Page 1 of Swept Away

DayOne

Zeke

I wake upon the houseboat wearing a trilby.

…huh.

I look around, moving gingerly. You’ve got to approach a hangover like this carefully in case it’s a feral one. The boat’s not changed much in the last five years: same wonky rectangular skylight, same wooden cupboards built into the sloping walls. One thing should be different, though—there should be a Lexi in this bed with me. A gorgeous, surprising, complicated Lexi.

I frown up at the skylight, pushing the hat back off my forehead. Has she…already left? I thought we’d have coffee first, at least, but I guess this is karma doing her thing. You can change your ways, but the past’ll always catch up to you, and I’ve snuck out of enough morning afters to earn a stint as the one left behind.

The houseboat sways beneath me. I grip the side table. Must be one of the larger boats from the marina passing too quickly. There was a surprising amount of that last night, and some drunk idiot threw something at the hull, too. The sound had been loud enough to make Lexi pause beneath me for a few gasping breaths before she said,Do we need to go check that out?We’d started to get up, thenkissed again, then forgotten all about it. It was an amazing night—worth breaking all my rules for. The sort of sex that makes you wonder why you ever do anything but that.

I close my eyes again. God, she was beautiful. Is beautiful. I guess she’s still beautiful, she’s just doing it somewhere else.

There’s a new cold twinge in my stomach, a kind of wistful sad feeling, and I stay still for another moment to figure it out. I think I’m almost…missing her. Which is ridiculous. We metyesterday. Maybe this is the thing everyone says happens once you “open yourself up to finding something meaningful”—the bit where suddenly everything seems to hurt. Not sure how I feel about it, so far.

I slide out from under the duvet, shedding my trilby and reaching for my boxers. When I open the bedroom door, I find Lexi standing at the sink in the tiny galley kitchen, wearing the same massive bun and irritated scowl she had when we first met. I smile when I see her, and it feels sort of like a reflex, like jumping at a loud noise. I’m glad she’s still here. She doesn’t smile back.

“Oh,” she says. “You’re up. I’m just figuring out coffee.”

“Hey. Yeah, sorry, I should be doing that,” I say, immediately getting distracted by the sight of myself in the bathroom mirror.

The door to the bathroom is just behind Lexi, a concertina one that my dad made himself. It’s folded back into the frame right now, giving me a full view of my embarrassing bed hair. I pat sleepily at my head, despite having been cursed with this hair for twenty-three years and knowing full well that without mousse there’s absolutely no way to sort out the situation. One curl’s sticking up at the front, like a question mark hovering above my forehead. Should’ve kept the trilby on.

“There’s no kettle,” Lexi mumbles, pulling open all the cupboard doors in turn. This shouldn’t take long—there’re only four—but she does each of them twice, in a different order, as if she’s not sure which one she looked in last.

Guessing Lexi’s not a morning person, either.

“Yeah, no,” I say, having another go at my hair. “I don’t think the boat’s hooked up to shore power anyway right now, and…” I lean to open the fridge beneath the countertop, then wince. It smells of gone-off cheese. “Yeah—the battery’s flat.”

I pause midway through closing the fridge. That’s weird. It’s fully stocked with food. I asked to buy all fixtures, fittings and furnishings, and the seller agreed to leave basic bedding and kitchen essentials, since it was a rental and she wasn’t attached to any of that stuff anyway. But do fixtures and fittings include, like, groceries?

“The fridge isn’t working?” Lexi says, ducking down to stick her hand inside. “Shit. I didn’t notice.”

She rubs her forehead. She’s got a thin gold ring on her pinkie finger and it catches in a sunbeam edging through the kitchen window’s curtains. The kitchen on this boat leads straight into a living space that’s maybe three meters by two: it’s got a wood burner, two fixed chairs and a corner sofa. The fixed chairs are new. I don’t love them—there’s not really room. I frown, noticing that the cushions from the sofa seem to have ended up on the opposite side of the boat sometime during the night. Which is…also weird. Was that us, last night?

“I’m not totally on top of everything right now,” Lexi says, testing how cold the milk is with the back of her hand. “Seems I can’t offer you a coffee.”

“You don’t need to make me a coffee. Why don’t I go out for them? Bring us back some pastries and flat whites.”

She looks up at me, suddenly focused. I wonder if it was the termpastriesorflat whitesthat got through to her.

She takes me in. Her eyes scan across my bare chest and flick up to my bad hair. Lexi’s eyes are round and icy blue. Sharkish, in a gorgeous kind of way. They’re what snagged me at the bar—well, not first, first was her line about howsuffragettes died for this shit,then second was the curves,thenit was the eyes. They’re what made me break my rules.

“I’ve actually got quite a bit to do today, so…” She looks away.

No coffee, then. All right. That’s fine. Better, probably.

“Can I walk you to your boat?”

Her eyes snap back to mine. “What?”

“Uh…I just…was thinking I could walk you back…? Or not?”

She’s looking at me as though maybe I’m really stupid, even though last night she’d said,You’re smart, aren’t you? Not school-smart, but actually clever.It’d made me embarrassingly happy—I’ve never been called clever before, except in a sentence like,You think you’re so clever, don’t you, Ezekiel?

“You don’t need to walk me anywhere,” she says. “This is where I’m staying. I’m staying on this boat.”

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