Page 74 of Swept Away

I lie back against the pillow and pull the duvet up to my face to hide my smile.

He makes us coffee with a tin of condensed milk that should have been used by 2020. My attitude to best-before dates has really flexed since this trip started. I drink mine with my legs in his lap in our bunk bed, and we catalog which of our muscles are currently hurting.

“What’s this one called?” he says, wincing as he pokes his upper thigh.

“Oh yeah, I’ve got that one,” I say, massaging mine. “And my calves. They’redead. And, weirdly…my toes?”

He cocks his head, directing his attention to my bare feet. “Your toes?”

“Don’t touch them!” I yelp, withdrawing my legs so fast I almost spill my precious, delicious coffee. I put it down. “Oh my God, Zeke, I’ve not had a proper wash since Thursday, youcannottouch my feet.”

He looks amused. “I don’t care about that.”

“Ido.”

He reaches for one of my ankles. I flail, scrabbling back against the pillow, but he lunges for the other so fast he almost catches it.

“Zeke! You do not want to touch my feet!”

“Do too. And I’m quicker than you.”

“No, you’re not. You’re recovering from an injury,” I say sternly, as he flashes me a cheeky grin and grabs for me again. “And I’m more motivated!” I shriek, sticking my feet up in the air.

Zeke sits back on his knees at the end of the bed and tilts his head the other way, eyebrows raised. I realize I am now lying back on the pillow with my legs up in the air, wearing nothing but knickers and a giant plaid shirt I found in the bedroom cupboard. I make a sound a bit likearpand wrench up the duvet to stick my legs underneath it instead. My heart is galloping, but Zeke doesn’t come closer; he sits back on his heels, and his expression reminds me of the little, wicked smile he wore when he chatted me up at The Anchor.

Then he pulls a piece of paper out of his pocket with a small flourish. I lean forward to peer at it, but he tweaks it so I can’t see what he’s written.

“First holiday activity,” he says. “We’re going for a seaside stroll.”

“This is incredibly weird. You know that, right?”

Zeke adjusts his ridiculous hat, and then mine.

“I’m shooting for ‘quirky.’ ”

“It’s giving ‘I lost my mind at sea.’ ” I pause. “Did I use ‘it’s giving’ right?”

He grins, and a pulse of joy goes through me at having made him smile. We’re close, a little closer than we’d usually stand, even on the houseboat—and now we have what feels like all the space in the world, out here at the edge of the rig with the wind around us. But I just want totouchhim. Even if he has made me wear a “seaside strolling hat,” otherwise known as one of the half-squashed straw hats he found in someone’s dorm room.

We’re in that delicious sliver of time in which nobody yet feels the need to clarify anything—to ask what we are to each other, what we’re doing. There’s a small, awful part of me that’s already saying,Come on, Lexi, he’s only looking at you that way because there are no other women on earth at the moment, but I’m giddy enough to ignore it. Right now this is just lovely, and after everything that happened yesterday, staying in theright nowfeels like the only reasonable thing to do. There might not be alateranyway.

“Just look at that,” he says, spinning on the heels of his boots. They’re considerably more battered than they were when we first met, marred with lines of white salt left when the water dries, scuffed from endlessly stubbing his toes on the houseboat.

“Look at what, exactly?” I say, inspecting the moldering mechanics, the endless blank sea, that god-awful tower. Behind it, a solitary cloud rests against a sky the color of washed-out denim.

“That view. Lexi, look. A three-hundred-and-sixty-degree sea view. We’ve stopped seeing it, but it’s still there, and when I came back up here from the houseboat this morning I just…” He trails off, the way he often does. “This morning I felt lucky. When we were on the boat, I kind of forgot we’re lucky. I kept thinking howunlucky we are, the stupid series of mistakes that got us stranded…But now that we’re here, it feels genuinely possible to live in the moment. I thought, people pay so much for that feeling. Yoga retreats, gap years, meditation apps…”

I want to stand on tiptoe and kiss the triangle of his chin, so I do, and he smiles, reaching for my waist.

“What was that for?” he asks.

“Just for your brain,” I tell him. “And for keeping me positive.”

He kisses me—the first time he’s kissed me properly since the moment on the tower. My stomach swoops, my tired, broken body suddenly alight with energy, and he chuckles against my mouth.

This time I’m the one to pull back. I want him—I want us to goto bed together, any of these hundred beds, and I want to spend all day with him there, reminding myself of the details of his body, the ones I’ve tried to recall in minute detail more times than I can count. But I want to savor today, too. I want the silliness of Zeke’s “holiday,” more stolen hats, more kissing. I want to feel lucky.

“You reckon that one’s him?” Zeke asks, pointing at an entirely random seagull.

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