Page 58 of Swept Away

“Right now thirty-one-year-old Lexi is really dehydrated, which probably isn’t helping,” I say, holding out her thermos. “Drink. And rest.”

“Will you…”

I nod. I know what she’s going to ask. She’s sent me out to check for leaks every couple of hours or so. I haven’t told her about the holes I just stuffed with cotton wool in the ceiling.

“Zeke?” Lexi whispers.

“Mm?”

“You’ve surpassed all my expectations,” she says, her voice fainter now, as if she’s about to fall asleep. “Every single one.”

Lexi

It’s a roughnight.

I crawl to the bedroom sometime around midmorning. There’s an endless, dull throbbing in the back of my head, a low bass note that won’t let up. The sound of the waves is even louder in the bedroom—it’s as if we’re in an echo chamber down here, and it seeps into my dreams, turning into womb sounds, the rhythmic ache of a heartbeat.

At some point I stumble to the toilet, catching a gray-white sky through the windows as the walls and cabinets slide in my vision. The houseboat isn’t cute now, with all its slightly-too-small chairs and drawers and cupboards. It’s hellish, like a dollhouse in a horror film. I fall on my way back into the bedroom and Zeke is there, catching me, though I’m not one hundred percent sure I’m awake, because that seems like the sort of thing I’d dream up.

I wake in the afternoon with a horrible taste in my mouth and a sheen of sweat all over me—by the time I eventually stripped out of my damp clothes, I was ice-cold, and Zeke layered me in blankets. I think of him calling himself stupid, and it makes me not just sad butangry. Who fucking dared make him feel that way?

“Hey, you’re up,” he says softly, pushing the door open. “How’s your head feeling? And your stomach? Could you eat something?”

“I knew you’d say that,” I say, lifting my head and shoulders to look at him. “Are you like this when you’renotrationing every last grain of rice?”

“What, always planning the next meal? Yup. You should see my recipe notebooks from when I first started at Davide’s.”

His hair has dried—it’s softer and fluffier than usual. He’s wearing his battered, stained velvet trousers, and a pin-striped shirt of mine, which he has French-tucked into his waistband to disguise the poor fit. I find this nod to fashion completely adorable.

“I hope I will see them, one day.”

I look up at the skylight as he tidies around me. The rain has subsided to a light, airy drizzle, like the fine spray that creeps past the shower curtain. God, what I’d give for a shower.

“Isn’t it funny that you and your dad both wrote down your thoughts? You with your recipe notebooks, him with his logbooks?”

He keeps his face averted. “Guess so. I’d never thought about it like that.”

I watch him as he shuffles around the bed, head ducked. It says so much about his relationship with his father that he still hasn’t dared to open one of those logbooks. My heart aches for him. I think he’s more afraid to confirm what his dad thought of him than he is to know the truth about his parentage. I almost want to say,It’s not so bad, you know, watching your father turn away from you, but I’d be lying. Dad leaving us the way he did, it made me who I am, and not in a good way.

“So. What could you manage to eat?” Zeke asks, chucking the blankets into the corner.

I am immediately itching to fold those.

“Digestive?” I say. “How many are left?”

“Plenty,” he says, and I know he’d give them all to me, and it makes me want to weep, that kindness, all his kindness.

I should get up and fetch some food myself, my brain says, but I’m too tired for that old crap, and right now it’s easier than usual to say,Actually, why not just let someone else do the work for a minute?

Zeke heads into the kitchen to bring me a digestive, then reaches for the moldy bread that he keeps in a plastic Tesco bag in the back of the left-hand cupboard. “I’ll just go see if Eugene is about. Bucket by the bed in case the biscuit turns out to be a bad plan.”

“We should not be giving that bread to the bird,” I say halfheartedly, resting the digestive flat on my palm, just contemplating it. The idea of eating moldy bread makes me want to vomit again, but before the rain came, I really felt the perilousness of our limited supplies. “There’s no way to get more food, Zeke.”

“I’m working on making a fishing pole,” he says, but he looks torn. “All right. No bread for Eugene.”

He puts back the plastic bag and starts checking the storm-proofing on the cupboards. The nausea rolls in the base of my empty stomach like something we’ve left loose on the deck.

“He can catch himself fish to eat now,” I say. “He’s up and about again.”

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