Page 14 of Date and Switch

“Are you okay?” I asked, continuing to inventory his disheveled appearance or the exhaustion in his voice.

“You’re the one with swollen, puffy eyes and skin the color of strawberries yet you’re asking me if I’m okay?” He chuckled, collapsing onto his bed with a soft thud. “You’re too sweet.”

He didn’t say anything more. Simply laid back and covered his arm with his face. He wore a pair of dress slacks with a button-down shirt and a tie. On a cruise ship. It was only three o’clock so nowhere near time to get ready for dinner.

“Not that I want to make you uncomfortable, but I can help you with that, if your sunburn extends to…hard to reach places.”

I couldn’t tell if his voice was just heavy with exhaustion, or something else.

“How did you know about the sunburn?” I asked. If he’d seen my naked butt in the middle of the night or this morning when he woke up, I’d full on expire.

“I’ve been working on a project with Penn. Getting it ready for a meeting I have to have when we dock in Los Angeles. He gets an alert any time you post something.”

The statement charmed me. Despite weirdness between us, knowing he and his brother stopped their meeting to talk about a blog where I discussed my sunburned ass made me feel seen. Like maybe he cared more than he wanted to let on.

“Is that why you’re wearing a tie?”

I heard him huff some kind of agreement in my direction.

“I promise I did not think I’d have to put on a tie for anything else besides the captain’s dinners. Unfortunately, there’s a lot riding on this European expansion. Vacation or not, we need to be prepared. I just wish it would have happened after we toured Europe.”

I was not gumby by any stretch. Given my shape leaned slightly more toward apple than hourglass, trying to apply ointment to my affected regions proved problematic. They offered yoga classes every day on the ship. I told myself once the sunburn healed, I would be up there every morning with bells on. My short arms, and less than limber body, resulted in ointment being applied only to the affected areas I could reach. At least enough of a surface area to make the throat closing agony dissipate to a twinge.

“The blog and such are doing really well.” He turned on his side to face me, using his hand to support his head, “I heard through Penn that the station tried to text you, but the signal is pretty shit right now. I’m sure once we get to Brazil you’ll probably get a slew of messages. We appear to be creating quite the buzz.”

I couldn’t gauge how he felt about that statement. The way he said the word buzz, it was as if he spoke the words in italics. But were they good italics or sarcastic ones?

He grabbed his iPad and swung over to my bed. After unfolding the cover, revealing the screen, he called up his email and double tapped a file with his efficient little stylus.

“Apparently we had an audience in Bonaire.” He pressed play on the video from an Instagram account called The Thrifty Cruiser which had caught the kiss to end all kisses that had left my head spinning. The one I still couldn’t stop thinking about. Regardless of whether he’d thrown ice water on us just seconds after. “According to the station we are quite the water cooler conversation. Penn tells me that Bear and Raven’s morning show has been inundated with texts, tweets, social media comments, desperate to know what is going on with us. We’re a national sensation.”

He said words. I heard the lullaby like soft murmur of his gravelly voice, and he continued to recount details about what he and his brother talked about. I couldn’t stop staring at the two of us on screen. He’d paused it just as he’d pulled back, before Bryce Frost entered, stage left. We stood, suspended in the last fleeting moment of magic.

I didn’t even recognize the expression on my face. I looked…happy. Unabashedly so. The set of his lips had not yet gotten the directive to start frowning. Rather, they were totally relaxed. If the softened expression hadn’t pulled my attention, the sexy way his lips dipped in a half smile, did. He dug that kiss.

“Earth to Sera.” He ran the back of his hand from my forehead down my cheek. The cool kiss of his fingertips against my skin skittered awareness through my whole being. It was a tender act and I fought against the instinct to push against his hand like a love starved kitten.

“Are you sure you’re feeling okay?”

I could only nod. Two parts of me were at war. The one that wanted another soul melting kiss and the part of me that said don’t you dare you idiot—he’s made it very clear he’s not into you.

“Have you taken anything? For the pain?”

I’d closed my eyes for one second, whether it was to luxuriate in that tenderness or to keep that ocean of feeling away from a shore I couldn’t visit. When I opened them once again, I stared straight into Bryce’s eyes. I could see the golden speckles in his iris, note the dots of freckles on the bridge of his nose, and feel too much warmth filling his gaze. His eyes shouldn’t look like that when he told me he wasn’t interested in me. That any act of attraction had simply been transference. He felt nothing for me. So why did he look like that?

eleven

I needed to focus on this stupid project with Penn. My brain felt like a TV with a jammed remote. Every time I’d try to focus on projections, timelines, costs, or labor, the channel would switch, and I’d be thinking about Sera’s relaxed smile or her friendly demeanor—to literally anyone she crossed paths with. I didn’t know the names of a single person. We’d sat through I couldn’t count how many dinners and other than their faces I didn’t know one detail about the eight people we routinely ate with. Nor the names of our waitstaff.

It made me proud her blog had become such a success. She took her assignment so seriously. Capturing pictures and typing notes in her phone everywhere we went, filling it with little tidbits that might be interesting. Of course, I’d done more smiling since we’d set sail that I probably had in the last year. I meant smiling for posed pictures, but I could probably also tally genuine smiles to that list.

“I’m going to order an in-cabin dinner tonight.”

Sera looked so pitiful laying on her bed, her eyes swollen from crying. My skin leaned more towards olive thanks to my dad’s darker complected relatives, so sunburns were a pretty foreign concept for me. Sera being a shade pinker than Casper the Ghost, hadn’t been quite as prepared for the power of the sun this close to the equator.

“I’m not hungry.”

I didn’t care what she said. She’d eat something. Even if it was just some crackers and a Gatorade. She’d need to stay hydrated based on the severity of the burn she’d described in the blog. That blog update. When Penn asked me how she was doing, I of course had no idea what he meant because I’d not really been present. Work, of course, not the only reason that kept me away.

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