Page 30 of Swept Away

“No, oh my God, what are your hips doing?” I ask.

“I don’t know, what are my hips doing?”

“They’re meant to just…They don’t really get involved,” I say.

Zeke’s whole body wiggles side to side, as if he’s an overexcitedpuppy wagging its tail. I am not sure how, but even his knees are shimmying. I laugh so much I snort, which makes him laugh more, which makes his dancing even more shambolic.

“Just stop waggling so much!” I say, wiping tears from my cheeks. “You’re—oh my God, no, why is your bum so…” I copy him, sticking my bum out behind me.

“My bum is just where it wants to be, thank you,” he says, though he does try to pull it in a bit.

When I first saw this man lounging in his armchair in The Anchor, I never, ever imagined he would dance like this.

“There you go, you look less like you’re pretending to be a chicken now, this is good!” I say, reaching for his hips. “Now just…stop. With these. The hips need to be used sparingly. Like…” I try to think of an analogy that’ll work for Zeke. “Like salt.”

“I’m lost,” Zeke says. “Are you saying I dance like oversalted chicken?”

I tighten my grip on his hips, the black leather of his belt digging into my palms. He stills for a moment, holding on to the railing on either side, looking me in the eyes. He’s bright-faced and breathless and we’re barely a foot apart. All of a sudden, I want to kiss him—not one of those fierce, heat-seeking kisses from that night in Gilmouth, but a kiss with eyes open, where you’re still half laughing, where you don’t want to stop looking at each other for even a moment.

He lets out an unsteady breath, and then holds out a hand for me. I assume we’re going to dance again—the music is sliding from “A Whole New World” to “Go the Distance”—but instead, he tugs me inside the boat. It’s cooler in here, and a little stuffy. I can smell washing-up liquid from Zeke cleaning the barbecue and plates with a bucket of seawater, and there’s dampness in the air. Probably just the sea leaching in from somewhere, no big deal.

The door slams behind us.

“Where are we going?”

“Cocktails. My hips are a lot better after a negroni,” Zeke says, with a tiny smile, heading for the kitchen.

He fiddles with one of his newly storm-proofed cupboards. Earlier today, he fixed them all closed by looping a string around each handle—storm prep, he said, which made my stomach turn over. But now he’s tipsy and it’s taking him forever to undo them.

“Fuck’s sake,” he says, but he’s still half dancing to the Disney song playing from the phone out on the deck, swaying his head back and forth, foot tapping. “That’s your influence, you know. The swearing,” he says over his shoulder.

“Yes, I’m sure you were all ‘dangs’ and ‘dashes’ before you met me,” I say dryly, but I’m remembering what he said when we were rescuing Eugene:You swear a lot. Why do I like that so much?

The string comes loose. I watch as Zeke pulls out all the drinks I picked up in Tesco, and feel a sobering twinge of nerves as I head-count the bottles: half a liter of rum, half a liter of gin, one liter of soda water, two liters of tonic…

“We shouldn’t be wasting all this stuff,” I say.

“What, the gin?” Zeke says, voice warm. “Here, look, this is going off anyway,” he says, handing me a packet of cut mint from the fridge.

I bought this to make myself mojitos. It was juvenile, really: mojitos are Penny’s favorite, and she’s always begging me to make them for her—apparently mine are better than hers. I’m not sure when I imagined I would make myself a solo mojito. Maybe by the time I went to Tesco I already knew that after a day or two alone on the houseboat I would come to my senses and message Penny.I’m sorry I walked out like that. You didn’t really want to kick me out, right?I would have said. You’ve got to give Penny an opening to apologize—she gets herself stuck in corners otherwise, digging her heels in because she’s too ashamed to admit she made a mistake.

The mint leaves are turning dark and limp against the plastic. I guess there’s no harm in using these, and it’s not like rum is a particular staple of survival. I grab a knife from the drawer and break open the packet. Standing here in the kitchen with Disney tunes playing and the crisp, artificial feel of supermarket packaging in my hands, I can almost pretend I’m in the real world. I’m still warm from the dancing; I feel better than I have in days. Maybe longer.

“Hey, is that how you chop?” Zeke says after a while, nudging me.

“No, I’m just pretending for the live studio audience.”

I catch his smile in my peripheral vision, my gaze fixed on the mint leaves spread out on the counter.

“You know…if you keep your finger across the back of the knife like that it’ll make your hand cramp up faster. If you just…”

It happens so fast, so easily. The houseboat is barely moving, but still, the floorisalways shifting underneath us, enough to throw you a touch off balance if you’re not ready for it. We’re drunk. And the knife is one of Zeke’s chef’s ones—it’s sharp.

I turn toward him to tell him off for mansplaining just as he moves toward me to guide my hand on the knife. Its tip slices clean through his T-shirt. I feel it cut the skin underneath as easily as if it were moving through warm butter.

For a moment we freeze, both silent, as the wound begins to lazily drool blood from the gaping slit in Zeke’s green T-shirt.

“No,” I say, more disbelief than denial. “I…”

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