Love Just Clicks

Chapter 3-1

Three

I follow the other vehicles for a few miles—pardon me, kilometres, dear, you’re in Canada now—until I spy a gas station off the highway and pull into its lot. I definitely need my phone to get me into the city, to find parking, to find yet another boat to take me away from civilization and into the waiting jaws of Nikki Meyer.

Maybe the boat will sink.

Maybe I will contract West Nile virus before we get there and I’ll faint and be saved from falling overboard by a dashing, handsome man with no mommy issues and no tattoos professing his love for his last girlfriend. Naturally this dashing, handsome man loves books, and we will carry on meaningful conversations about the mixed messages given to young girls who swoon over Mr. Fitzwilliam Darcy, and he will have an open mind about the importance of romance novels in our literary canon. Also, though he’s a conservationist and advocate for animal rights, he does eat responsibly sourced meats, but no bacon because I like pigs. Pigs are super smart. And it’s okay that he’s saving me because I am a twenty-first-century feminist but I still don’t want to fall overboard when I faint from a West Nile attack.

Maybe that nuclear h*******t we’ve all been fretting over will finally happen, and not even being in Canada will save me, and everyone on the boat will come together and we’ll form a band of mercenaries to take out the terrible men responsible for the destruction of Los Angeles and Dubai and Paris. Especially Paris because I’ve not been there yet.

Or maybe my phone battery won’t have died between my brief call with Bryony and now, and I will be able to use my GPS to find my way to Victoria Harbour before the boat to Revelation Cove leaves me behind.

And maybe not.

“Howwwwww?” I whine to only myself and my brother’s camera equipment. I charged this phone last night. I specifically remember plugging it in. Welp, evidently not because it’s dead dead dead now, and I’m screwed until my car battery gives up enough of her juice to make the phone’s screen turn on again.

Until that happens, I must rely on pen and paper and, I hope, my pleasing manners. I have to ask someone for directions.

And the clouds have just opened their floodgates. Didn’t I pack a compact umbrella in this tasseled behemoth?

I hop out and jog around the front of the small store. The young woman behind the counter is more than happy to draw a map for me to get to the Inner Harbour—except I don’t know my north from my south here, and she has a lot of customers needing to pay for energy drinks, small bottles of overpriced maple syrup, and very expensive gas.

“You’ll be fine! Just drive toward the water,” she says, flipping her blond ponytail over her shoulder.

I wave my thanks and saunter back to my car, not caring that I’m getting soaked. As I open the driver’s door to climb in, I’m about knocked over by a beagle who zooms past and flies into the car’s belly.

“Lila! Come BACK here!” I turn and look—Lila’s apparent owner is fumbling with the gas nozzle sticking out of her truck’s tank.

“Hey, Lila,” I say, leaning into the car. The tricolored beagle sits on the passenger’s seat, wagging her tail like this is no big deal. “I think your mom is calling you.”

“Oh man, I am so sorry!” The beagle’s owner jogs over to me. “I swear she’s going to get hit one of these days.” She adjusts the Toronto Blue Jays ballcap on her head; the rain is beading on her black Arc'teryx coat. She has a leash in one hand and cookies in the other.

“Does she do this often?” I ask.

“I should’ve named her Houdini. I’ve never had a dog who escapes so often,” she says, smiling. “I think she wants to go with you.”

I slide into the driver’s seat and hold out my closed fist for Lila to smell. She licks it. “You’re super cute, but I can’t take you to Nicolette’s stinky wedding,” I say. Lila’s floppy brown ears are so soft, and her chocolate-brown eyes soften as I pet her head.

“Maybe you can click the leash on?” her owner asks, hand extended.

“Frankie?” a man says to our left. “I thought that was you holding up my line on the ferry. You lost again?”

Oh my god, I know that voice.

“Sam?” I climb out—I’ve missed my shot with the leash.

“Hey!” he says, resting a hand on my open car door. “Is that your dog?” He bends and wiggles his fingers at Lila the beagle; she bays in return.

“Oh my god—what are you doing here?”

“Let me step in here and grab my girl. Again, so sorry,” the woman says, taking the leash from me. She tries to get hold of Lila, but the pup is having none of it. She barks and bays at her mom, jumps into the back seat of my Honda, and then hops into the front, her tail going crazy the whole time. I’m guessing this is a game they play often.

Sam jogs to the car’s other side and opens the passenger-side door to try to snag Lila’s collar. Instead she escapes past him and runs around the building front, her timing perfect—she shimmies into the convenience store as another customer exits.

“Sorry!” Lila’s mom calls, running after her dog.

“Do you need more help?” I yell.

“No, we’re good! Thank you!” The woman disappears into the store, leaving me here all alone in the pouring rain with Sam McKenzie staring down at me.

“No, Hey, Sam, good to see you, fine sir?”

“Yeah, all that, but why are you in Victoria?”

“A wedding—I’m all for free booze and desperate bridesmaids.”

“Wait—what wedding …”

“Nicolette Meyer, cheerleader, soul-swallower, mean girl with crazy eyes? You remember her?” he says. My stomach flips and my eyes widen. “No s**t—is that what you’re doing here too? Small world!” He laughs.

I about pee myself. Samuel David McKenzie is my brother’s former best friend. Former because Sam was dating Lainie when my brother swooped in for the kill. It was actually pretty heartbreaking.

From second grade on, Sam was the third kid on our family vacations; he camped with us on my dad’s outdoor photo adventures to Yosemite and Yellowstone and the Grand Canyon. He was my brother’s wingman when they discovered their p*****s and the magic they could wield on members of the opposite s*x.

And then Sam and Lainie had a rough night while my dumb brother was visiting during their senior year at the University of Oregon. Gabe and Lainie drank a lot of cheap wine and shared a lot of sad stories and somehow fell into one another’s body parts. That was the beginning of Gabe and Lainie, and the end of Gabe and Sam.

I mourned Sam’s departure from our adventures. It was like we were missing a limb for a while there.

“While you contemplate the finer things in life, we’re getting drenched.”

“Oh, right, sorry. Climb in.”

He does, pausing first to swipe the dog hair off the seat.

Sam shakes his auburn mop, sending water droplets everywhere. He’s bigger than the last time I saw him—like maybe those Flintstone vitamins his mom loved finally started working. His eyes, still that fierce green. His jawline has sharpened too, dusted with a light stubble. My dad used to tease him that he was the only redhead he knew who could grow a proper beard.

Sam’s like a real grown-up man now, and I feel like a dorky teenager as he smiles back at me.

“You look really freaked out right now. Like that time we went bungee jumping.”

“This feels a bit like bungee jumping,” I admit. I hold up my dead phone. “Battery died. I have no GPS, the girl inside gave me directions I don’t understand, and I need to get to the harbor to get on the boat that’s taking me to the venue.”

He checks his own charged phone. “We still have time. Follow me into the city. I’ve been to this place before. You’re gonna love it, F-Stop.”

I pause and stare at him. No one has called me F-Stop since I yelled at them as we cracked crabs at Jake’s Famous Crawfish in downtown Portland on my seventeenth birthday—my dad, Gabe, and Sam—that no one was allowed to call me that anymore and especially not in public because I was a young woman now, and it made me sound weird. I think that really hurt my dad’s feelings, looking back. He’d always called me that, from the very beginning.

An f-stop is the aperture setting on a camera’s lens; my name is Francesca, which starts with an F. When Dad was explaining f-stop to Gabe and me during one of his many lessons, Gabe made a joke about how they should call me F-Stop because the words “Frankie” and “stop,” as in “Stop being a pest,” were usually said in the same sentence. So, it stuck.

“Are you seriously going to the Meyer-Nelson wedding?” I ask.

Sam’s smile is all Cheshire Cat. “And pass up an opportunity to watch Nicolette Meyer make the second biggest mistake of her life?”

I laugh. Of course Sam would be here. They all went to middle and high school together, and since then, he’s done computer consulting or something involving 1s and 0s for her posh daddy. “What was the first mistake, pray tell?”

“Turning me down for homecoming senior year. And then turning down my marriage proposal that famed spring-break night in Fort Lauderdale.”

“Right. What a missed opportunity.”

“Exactly! Who wouldn’t want to live in a Southeast Portland, second-story, overpriced condo I co-own with my mother that’s filled with movie memorabilia and shared with a semirabid cat named Zod?”

“You do paint a pretty picture. I can’t see why she would give that a pass.”

“Ah, but she turned me down flat before all that magic came to be. I don’t think she saw the potential.”

“Her loss.”

“Completely,” Sam says, turning on his phone. “Now—why are YOU here?”

“Gabe broke his leg. Mountain biking. He had surgery.”

“He always was too reckless on that bike. Does Nikki know yet?”

“Gabe dealt with it, likely under the influence of painkillers.”

“Yikes. You didn’t talk to her yourself?” Sam says, eyebrows hiking.

“Have you met Nicolette Meyer? I think murder is within her skill set.”

Sam nods his agreement. “Well, then, let’s get going. You have a wedding to shoot.”

“This is going to be a disaster, Sam. You’ve seen my pictures.”

His head is already shaking. “This is no time for self-deprecation, or false humility. I have seen your pictures. And between the two of us, I’m sure we can grab a few photos of Nicolette Meyer looking like the frosty bride-queen she will undoubtedly be.”

“If we’re lucky, we’ll get a few photos with her forked tongue behind her teeth,” I say.

Sam laughs, and for a moment, I’m sucked back in time, around the campfire in Yellowstone National Forest, roasting marshmallows in October. Dad was there capturing shots of the bears before they went to bed for the winter. Gabe and Sam, a few years older than me, ate through all the chocolate before we could make s’mores while I caught marshmallow after marshmallow on fire and contemplated if Sam really did have cooties. He didn’t seem to in the dancing firelight.

“You look good. I’ve missed this face,” he says, smiling. “You’re going to be fine, F-Stop. Follow me in, okay?” His wide hand is on the door release. “Try to stay close—this rain isn’t letting up. And please don’t rear-end me because that is not a suitable way to get out of this weekend. We already have one irresponsible member of your family in the hospital.”