Page 32 of Swept Away

I can hear the effort it’s taking him to keep his voice light.

“Oh, God,” I say, turning my face away. “That’s not just a cut. Put the towel back on, Zeke, you need to apply pressure.”

He does as he’s told and stays quiet, slumped there, head bowed as he looks down at the darkening towel. How much blood can he lose? How much has he already lost?

“Please don’t feel bad, Lexi. None of this is your fault, OK? I said we should make cocktails even though we were drunk and…you know…on a boat. Lexi—are you OK?”

“Stop being so understanding.” I close my eyes and take a deep breath. I can smell blood, tinny and frightening. “I’m fine. I just feel…”Awful, awful, awful.

“You aren’t responsible for this. For me. Lexi, look at me.”

I meet his gaze. He’s steadier now, not so afraid, not so young-looking, but I can see the pain there. As the adrenaline eases, it’ll start to get worse.

“Painkillers,” I say, swiveling back to the first aid kit. “We’ve got ibuprofen, paracetamol. You should have both. But maybe not at the same time, we should space it out…”

“I’ll just have some paracetamol,” he says. “We shouldn’t…We don’t want to get through the medicine too fast.”

He’s right. These small calculations are so difficult when we have no idea how long we’ll be out here—how much do we eat, drink, use, save up?

I fetch him a glass of water to take the tablets. He knocks them back with a wince, and I wince, too.

“How long should it take for the bleeding to stop?” he asks. His voice is level. The tone of a man telling himself to remain calm.

“I have no idea. I don’t know about any of this stuff, Zeke. I did a basic first aid course about ten years ago.”

“I’ve done some as part of a kitchen safety course,” Zeke says. “But a lot of that was about how to prevent this stuff. Like, don’t cut on an unstable surface. Such as a boat, I guess.”

I turn to face him, leaning back against the sink. It’s so cramped in here that his feet are framing mine, his knees spread so I can stand between them. The shower curtain tickles my elbow. My heart is still racing.

“I do remember learning what it’ll look like if it gets infected, though,” he says, swallowing with difficulty. “It’ll get red and raised, with little lines running off it, maybe.”

“OK. OK. So we know what to look for.”

“And then what?” Zeke says, glancing aside.

“Should we…” I point to the Savlon, abandoned next to our toothbrushes on the edge of the sink. It seems a bit ridiculous in the face of his wound, like considering applying Polyfilla to a hole made by a wrecking ball.

“I don’t really want to move the towel again,” Zeke says, almost apologetically.

“No. Yeah. OK.”

So we stay where we are. Zeke keeps pressure on the wound. I stand with him, my thoughts wine-fogged and slow with panic. Minutes pass. The towel turns darker. It’s been perhaps twenty,twenty-five minutes since I casually sliced his midriff open with a kitchen knife, and the world feels like a completely different place.

After a while, Zeke eases his hand from the towel and shakes it out at the wrist, breathing heavily through his nose. We wait. I stare at the bloodstained fabric.

“I feel like we need a game plan that isn’t just me sitting on this toilet,” Zeke says, moving to stand.

I open my mouth, but to my surprise, he’s not waiting for me to come up with something.

“If you put that green blanket over the bed, I can prop myself there,” he says. “Less strain if my feet are up, and we can wash the blanket more easily than the sheets if I, like…bleed everywhere.”

“Right! Yes. Good idea.”

I hover for a moment, wondering if he needs my help to walk, but he grips the doorframe and then takes a few unsteady, short steps to get himself to the kitchen counter. I move past him into the bedroom, grabbing the green blanket from the end of the bed.

We get him settled back on the pillows. I end up lying beside him, hands on my belly, staring up at the wood-paneled ceiling. When I close my eyes, the skylight leaves its rectangle there, glowing black. We’ve never been in this bed together before—we’ve always taken it in turns. Well, except for the first night.

“It’s wide,” Zeke says, his voice strained. I glance over, then down to the towel. He’s feeling around underneath it; his fingers come back shining with new blood. “It’s sort of stretched open? I don’t know if…I feel like a cut like this, at home, it would need stitches.”

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