Page 37 of Swept Away

“Oh, so now you get out of the box, you little shit,” I say through my tears, and when I turn back, Zeke’s smiling at me.

“Please lie down,” I say. “I am not a woman who says ‘please’ very often. But—please.”

He sobers, eyes steady on my face. “I’m OK, Lexi.”

“You think you’re OK. But you look terrible. Ineedyou to rest.”

He straightens up slowly, taking a step toward the bedroom and gripping the doorframe with both hands.

“When I’m better,” he says, voice almost too quiet to hear with his back to me, “I’m going to make you a proper breakfast.”

“Zeke, we’re…”

“Lost at sea, rationing food, I know. Let me have this, OK?”

I stay silent. I’m not really one for fantasies and daydreams. I don’t want him to make plans—it feels like tempting fate.

“We don’t have a lot of brunch ingredients,” I say eventually.

“I like a challenge.” He leans forward to crawl onto the bed. “And all’s not lost yet. We still have a cafetière.”

Dayfour

Lexi

It’s early evening,the low light before sundown. We’re out on the deck, watching for boats, but really just watching the water. You can lose hours to the sea. It shimmers and fractures—I can’t find names for all its shades of blue. Sometimes it seems closer to purple, or gold, or green, and sometimes I can imagine it’s the skin of a living beast, breathing underneath us, muscles sliding beneath the surface as it braces to pounce.

Right now it’s so serene out there, and I don’t know how to feel about it. That still water is keeping us trapped in this particular patch of nowhere, coordinates unknown. But it’s also keeping us steady. Still water means we’re still alive.

I can’t quite believe that another whole day has slid away out here. Zeke is resting on a deck chair beside me, but I do feel encouraged by the progress he’s made today: he’s now able to move around without feeling like he’ll faint, and that aura of sickness that clung to him, the sallowness, it seems to have eased in a way I can’t quite define. He just looks more himself again.

“Want to play a game?” he says, eyes still closed.

Our makeshift bandage—a strip cut out of one of the T-shirtsin my luggage—forms a discreet lump beneath his top; I keep glancing at it.

“We’ve already ascertained I’m crap at charades,” I say. Though actually I blame Zeke for being unable to guess that I wasclearlytaming a horse, not having a seizure, which would have been a very insensitive choice of charade.

“Not charades. Would you rather,” he says.

I raise my eyebrows. I’ve only ever played this as a drinking game, and we’re not really in a position to be wasting fluids. I think about the wine we cracked open two days ago and wince.

“Would you rather be lost at sea on a houseboat with your one-night standor…”

I snort.

“Or,” Zeke continues, “go back to secondary school?”

“Ooh,” I say, turning to face him and leaning on the railing. “Interesting.”

Secondary school would have been awful if it hadn’t been for Penny. She was my lifeline: she was prettier than me, skinnier than me, and boys liked her, which meant she had power. The one time the boys in my year tried to nick my lunch box—Hey, pub girl, what have you got in there, pork rinds? Salted peanuts?—she told them if they didn’t back off then she’d tell everyone how smalltheirpeanuts were, and the whole school had talked about the showdown for weeks. A Year 7 with a pink unicorn rucksack scaring off four Year 9s—that was my Penny.

“Secondary school,” I say. “Worse outfits but less likely to die. You?”

Zeke smiles slightly, eyes still closed. His curls are frizzing and greasy at the roots; the unkempt hair sweetens him a bit. He looks very young, lying there on the deck chair, and I feel a twist of discomfort at that, though it shouldn’t matter now. All sex acts have been strictly forbidden, after all.

“I’d rather be here than there,” he says.

“Seriously?”

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