Page 60 of Swept Away

I meticulously repack my bag with everything I hung up in the wardrobe. I find my purse at the back of the bedside drawer andunzip it, looking at my driving license, my credit card, all these little plastic symbols of a life that feels completely alien now. I imagine paying contactless for something and it makes me want to laugh.

Zeke’s bag is by the bed, packed exactly how I’d expect Zeke to pack—haphazardly. The end result is a duffel bag so full he’s only been able to half close the zip, and as I carry it out onto the deck with mine, I see what’s sitting in the top.

The logbooks. They’re all in there.

I look at him standing beside the sail, up on the roof, wind in his curls.

“Did you…?” I begin.

He clocks what I’ve seen.

“No.” He gives me a lopsided, closed-mouthed smile. “I tried opening one of them and slammed it shut again. I dunno. There’s a lot going on right now.”

I tilt my head as I look up at him from the deck, like,All right, I’ll give you that. We’ve barely stopped for the last two hours, and this small pocket of stillness in the frenzy of the day feels almost nostalgic now, as if we’re going back to the time when we were frozen and floating with nowhere to go. All of a sudden I feel dizzyingly emotional.

“I’m glad it was you,” he says, so softly I almost don’t hear him over the wind. “On this adventure with me.”

“Is that what we’re calling it now?”

“Uh-huh. Adventure. Quest. Mission.”

“Not two clueless arseholes drifting around?”

“Definitely not,” he says. “Have you seen yourself right now?”

My hand is on the wheel, my feet planted on the deck, my hair whipping in the wind. I can’t bear how he’s looking at me—there’s something sweet and tender about it, and this is starting to feel like a good-bye.

“You look amazing,” he says.

For a moment, up there on the roof of the houseboat, his eyes are just like they were on that first night: hot, intense, fixed on mine like they don’t want to let me go. I’ve seen glimmers of that desire on his face in the last week, but he shuts it down so effectively I sometimes think I imagine them.

He shifts to the edge in a crouch, sliding so his feet hang over the door, and reaches a hand out for mine. I think he’s asking me to help him down, but once he grips me, he just stays there, holding my hand. The sensation of his skin against mine starts at my palm, but it spreads in warm sparks, up my arm, through my chest, right to the core of me. He slides his thumb slowly across mine, as if he’s tracing the shape of me to memorize it.

Then he drops my hand. “Sorry,” he says, eyes widening. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have done that.”

“It’s OK,” I say, but he’s already getting back up on his feet, dodging the swinging sail.

“No, it’s not,” he says, and I can’t see him now behind the tarp. “I made a promise about what would happen on this boat, and it wasn’t that.”

I look at the approaching rig. I don’t argue the point with him. Not because I give a damn about that rule we made anymore, but because in a matter of minutes,everythingwill be different.

We won’t be on this boat, for starters.

The nerves set in the closer we get to the rig. I expected to see someone up there by now—we’re near enough that we’d be able to see figures, and I imagined they’d be waving to us, maybe even sending out a life raft. But the rig is silent and still.

We’re so close now that I can see the rust and peeling paint. It’s cooler here in the rig’s monstrous shadow, and the quietness is eerie. I’m beginning to feel afraid.

“Lexi?” Zeke says.

“It’s fine, it’ll be fine,” I say, and then: “We need to get closer, and they’re not…sending anyone out, or anything…”

I frown. We’re drifting onward, but the rig isn’t quite where I expected it to be in my line of vision. Ithoughtwe were heading straight for it, but…

“Are we…”

“Yeah,” Zeke says grimly.

He’s already turning the wheel, but the breeze is slower here; it doesn’t seem to move us at all. We’re now about twenty feet from the rig’s structure: I can see a ladder, tantalizingly close, and a gathering of crustaceans just above where the water touches one of the pillars rising out of the sea. A seagull caws, and Eugene stirs in his box, seeming tamer than ever compared to the birds looping above us.

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