a jaundiced circle of light onto the table below. The thought came to her that she was good at hiding her feelings because she’d been dealing with her mother for her entire life. She had mastered the ‘everything’s fine, don’t worry about me’ performance early, probably when she started university and needed to reassure her mother almost daily by phone. She could do it so well that people could stab her in the heart and she wouldn’t flinch.
“So,” she said lightly, “what is everyone doing during the rainy day tomorrow? I think Ren wanted to fit some extra classroom time in, but we can work around your schedule if anyone has plans.”
Sarah was stillawake and working on her laptop when Ren made it back to their hotel room a couple of hours later. She slid up in bed, flipping on the light. She could see that the shoulders of his coat were dark.
“You got soaked,” Sarah said, her voice husky. She closed her computer.
“A little,” Ren said. “We had to call it a night.”
“I worried Kyle would insist on ‘pushing through.’”
“Oh, he tried,” Ren said wearily. It still felt strangely intimate to be sharing a room like this with him, watching him peel off his coat and slide off his shoes.
“Get anything good?” she asked.
He took his digital camera out of his bag and walked over to her bed to hand it to her before he continued unpacking gear. She flipped through some images. It looked like he, Kyle, and Elka had driven to a lighthouse and shot it in the fog, capturing the long beams of light disappearing into the fingering mists of rainfall.
“Damn it, Ren. These are gorgeous.”
He nodded. “Lighthouses are great in fog.”
“Which I guess is the whole point of lighthouses.”
