Page 48 of Swept Away

“What? What’s shit? Are you OK?”

She’s breathing hard, and her bun has slid all the way to bob down by her left ear. And…she’s…uh.

She’s wearing nothing but a pair of black knickers.

“Oh, fuck,” she says, eyes rounder than ever. She clutches her hands to her breasts and spins around.

“You sleep…like that?” I say.

My voice is suddenly very high-pitched. Like thirteen-year-old Zeke. I should be thinking about the water, but for a second, right now, I’m really, really not.

“It was hot in the bedroom. I was going to put a T-shirt on when I heard you coming in. You always get yourself a glass of water first, so there’s usually time, but…”

She reaches to grab her towel and wraps it around herself.

I’ve seen Lexi naked before. I’ve touched her almost everywhere. But I didn’t know her then like I do now. And somehow it makes her nakedness…different. She’ssogorgeous, every bare curve, and it’sLexi, not just a beautiful woman, but the one who made us sterilization espressos and who feeds Eugene on the sly. I’ve never looked at a woman naked and known that she cares about an injured seagull even though she pretends she doesn’t, and turns out it makes a hell of a lot of difference.

“Why did you shout?” she asks.

I avert my gaze—maybe a second later than I should have—and keep the torch shone down at the water on the shower tray. Before I can explain, Lexi’s clocked it, and she’s swearing, too.

She steps into the wet shower, patting down the walls, looking for a leak. I’m crouched here on the floor—there’s not much room, and there’s a lot of towel in my face. She’s very close, and it’s really not been long since I saw her topless, so this is…distracting.

“I was wondering if maybe the showerhead’s leaked,” I begin, straightening up just as she turns. “But…”

Her towel slips. She grabs for it as I stand, her elbow flying up—and she knocks the shower handle.

Whoosh. Just like that, the shower’s on.

It’s only a few seconds’ worth of water—I guess whatever’s trapped in the line, since the shower’s not actually working. But the water’s freezing, and the blast of cold makes us both cry out.

I step backward out of the shower, get tangled in the curtain, almost trip. It wrenches my cut, and the sensation’s like someone taking a hot poker to my skin. I breathe in sharply between my teeth. Lexi’s hand is on my back in less than a second.

“You OK?”

“Fine. We need to find the leak,” I manage, leaning back against the wall, breathing hard. My trousers are sticking to my thighs and my hair’s dripping down my neck. My wound throbs with my heartbeat. “What I was going to say is, it’s not from the showerhead, because it’s salty. It’s seawater, not fresh water.”

She assesses me for a moment, scanning me over. I can see her deciding that the bigger threat right now is the water, and it freaks me out that she even hesitated to check on me. We can’t afford to think that way out here.

That said, I know if she was hurting, I’d be exactly the same.

“Now everything is all wet, we’ll never be able to tell where the water is coming from,” she says, her voice shaking. “Why isn’t the shower draining?”

She’s right—the water’s still just sloshing in the base of the shower. I remember from staying here as a kid that there’s an automatic pump that drains the water out, but it won’t work without power.

“What if—could that be how the water’s getting in? Up the drain?”

My heart beats faster. I’ve no idea how the drain works, but eventually that water must end up out in the sea. There’s a freshwater tank under the bed, and the toilet waste collector’s built in underthere, too, but there’s no tank for used shower and sink water that I’ve seen, so it must be getting pumped out. What if that system’s gone wrong? What if—what if it’s letting water in?

“We should bail it out,” I say, my mouth dry. “All this water. Dry it as best we can and then see…if it comes back.”

“Good idea.” Lexi breathes out shakily. “OK. OK. Well, if it was areallybad leak, surely we’d have doubled the amount of water or something by now, and even with the shower coming on, I don’t think there’s much more.”

She turns, and my torch catches her straight on. Hair damp, bare shoulders dewy with droplets. We pause for a second like this, her eyes wide with fear, her skin glowing, her face so beautifully familiar to me now. I want to fix this for her. I want her to be safe.

Lexi bites her lip and turns her face away from the glare of my torch.

“I’ll get dressed,” she says, “and then let’s start bailing.”

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