Page 89 of Swept Away

“You can. Youcan.”

“What’s the point? We’re sinking, we’re…”

I grip her arms. “What’s the point? Are you serious right now?” My fingers tighten. “Are you telling me you don’t think we’re worth fighting for?”

Her head drops, her shoulders shaking. We stumble together, hit a wall, right ourselves. Something smashes somewhere. I am so profoundly scared I can’t believe I’m still able to function.

“This, us…” I begin, but she’s shaking her head.

“This is how it has to end, maybe,” she says, still sobbing. “Me and you. It’s been so beautiful. I’ve loved you so much. But I don’t want to go down apart, fighting the sea like we’ve got a fuckingchance of winning, when we could be holding each other.” She looks up at me, her eyes desperate, and lays both her palms on my cheeks. “I think this is it, Zeke. This is it.”

“No,” I say, voice ragged, but I’m sagging, too. If Lexi’s out of hope, I don’t stand a chance.

I start to cry. She kisses me, desperate, tear-drenched. I know she’s right. I can feel it, smell it, hear it in the roar of the waves. We’ve lost. What we’re fighting, it’s just too big. And all of a sudden I get what Lexi means when she says,This is how it has to end, because what we’ve gone through’s been so wild, and this is how wild things go. Brutal and sudden. Swept under by something too strong to fight off.

So I just hold her. Feel every ounce of the love I have for her. Let myself sink in it, and the pain of knowing it’s over, and the abject searing torture of knowing that if I go, it means she’s going, too, andallI want is for Lexi to live the happiest, safest, fullest life.

But this is it. This is it for us.

The end.

And then.

Voices.

Voices.

A great bulk blocking the moonlight for a pitch-black instant, then—

The glare of searchlights blazing through our shattered windows.

The soaring sensation of hope surging back.

“Is anyone alive in there?”

A male voice. Loud and clear above the waves and the wind. I’ve not heard a single voice but Lexi’s for almost twelve days. A face appears in the window for a split second as the lifeboat manages to get alongside us, and the sea sends us tipping. It’s a man, but it might as well be an alien. I cannot comprehend it. Everything’s disjointed, snapshots caught in the lifeboat’s beams.

“Help!” Lexi screams, pulling away from my arms and scrabbling to the window.

The lights flood through our broken boat. Shards of glass, pools of water, our abandoned bailing bowls sliding toward the bedroom.

“Can you reach the aft deck?” the man shouts over the wind.

“Yes! Yes!”

Lexi whirls around to grab me and we scramble our way there, stumbling against the strange tilt of the boards beneath us, yanking at the makeshift barriers we fixed in front of the door to keep out the storm.

Outside, silver shows on the waves like the whites of an animal’s eyes in the dark. The lifeboat seems huge, blocking out half the sky. I think I’m dreaming, a drowning man’s dream, maybe, but then I see the figures on the lifeboat deck and they look soreal.

We cling to the railing, wind snatching at our clothes. I hear Lexi let out a wild, high-pitched laugh as the lifeboat swings inbeside us like the storm’s nothing at all. And then arms are reaching across the broken railings and pulling us—“Lexi first,” I scream, “Lexi first”—and suddenly the ground is so steady beneath us I think for a second we must’ve been pulled to land.

“You’re safe now,” someone says, their voice close and warm.

But I don’t feel it, not until I turn and feel Lexi collide with me. Sobbing, grasping, soaked. She smells of salt and sweat, and ofLexi, my person, not torn from my arms and swept to sea, buthere.

I grip her shoulders, check her over, kiss her tear-soaked face and taste sea salt. For a moment, after all that terror, after being so sure it was over…I feel completely awed. Wesurvived. I can’t believe it.

“Look,” she whispers, eyes on the sea behind me.

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