He was bending his knees to let me off when a lady with big hair and a bigger voice yelled out loud, “Oh my goodness! I need a picture of you two. That’s so artsy-fartsy, hold on, hold on.” That’s when I felt even more eyes on us. People were definitely looking at us. For a split second, I wondered if they were looking at us because of our obvious age difference. Did they think we were even together? Were people being judgmental? Not only was there an age gap, but we were two guys, and although Miami was a friendly city toward her LGTBQ residents, it didn’t mean there weren’t a few who would do us harm.
I knew that firsthand.
A flush swam to my cheeks, warming everything from my chest to my head. I could feel my breathing start to become more and more shallow, like oxygen was somehow getting harder to find.
But the woman with the big hair seemed happy, like she loved what she saw. And the others were smiling, too. No one looked angry or upset.
Part of me was angry I even cared. But I did, and I wasn’t going to change that right now. Instead, I focused on pushing away my anxiety.
I put my hands on Beckham’s head to steady myself as he went back up. The big-haired woman brought out a disposable camera and held it up, aiming it toward me and Beckham. Her daughter looked morbidly embarrassed at her side, holding a hand up to her mouth and looking down at the ground, no doubt asking for it to swallow this entire scene whole.
“Okay, perfect, you two are so photogenic, hold on.”
“But, but—”
I didn’t want to tell her she wasn’t even getting a picture of the rainbow water behind us.
“You’re okay down there?” I asked. Beckham nodded. I could feel his laughter vibrate through his chest, up my legs.
“I can hold you up there all day.”
And night?
“Oh darn it, this doesn’t have film! Ugh, Candice, grab my other camera. Quick, quick.”
“Mom! What are you even doing right now?” Candice protested as she rummaged through the bright blue backpack on her mom’s back.
“Look at them! They perfectly line up with that wall art back there.”
Ohhh, so it wasn’t about the lake.
The daughter peeked over and seemed to have realized what her mom saw. I noticed a few other people in the crowd were snapping some secret pics, no one as loud as my friend with the hair that had a direct line to Jesus.
“What is it?” I asked.
“Smile!” was my answer. I flashed my most photogenic grin from the top of Beckham’s shoulders.
With the photo snapped, I finally thought my feet would touch the concrete. Who would have guessed this rainbow pool fiasco was going to end up in my missing the ground?
“Okay, you can put me down.”
“Oh shoot! It didn’t save.”
“Mom, we’ve seriously got to go. Like right now. Thank you both—let’s go.”
“Oh, Candice, they’ll want the photo.”
Candice, the problem solver and angsty teen that she seemed to be, whipped out her phone in record speed and took a sequence of photos, the loud shutter of the camera filling the air as if a paparazzo had joined the crowd.
“Well, I mean, Candice, if you could have done that from the start of this trip instead of using the phone I bought you to feed your social media addiction, then maybe I wouldn’t have to deal with this piece of absolute baboon shit.” She lifted the camera in the air.
It was then that things got even crazier.
Her fingers weren’t as big as her personality or her hair. The camera slipped out of her grasp and went twirling through the air—straight toward Beckham’s face. His beautiful, sculpted by the gods, incredibly handsome face. One I wasn’t going to let be harmed by anything, much less a crazy lady’s projectile Kodak.
I moved my hands from his head to his face, covering his eyes.
That… well, it only made things worse. Beckham couldn’t see; he had been scared, and he was holding a one-hundred-and-forty-something-pound guy on the top of his shoulders.