Page 50 of Swept Away

“Not for a while. I have rules now. I never have sex on a first date. Never sleep with someone if I don’t think we’ll speak the next day. And I never sneak out the next morning after spending the night.” He ticks them off on his hand as he goes. “No judgment on anyone who finds that stuff makes them happy, but it was making me really sad, so…yeah.”

“Oh. But you broke your rules? With me?”

“For you. Yeah.”

I pull my knees in against my chest as he seasons the peppers and tosses the veg over the pasta.

“There was me joking about you leading me astray,” I say, a little weakly. “And…”

He laughs. “It was worth it.”

This has thrown me. I did assume Zeke was pretty well-accustomed to a one-night stand—it was obvious in everything from his confident approach at the bar to the way he kissed me. But…I can’t quite fathom the idea that he didn’t want to do that anymore, and chose to break his rules forme.

“I can see you doing a lot of thinking over there,” he says. “Looks tiring. Pasta?”

“Umm, yeah,” I say, standing to reach for the bowl. “Thanks.”

He meets my eyes as he hands it to me, the corner of his mouth lifting slightly. His beard is getting thicker; it makes him look tousled and rugged, as though he’s spent a few months backpacking somewhere hot.

“I don’t regret it for a second,” he says quietly. “Not even now, with everything that’s happened since.”

“That’s mad,” I say, before I can stop myself, and his smile widens.

“Maybe,” he says. “But I can’t help hating the thought of never having met you.”

He moves past me with his bowl of pasta, heading out onto the deck. I stand for a moment by the sofa. I hate compliments. They make me want to squirm away or redirect the person’s attention; right now I have the weirdest compulsion to point at the window and go,Hey, look, a whale!But as I move to follow Zeke, I realize that since we woke up at sea, I’ve not felt the unworthiness that dogs me on land. I’ve not felt like I’m less.

Maybe it’s the lack of context. Nobody on Instagram to compare myself to; nobody to ignore me and talk to Penny instead. Just Zeke, who says things likeI can’t help hating the thought of never having met youlike it’s no big deal to tell me that I matter in my own right.

So instead of shrugging off the compliment, I let myself absorb it. He’s glad he met me. That’s lovely. I’m so glad I met him, too.

I pull one of the extra blankets out from under the deck chair as I sit down beside him with my bowl, settling into our usual companionable silence. It’s a bit cooler today, and the sky is dotted with fluffy clouds, the kind Mae would draw with her crayons.

This, I suppose, is the first clue things are about to change.

I take a nap in the bedroom after the pasta—it’s the natural order of things—and wake to find myself about five inches from slamming into the floor.

My hands fly out just in time to catch me as I land. I just…rolled out of bed. I can’t make any sense of this, but as I lie here face down with my forehead pressed to my arm, I realize I’m not feeling good atall.

I just about make it to the toilet before vomiting. On the waythere I whack myself into the door, then the sink; I stub my toe on the toilet. It’s not dizziness, though at first it feels like it. It’s the boat.

It’s moving.

“Zeke!” I shout, flushing the toilet.

“You’re up,” he says, appearing suddenly in the doorway with bright eyes and messy curls. “Can you believe we’re moving? Oh, hey, are you OK?”

He steps into the bathroom, eyes widening.

“Shit—is it food poisoning? Or seasickness, because of the waves?”

I long for a glass of water to wash my mouth out. The thirst is becoming harder to bear—my body iscravingwater now, and it’s even worse after being sick. For a wild second I think about just flipping on the bathroom tap and lapping from it like a water fountain, and the fantasy makes me close my eyes and groan.

“I don’t know if I get seasick. I’ve never been at sea before,” I say. “Except on a ferry. And that was not like this. There was more ice cream and fish and chips, for starters.”

The joke’s weak; it’s the best I can do. I pull myself up and sit down on the toilet seat, leaning forward on my knees, trying to take deep breaths. Throwing up has helped with the nausea—it’s less intense now. I remember last night—the shower—and turn my head to look at the drain.

“Don’t worry, I already checked it this morning,” Zeke says, stepping past me to reach my toothbrush and toothpaste, which have rolled into the sink. “You weren’t sick when we first got swept out, and we’re eating a lot of old food that should probably have been in a fridge…”

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