Page 84 of Swept Away

“We have to go, Zeke. It’s not safe.”

He shakes his head, but he’s no longer pulling me toward the inside of the boat. He’s staring at that knot, too, and following the track of the rope across to the steel bar we chose as one of our mooring points, reachable from the ladder where I first clung after we got to the rig. When we were still hopeful. Before all of the wild, extraordinary things that have happened between us here: the kiss on the tower, the condensed-milk coffee, the incredible sunset-drenched night on the helipad.

This place has been spooky and hellish and awful. But it’s also been so very beautiful. And for all its horrors, it is the place where I fell in love.

“Once we’re untied…” Zeke trails off.

“I know. There’s no unmaking that decision.”

“No.”

“And then we’re just…back into the unknown.”

He shakes his head. “There must be a way to improve our odds. Something we can do here to…”

I watch him. He’s thinking. I like watching Zeke think. I coulddo it all day. He gets this adorable indent between his eyebrows, not quite a frown, kind of like a question.

“I’ve thought of something that is probably very stupid,” he begins, and I cut him off.

“I bet it’s genius,” I tell him, holding his gaze. “Whatever it is, I trust you. Let’s do it.”

Zeke

It takes usabout an hour to get set up. With the rig groaning around us and the seagulls circling above, we take our bags and as much water and food onto the boat as we can without risking weighingThe Merry Dormousedown. Then we get every sheet off every bed in the whole rig and tie them together.

“I feel like I’m at a hen party,” Lexi says. “Here, pass the rum, would you?”

I hand it over. She sprinkles the sheet in alcohol before reaching for the next one.

“There’s always some kind of bizarre booze-fueled crafting activity involved in a hen do.”

“This bizarre?”

“Maybe notthisbizarre. Though this is a lot more useful to me than a flower crown.”

The rig creaks again. Both of us glance at the heap of untied sheets, then at each other.

“Do we call it?” she says.

I’m hating every second of being here. I don’t know if the rig always made these sounds and I just got used to it, or whether it’sgot a lot noisier, but I can’t help feeling like any second now we’re going to be crushed under a falling crane. So yeah, I want to leave. But I also know this is a real shot at getting rescued, and I don’t want to miss it because we lost our nerve too soon.

“One more,” I say, grabbing for another bottle of alcohol.

Our hands touch—she reached for that one, too. I look up at her and she smiles briefly. She’s wild-haired, sweat glistening across her nose and forehead, and I can feel her terror, but Lexi has this fierce energy to her in a crisis, too. She’s just…amazing.

“You ever made a Molotov cocktail, Zeke?” she says.

“No.” I look back at the bottle of rum. “But I have played a lot of video games featuring them?”

“That’ll do,” she says, her eyes widening slightly as the rig lets out another roaring groan beneath us. “Now. Where are the matches?”

This is the wildest, craziest thing I’ve ever done.

“Well done!” Lexi says, her cheek twitching slightly. “No, really, it’s great.”

“Why’s it not…bigger?”

“It’s the perfect size!”

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