Page 40 of Swept Away

“I’m so glad I know now,” he says. “And I can’t imagine how much harder this must be when you know you have your little girl waiting for you.”

“Please,” I say on a sob. “I can’t bear to think about it like that.”

His hand grips the fabric of my T-shirt for a moment, then loosens, as though he’s remembering himself.

“We will get you home to her.” His voice is as soft as ever, but there’s steel in it, too. “OK? We will get you home.”

“You can’t say that,” I choke out.

“OK,” he says, after a moment. “Then I’ll say…there’s nothing I won’t do to get you back to Mae.”

The sunshine weighs hot on my shoulders. I press my forehead against my hands and close my eyes. It’s hard to feel lucky out here, but hearing Zeke say that—for a moment, he makes it easy.

Daysix

Lexi

A day passes,and then another. It genuinely astonishes me every morning to wake up and find that we are still floating here. Sometimes it seemssobleak—and sometimes it almost seems funny, like we’re the punch line of a very long joke.

We’re rationing the food more now, being extra careful with water. We’ve finally figured out the water tank systems monitor, a small screen set into the wall behind the steering wheel. You’re meant to input the tank’s capacity when you install it, but whoever fitted it didn’t bother, so it doesn’t tell us how many liters we have left. It just has four lights for the freshwater tank, four lights for the wastewater one. Full, three-quarters, half, a quarter. And empty. Late yesterday, the light for the freshwater tank flicked from a half to a quarter, and Zeke and I finally opened the bottles of tonic and soda water we had been saving up until now. It hadn’t felt good.

I’ve got into a daily routine of sorts, and I always spend at least an hour checking the houseboat meticulously for damage, looking for ways to make her safer. You’d think we would spend our whole time considering our imminent demise, but days are long, and there’s only so much panicking you can do before you get sick ofyourself. So in reality, I spend a lot of my time thinking about other things: whether Eugene has feelings; what I might order if I had fifty pounds to spend in Papa John’s; and Zeke. Naked.

That’s a bad one, obviously. I don’t let myself do it much. Hardly ever. And definitely not when he’s there, because he’s starting to get to know me really well, and I worry he can tell what I’m thinking.

By day six, I’ve stopped waking up and going through the horror of remembering where we are. Instead, I wake up and think:Ihaveto wash my hair. The shower doesn’t work, obviously—no power—and though I wash myself every day with hand soap and a bucket of seawater, I’ve not figured out how to do my hair. It’s almost sticky with grease now, and it makes me feel disgusting.

I declare this to Zeke as I march out into the living area. It’s late, nearly midday according to the corgi clock—I was on first watch last night. Zeke prefers to sit indoors in the heat of the day, because although it’s nauseatingly stuffy inside, it’s a little cooler.

I can’t believe the weather we’re having. It feels like we’re in the Mediterranean, not the North Sea. Both Zeke and I have caught the sun in the last six days, and we are turning browner now; when I look at myself in the wardrobe mirror, I’m already so different. My tanned skin makes my blue eyes pop like someone’s edited them on the computer, and the grease almost turns my bleached hair back to its original mousey brown. I’ve lost weight—my chin doesn’t slope into my neck, it juts sharply, and my upper arms aren’t so wobbly. It’s interesting how little I care: back home, I’d have been delighted, but now the exact proportions of my body feel completely irrelevant as long as it’s still in one piece.

Zeke’s different, too. He’s not lost weight the way I have, but his hair is slicked back now, and he’s growing a beard. I like it, though I’ve not said so—it would feel kind of inappropriate. Since our conversation forbidding anything happening between us, he’s beenfastidious in friend-zoning me. I find it a constant source of irritation. The more he politely keeps a distance from me, the more I want to press close and make him change his mind.

Which is terrible. He’s being a nice man. Iagreedthat we should keep things platonic.

But still. I’d love him to just sit up on that sofa, snag his T-shirt over his head, pull me in with one hand on the back of my neck the way he did in bed on that first night and—

“I’d say you could go for a swim with a bottle of shampoo,” he says, “but I don’t think it’s worth the risk.”

I sigh, settling down on the opposite end of the sofa from him. Neither of us has been near the water since the accident with the knife—it’s changed our whole perspective. We’ve discussed the possible dangers in the sea: sharks, jellyfish, the sheer coldness of the water. And we’ve both seen movement out there, though neither of us can be sure that it isn’t just a trick of the light on the surface. But it looks soinvitingright now. Glittering, azure, cool, fresh…

“Could you throw a bucket of seawater over my head?” I suggest.

“Weren’t you the one telling me to stop lifting things?”

I pull a face. He’s healing well—there’s no sign of infection yet, and my anxiety is slowly easing by the day. But the wound still restricts his movement, and Idofuss about him doing too much. He’s a very pliant patient, really—he doesn’t get annoyed when I tell him to sit still. But he does always end up standing again two minutes later.

“Right, yes. Sorry.”

I watch him sip his drink. We’re both thirsty all the time. The pot of Vaseline in my makeup bag has been an unexpected godsend—you feel so much thirstier with dry, chapped lips. We give ourselves four small glasses of water per day now, and we use the seawater bucket for everything we can.

“I could maybe wash your hair for you if you leaned over thebucket,” Zeke says thoughtfully. “Shall we try? It’s not going to make it any dirtier.”

“Oi,” I say, shoving his shin with my foot.

He doesn’t wince, and I relish that small sign that he’s not hurting so badly anymore.

“You’re not looking much better,” I tell him, “and you got to swim in the ocean with Eugene on day two.”

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