'Around' turned out to be the next morning at breakfast. Nate was already sitting out on the patio with an empty plate by the time I moseyed in. He waved when he saw me but gave no real indication that he expected me to follow in his footsteps from the day before and go and sit at his table to chat.
I dithered for a second. I suppose we were at least acquaintances now, and it would probably be rude to just sit somewhere else and not talk to him; at the same time, I wasn't sure if the nature of our acquaintance was such that my presence and idle chatter would even be welcome. I didn't want to be presumptuous, after all.
Hedging my bets, I took the table immediately adjacent to his. "Morning," I said carefully, setting my breakfast down.
"Hi," he said.
His wide smile assured me that I hadn't committed a heinous social faux pas, and I felt my shoulders ease. He picked up his coffee cup and, just as he had done the day before, came over to my table to sit opposite me, apparently suffering absolutely none of the same reservations I'd had about where we stood with each other on the friendly stranger scale.
"Sleep well?" he asked.
I made a side-to-side motion with my head. "Yeah, it was all right. Still fighting the jet lag a little," I said.
In fact, I hadn't been able to fall asleep until past two, idly flipping channels, once in a while landing on something I didn't mind passing the time with, but mostly thinking that I should have stayed on the beach a little longer, at least for the scenery. Television was so much less interesting that late at night, to say nothing of its paling in comparison to the panoramic view of the night sky.
"You?" I added.
Nate's face screwed up, abashed. "Kinda fell asleep on the beach for a bit. I wouldn't recommend it," he said, rubbing the back of his head. "Got a crick in my neck. And I woke up to a little sand crab heading up an expedition inside my shorts."
I couldn't help it; I laughed.
He shook his head, smiling behind the coffee cup he'd brought to his lips. "No sympathy at all. It's your fault, you know. You left me there."
"Okay, hey," I said, lifting my hands. "In my defense, I didn't think you'd be so useless out in the wild."
Nate shifted in his chair, relaxing into its back. "I thought I might rent a scooter and explore today. You want to come make sure I don't get eaten by wild dogs or anything?"
"Oh, uh," I said, slightly startled but, more distinctly, pleased at the invitation. Rather than talk myself out of it, I seized on the feeling and added, "Yeah, sure. But if there really are wild dogs, I'm just letting you know now that I'll be running. You're going to have to fend for yourself, buddy."
"You're a good friend, Emory," he said, facetiousness fairly dripping from his words.
"Yeah, I know. I try."
A corner of his mouth tilted upward. I'm not in the habit of making people laugh, but he seemed to find me endlessly amusing, and something about that made me want to try harder at it. For some reason, he thought my company enjoyable, and I wanted to be worth the thought.
He drummed a couple of quick fingers on the table, getting up from his seat. "Okay, I'll let you finish your breakfast in peace. Meet me by the entrance in half an hour, let's say?"
I nodded, and he flashed me a grin, walking off with his hands in his pockets, humming something identifiable only to himself.
Finishing up what I had left on my plate, I then drained my cup of Earl Grey and headed back to my room to swap out my flip-flops for sneakers. I grabbed my backpack, making sure all my travel essentials were safely tucked in there, and swung out the door again. If I didn't know myself better, I might even describe my footfalls as jaunty.
Nate wasn't at the hotel entrance yet when I got there, so I hung around, idly leafing through pamphlets near the front desk.
"Can I help you with something, sir?" the clerk at the front desk asked, when she noticed me taking and putting back several tourist brochures.
"Ah, no thanks. Just waiting for someone," I said, and she nodded in understanding, returning to her work.
"Hey," Nate called out, as he approached.
I secretly wished Alak was there to witness this. So I had arrived on the island with a wife conspicuously missing, what of it? I had a new
acquaintance
now, with whom I could get up to all kinds of shenanigans. Who needs a wife when you have a new best acquaintance?
Who indeed
, I would have demanded of Alak, so it was really for the best that he wasn't around to be party to my flirtations with madness.
"Touristy," I said to the large camera bag hanging from Nate's neck.
"Nah, it's kind of my job."
That wasn't too much of a surprise. Men like Nate who make ladies swoon on a regular basis usually don't tend toward staid occupations. They laugh in the face of the likes of accountancy and banking, and instead commandeer safaris, run Fashion Week and produce award-winning wines out of their own vineyards. They come in a packaged deal of exciting and ridiculous.
"Oh," I said, briefly imagining Nate hanging out of a Jeep, snapping pictures of a hungry hippopotamus intent on tenderizing him, "you're on assignment or something?"
Nate shook his head. "Not really. I'm trying to build up my portfolio a bit, see if I can get some good freelance gigs. Normally I do a lot of portraits and weddings, which is cool, but I kinda want something different." After a pause, he added, "But technically I'm just on vacation. Sometimes you just need to recharge, you know?"
"Yeah," I said, nodding slowly. "Absolutely."
As we walked out onto the main road, Nate said, "Mind if I ask what you do?"
"Speech therapist," I said. My degree says SpeechLanguage Pathology, but nobody ever knows what a speechlanguage pathologist is.
"Oh, cool. My niece is in speech therapy. Can't say her esses," he said, smiling at a memory I wasn't privy to. "How did you get into it?"
I've been asked some variation of this question approximately seventeen thousand times, mostly while I was in school. Meet anyone new at college and one of the first things they want to know about you is your major, and then all the explanations as to why. And then you meet new grad school classmates, and even though they have presumably gone through the same tiresome rote, they cannot stop themselves asking it all over again.
Being as personal as it was, I never liked telling anyone the real reason, and usually made one up, which was that I had been volunteering at a clinic and got interested in the discipline that way. Not totally untrue, because I did volunteer at a clinic, but only after I'd decided.
Maybe it was something in the bottled water, or maybe it was because Nate wasn't going to be secretly judging my dedication and worth as a colleague and future job competitor, but I felt no compulsion to keep the truth to myself this time.
"My grandpa had a stroke when I was fifteen. Oh, he was the one who taught me all about baseball," I added, remembering the similar history Nate and I had in being raised on the national pastime.
"Oh, yeah? He got you into the Cubbies?"
"Yeah," I said, smiling to myself, taking my turn now to indulge in the bits and pieces of remembrances that belonged only to me. "Every Sunday, we'd play catch in his backyard, and if the game was on TV we'd watch, and if it wasn't, we'd listen to it on the radio. He always let me sit in his La-ZBoy."
"Sounds great," Nate said softly.
"It was. He was great," I said, winning the award for understatement of the year. "But, y'know, when he had his stroke, he had hemiparesis and his language was shot. He couldn't communicate anything he wanted, and it killed me that I couldn't help him. Eventually he started working with a speech therapist, and it got better, and that's how I decided what I wanted to do."
"I bet he's incredibly proud of you," Nate said.
I shrugged. "He passed away a couple of weeks before I started college."
"Hm, I'm sorry to hear that, man," he said. "But I'm going to stand by my statement."
It shouldn't have meant anything, coming from someone who had no real idea what my relationship had been with my grandfather, and what was essentially a pointless sentiment, but sometimes sentiment hooks a way into your heart before you can intercept it, so I left it there.
Our walk came to an end outside a scooter rental place, a small wooden hut with 'For Rent' signs staked into the ground. Flanked by the signs was a neat row of scooters in gleaming primary colors. I took a picture of them.
You hear of these stories in the news occasionally, a hiker who falls off the trail or gets eaten by a bear, and they accidentally take a picture of that last moment, leaving rescue parties to find and piece together the event from that final photo on the roll.
This was essentially the same concept; I figured that if anyone found my camera after I'd ridden, flailing, straight off a cliff, I'd be helpful and give them a clue. You know, just in case.
"Ever ridden one of these before?" Nate asked, inspecting a shiny silver scooter.
"Never," I said, snapping another picture for good measure and posthumous utility.
"Well, it's not too difficult; I can teach you," he said absently, smiling up at the rental representative who had come out of the hut to see what we wanted. "Do you have an international license, insurance?"
"Yes," I said decisively, though I could just as easily have lied to get out of riding on one of those things.
Michelle had delegated to me all the boring tasks of getting the proper documentation well before the trip, and it seemed just as well that I should use them after putting in all that work.
Besides, I wasn't allowed to be my overly prudent self this week, and as uneasy as it made me to think of plunging myself into what was frankly some of the craziest traffic I had ever seen, there was also a distinct sense of delight at the prospect of taking on, and possibly even succeeding at, something I had never considered doing before.
Nate grinned. "Well, then, we are going to have a fantastic day."
He bartered the rental price down, mostly by dint of charm, as far as I could tell, and put me in charge of taking several photos of the scooters we were renting in case of damage. I couldn't remember whether Michelle and I had planned to do this, and presumably we would've figured the process out eventually, or at least read up on it, if we were going to do scooters, but I was glad to have Nate's experience on hand.
After checking our tanks, doing a little trial run, and making sure the rental person had written down all the existing outer damage, Nate handed our money over.
"Okay," he said, squinting down the road. "There isn't really anyone around right now, so I think we can just have our lesson here?"
I shoved my helmet on, hoping it would hide the apprehension likely radiating from my face. "Sure."
It wasn't horrible, and nobody died in a fiery explosion, so I awarded myself a gold star. And, to his credit, Nate was a patient teacher, still in retention of his natural good humor by the end of the lesson about forty-five minutes later, when I'd finally gotten comfortable enough with the machine to be allowed in slow traffic.
We set off at a reasonable pace, taking quiet back roads where I couldn't accidentally run over or into anything.
The island, predictably, was pretty as its postcards made out, all turquoise waters and gleaming sand and generous hospitality. We made several stops along the coast, whenever Nate saw something that caught his creative eye. Not one to argue, I fished out my little digital camera as well at those points and took a few pictures of my own.
"Here," he said, holding out his hand for my camera at one of the beaches. "I'll take one of you. Otherwise all you'll have when you get back home to show everyone is scenery."
"Scenery's good," I said. "I mean, they know what I look like."
"Gimme." Nate took the camera from me and directed me to stand a little over to the left. "Okay, smile."
I did.
Nate lowered the camera. "Dude, I said smile."
"What? That's what I'm doing."
"No, you look like you're posing for your eighth-grade school photo. Stretching your mouth one millimeter to the left doesn't count as a smile."
I elevated an eyebrow. "Are you always this pushy when you take people's wedding pictures?" Dropping my voice an octave, I imagined him out loud, "
Hey, you, you guys are the worst at being in love. Why isn't my heart melting at the sight of you? I can't work like this
."
Nate let out a bark of laughter. "What was that? I sound like I'm on a hellish cocktail of steroids and flu meds."
"That is exactly what you sound like," I said, shrugging to counterpoint the snicker that pirouetted out of my throat.
"
Smile
," he ordered, as he raised the camera again.
I did, maniacally.
The camera clicked, but I wasn't sure the picture would come out very well, given how much he was shaking with laughter at my stupid face, and watching him convulse set me off, too.
It was, all things considered, a pretty good day so far.
We hopped back onto our scooters once we managed to control ourselves, and rode on, checking out a temple on the way and a couple of tiny villages, eating things that caught our fancy and drinking out of coconuts as big as our heads.
As the day waned, Nate hurried us along back toward our resort so we could watch the sun say goodbye. We dropped off our rented scooters, incurring no extra charges thanks to Nate's careful inspections earlier that morning, and carried on toward the beach on foot.
"You've probably seen your fair share of sunsets in your life," Nate explained, as we followed the well-worn pathways of beachgoers before us, "but I promise you haven't seen one like this."
"Okay," I said, not all that excited about a sunset but going along anyway. He hadn't steered me wrong yet, after all.
I took off my shoes and socks the minute we hit the beach, the soft, warm sand filling the spaces between my toes with a luxurious welcome. We still had a little bit of time before the sun dipped beneath the waves, so we sat in silence, as we'd had the night prior, watching the sea approach and shy away again.
The sky was beginning to take on a pinkish hue, and Nate unpacked his camera happily. I scooped sand over my feet until they were buried to the ankles, and wiggled them out again, waiting.
As the sun began its descent in earnest, I saw Nate's point. If I had been better at science, I might have been able to articulate exactly what was happening up there, but all I could do was admire, slack-jawed, the sky in all its glory, purple clouds like shadows of uncharted islands in a bubblegum pink ocean.
"Holy crap," I said.
"Well said," Nate murmured, his face an intent mask as he alternated his gaze from the ocean and his camera's viewscreen.
Once her performance was over, the sun simply dropped out of sight underneath the waves, and dusk crept in with the evening breeze.
Nate lowered his camera and smiled at me. "Hey, thanks for coming out with me today."
"Oh, yeah, of course. Thanks for inviting me," I said, feeling suddenly awkward for no reason. "It was fun. It's nice to have a travel buddy."
The smile didn't leave his face, but he turned away toward the ocean again. For being so expressive, he was remarkably unreadable.