by Alexa Donne
“Uh, yeah?”
“It’s about Elliot.”
My heart zipped up into my throat. I nodded.
“I know you two used to be really close. Maybe a little romantic? But that ended when he left, right?”
Again, I nodded. Words failed me.
“Good.” She let out a breath. “Last night, I think he was really into me. And he’s so cute. You don’t mind?”
I shook my head. Carina didn’t know about the failed engagement, and now certainly wasn’t the time to tell her. Elliot did seem into her, so who was I to stand in the way? I offered her a thin smile.
“Great! Thanks, Leo.” She clapped her hands and grabbed her towel.
We stepped back into the lobby, making our way forward down a short corridor. Carina skipped ahead of me, all too eager to show off her cherry-red two-piece.
As the shadowy hallway ended and the pool area came into full view, I marveled, as always. The crescent-shaped swimming pool hugged the floor-to-ceiling windows, so you could literally swim with the stars. The windowed ceiling arced above our heads almost as far as one could crane one’s neck, giving a similar feeling to being in the lift pod.
The party was sparsely attended thus far—there were maybe fifteen people at the very far end of the pool, by the bar. I spotted a spread of empty chairs to our left, but Carina had other ideas.
“Evy! Elliot!” Carina called out, heading straight for a semicircle of chairs on our right. Evgenia was treading water at the edge of the pool, chatting with Elliot, who sat poolside. I noticed a reader tab in his hand and inwardly cursed our similar inclinations. I’d found my quiet reader, all right. Against my instincts, I reversed course and followed my sister, who unceremoniously dumped her towel on the chair next to Elliot and joined Evgenia in the water. I selected a chair as far from Elliot as possible, next to what was likely Evgenia’s sheer pink cover-up. It was vintage and incredibly luxe, Evgenia’s MO.
“Leo, you’re not wearing a suit.” Evgenia frowned up at me, and I burned under the stares of the whole party. Elliot looked at me with dispassionate interest, either unsurprised that I was stubbornly wearing my day clothes or approving of a fellow reader; I couldn’t tell which. Yet he wore a swimsuit, I noticed. He’d developed a muscular physique in the years since we’d parted. I sat down on my lounge chair and turned away from him before he could notice my attentions.
“I tried to change her mind,” Carina piped up. “Leo doesn’t like swimming much.”
“Why not?” Evgenia asked. I took a steadying breath before replying. Telling someone your mother drowned in this very pool tended to bring down the mood.
“Just a personal preference,” I said, as light and airy as I could. As soon as you called something a fear, people tended to try to reason with you, use logic to defeat your objections. Though I thought my fear was perfectly logical—my mother had been a strong swimmer, yet she’d drowned. I was a middling swimmer at best.
Elliot shifted almost imperceptibly. He’d been with me when I’d heard the news, hugged me tight when I cried, held my hand through her funeral.
“Well, at least you have another bookworm to keep you company.” She indicated Elliot, who offered a polite nod but did not make eye contact.
I settled into my lounge chair, letting Evgenia and Carina’s chatter and the sound of someone swimming laps fade into the background as I dove into my Jasper Fforde book, which kept me occupied for at least an hour before movement to my left snapped me to attention. Elliot stood up, his near nakedness once again capturing my gaze. I wasn’t sure how I felt about Elliot with muscles—it seemed to me that he’d become hard in more ways than one. I stared at his torso far longer than was wise.
“See something you like, Leo?” Carina laughed, emerging from the pool like Lady Godiva while I shot daggers at her with my eyes. I could feel Elliot looking at me, and I willed my cheeks not to flush embarrassingly and tellingly red, but to no avail.
“Maybe she likes my money.”
I glared at him in response.
“You’re so muscular now, Elliot!” Carina went on, slinking up to him and laying a hand on his chest as if he were some alien specimen that had to be felt to be believed.
“The work on the Saint Petersburg and then the Islay demanded a lot of me. It just happened,” Elliot demurred.
“I bet you could pick me up and throw me in the pool, no problem,” Carina said, now hanging on to Elliot by the arm, squeezing his now-pronounced bicep. I looked again while he was distracted by her. He was still tall and lean, the new musculature subtle but uncanny in the difference it made. It took him another step away from the boy I’d loved.
“I mean, do you want me to throw you in the pool?”
Evgenia, now floating on her back with an ear cocked above water and in our direction, said in a singsong voice, “Don’t you dare, my darlings. Not anywhere near me.”
“Maybe you could just carry me in,” Carina continued. “I am a princess, after all.”
Elliot’s smile dimmed, Carina clueless to the implications for a valet’s son of a royal demanding to be waited on. Evgenia had drifted away, leaving me to save the moment.
“I bet I could pick you up and throw you in,” I jumped in with the first retort that came to mind. Carina reeled around to me, a lemon-sucking expression on her face.
“Not funny, Leo.”
“Just saying. I totally could.”
“Well, of course you could; you’re, like, eight feet tall and you weigh twice as much as I do.”
For several uncomfortable beats, there was nothing but the gentle swish of Evgenia’s backstroke and the beating of my own heart thumping loudly in my chest. I was sure Elliot could hear it, the manifestation of my hurt and anger at my stupid sister, who was so careless with her words. Whether she realized it or not, they were exactly the right ones to wound me, at the worst possible moment, in front of the worst possible audience.
“Hello, beautiful party people!” Klara’s distinctive sly tone announced her presence before we all turned to see her approach. It was both the ideal distraction and another kick in the stomach. Klara and I were the same height, tall stature being nothing out of the ordinary on a ship like the Scandinavian. But where she’d lucked into genes that rendered her long and lean, with perfect, perky boobs that filled out her stunning black bathing suit, I was curvy. And while I would call myself “height-weight appropriate,” there was no denying I had . . . more where most other girls my age had a lot less. Usually I didn’t care, but Carina weaponizing my body in front of Elliot?
I barely stopped myself from pushing her into the pool.
“Elliot, are you going in? Help me down the steps!” And with that, Elliot was swept over to the pool by Klara, who inadvertently managed my revenge for me. Carina silently fumed while I fought a smirk. It wouldn’t be kind to tease her about it. She took a moment to collect herself, like an actress preparing backstage before her cue, then jogged over to join Klara and Elliot in the water.
I watched them, chatting and laughing as they swam, while I battled a wave of feelings. I might as well have been in the pool, its crystal-blue deep threatening to pull me under. I gulped a breath, fighting to steady my racing pulse, the mental image of drowning enough to send me into a mild panic. What had hurt more than my sister’s carelessness was Elliot’s reaction. He’d had none. We’d gone from open aggression to just . . . nothing. I might as well be a stranger.
I relinquished my book, far too keyed up to read and the noise of the party now too overpowering anyway. Another two dozen people had shown up since our arrival, and they’d all availed themselves of the bar. Lowered inhibitions meant louder voices and a few people performing tricks from the high dive.
I didn’t want to give Elliot the satisfaction of leaving, so instead I swung myself up and padded over to the bar. I asked for something sweet and not too strong, and the bartender inspired a full-body flush by handing me something crudely titled a Sex on the Beac
h.
As I was taking my first sip, a ruckus erupted to my left. I turned to find a gaggle of drunken boys and girls starting to whoop and clap, their gazes pointed up at a boy with light-brown skin, poised on the edge of the high dive. I squinted up at him, shading my eyes with the flat edge of my hand against my forehead, trying to place him. The boy grinned down at his audience. Then it clicked into place—it was Daniel, from the ball.
“Anyone who doesn’t think I can make a double half twist will owe me a drink!”
“It’s an open bar!” someone shouted in response. He merely winked and took his dive position. Then, for just a second, I thought his gaze snapped to mine. Which was, of course, preposterous. I blinked and broke the spell; he catapulted off the diving board, performing an elaborate twist and tuck before arcing cleanly into the water. The boy’s groupies swarmed him as he exited the pool, and I didn’t pay him any more mind. My drink, embarrassing name or no, was really quite delicious, and I realized I’d already sucked down most of it. Might as well get another while I was up.
I got in line and finished my previous drink with a noisy slurp. The person in front of me turned, and we blinked at each other. Elliot.
To his credit, he neither turned back around immediately nor called me a money-grubbing alcoholic. He set his bar so low.
“I take it it’s good?” He nodded at my drink. “What did you get?”
“Something about a beach,” I hedged, feeling my cheeks heat. I would not say the full name to him. “Maybe you’ll get lucky and I’ll choke on the mini umbrella, and you can watch me suffer.”
“Leo,” he said my name like a warning. Or maybe an apology? Elliot squinched his eyes shut, adjusted his glasses higher on the bridge of his nose. “Carina shouldn’t have said that about you, about your body.”
“You’re censuring my sister for being too mean?”
“I saw the way you reacted.”
“And you jumped right to my defense.”
“I—”
“What can I get you, sir?” We’d reached the front, and the bartender looked at us expectantly.
“Two of whatever she’s having,” Elliot said, indicating my empty glass.
“Two Sex on the Beaches, coming up.”
And there it was. Elliot snorted a laugh. I punched him lightly on the shoulder, without even thinking. We just fell into old patterns.
“It’s not funny,” I said.
“It’s a little funny. ‘Something about beaches,’ huh?”
“Who has sex on a beach, anyway? The sand would get everywhere. I hate beaches,” I dug in grumpily.
“You’ve been to the beach, then? In space. And, uh, had sex there?”
“Klara had a beach birthday party on the digi-deck last year. There was manufactured sand and everything.”
“Rich people,” Elliot grumbled, bringing us right back around to the sticky point.
“You’re one of us now. One of them,” I corrected myself. “You can access the digi-deck anytime you want, go wherever you want.” It was a gamble, pointing out his hypocrisy again. But he simply handed me my drink and hummed under his breath as we walked back toward our deck chairs.
“You didn’t answer the question about sex. On the beach.” I couldn’t tell whether he was trying to be funny or genuinely asking.
“I’ll leave that to your imagination,” I replied. Let him chew on that.
“Leave what to the imagination?” Evgenia asked, pulling herself up and out of the pool.
“Uh, how speed dating on the digi-deck is going to work,” I came up with on the fly as I settled back onto my chair. “It’s the Valg event tonight.”
“Yes, Leo was just telling me how much she’s looking forward to going,” Elliot parried.
Oh, no.
“Really?” My sister kicked over to the side of the pool, squealing with delight. “Leo, I was so sure you wouldn’t go! Father said I couldn’t do the nighttime activities without you, so this is perfect!”
Thoroughly stuck, I nodded. Guess I was going to be suffering through some virtual-reality speed dating tonight.
“Who is that?” Evgenia asked as she toweled off and put on her vintage wrap.
“Who?” I whipped around to find Daniel looking our way.
“He likes something over here,” she mused. Then Evgenia pointed to herself and shouted loudly. “Lesbian, sorry!”
He cocked his head in confusion, then cracked a lopsided smile.
“That’s Daniel Turan,” Klara said from the edge of the pool. She was treading water like a sea nymph, hair and makeup dry and perfect. “His mother’s from here, and he used to spend summers with us as a child,” she continued. “Or so he told me when you pawned him off on me for a dance the other night. I don’t remember him at all. And, of course, he’s interested in politics.” My cousin threw me a hard look.
Evgenia’s lesbian disclaimer seemed to work. When I looked back over, he was wrapped up in conversation with a leggy redhead. Evgenia flounced down beside me with a dramatic sigh.
“How am I going to find like-minded ladies at this thing at this rate? I tried mingling earlier, and every girl kept prattling on about finding the perfect husband. And boys like that make me feel like a piece of meat.”
I hummed my agreement. I could relate, to the feeling-like-an-object part at least. Just for good measure, I did a quick scan to confirm that Lukas Hagen was not in attendance.
“This name-tag thing is completely useless to me, besides,” Evgenia continued on. “I don’t need to know where people are from, but where they’re going, you know?”
“There won’t be name tags at the subsequent events, anyway,” I said. “But you can browse profiles in the Valg app.”
Evgenia rolled her head dramatically along with her eyes. “I’m so sick of that bloody rose chirping at me ten times a day,” she said. “There needs to be an opt-out feature. Besides which, why a rose? We don’t even have those up here.”
“The Scandinavian does,” I said. “There’s a rose garden in the arboretum on the top level. And they chose the emblem a hundred years ago, apparently as some homage to an Old-World television program about love.”
“I think it’s romantic,” Carina chimed in. She’d pulled herself from the pool as well, and was slowly and strategically drying herself off within Elliot’s eyeline. “Like in Beauty and the Beast.”
“That rose was cursed,” I couldn’t help pointing out. My sister shushed me.
“Are you coming to speed dating with us?” Carina asked Evgenia.
“Ugh, no, it’s going to be a heteronormative snoozefest,” Evgenia drawled. “Boys and girls circling each other like prey. I’ll stick to the app, noisy flower and all. I’ve already matched with a few girls.”
“There’s going to be a queer and non-gender binary mixer later this week,” Klara piped up. “But I know that regardless, this speed-dating event must feel very exclusionary.”
Since when did Klara care about making things more equitable for all? Then I caught her stealing a glance over at Elliot. Seeking his approval? Was every woman I knew interested in him?
“Speaking of the app,” Klara went on, “everyone going tonight, don’t forget to fill out the dating questionnaire. It’s required to participate. Leo, are you going?”
Suddenly all eyes were on me.
“I guess so?”
With a groan, I pulled out my tab, looking for that “bloody rose,” as Evgenia called it. When I tried to tap on the dating questionnaire, I was prompted to fill out my personal profile first—which contained a whopping two hundred questions. Taking a long drag of my drink, I settled in to play catch-up. It seemed I would be participating in the Valg, whether I liked it or not.
Seven
The digi-deck was nearly at the bottom of the ship, two decks down from the royal quarters and located in the same forward section. The back half of the deck was all servants’ quarters. Outside the entrance to the digi-deck, the walls were painte
d with dynamic Earth landscapes and serene sunsets, a preview of the delights on offer. Or perhaps they were a way to keep us calm so we wouldn’t remember we were about to enter a giant windowless box. Though, really, weren’t we already on a giant box, floating in space? Did the windows make it better? I took a deep breath.
The digi-deck was the Scandinavian’s passport to escape, a cavernous space that offered a 360-degree virtual experience of your choice. There were props to sell the lie, like the sand at Klara’s beach party, and they even had rigs you’d strap into that jerked you to and fro, aiding the illusion that you were hang-gliding, or mountain climbing, or what have you.
I was not a big fan.
And so of course the speed-dating event was being held here. Two things I didn’t care for, rolled into one. I was surrounded on all sides by a sea of smarmy, smug boys who were already scoping out the women—I noticed their eyes skim over and past me, settling on the younger, prettier, wealthier girls on either side. This was going to be a trial in self-control. Already I wanted to leave, and we hadn’t even started.
We were corralled inside the digi-deck proper by Captain Lind, who made us line up in front of a series of doors arranged in a horseshoe shape, girls facing boys. Then she explained.
“First off, congratulations on arriving early and making the cut,” she began as I cursed under my breath. They’d capped the event at the first twenty-five girls and boys to arrive, and I’d been stupid enough to be on time. “The digi-deck has been partitioned off into individual chambers, into which you ladies will go and sit. A young man will join you, and you’ll be whisked away onto his idea of a perfect date.”
I raised my hand. “What about our ideal dates? We had to answer a ton of questions on the Valg app about that.”
“This event is about the men wooing the women. Go with it, Leonie,” Captain Lind snapped.
My cheeks burned at her censure. I edged for the exit, imagining I could just slip away and escape this torture, but my sister caught me.
“Oh, no, you don’t.” She grabbed me by the arm and held me fast to her side while I squirmed. Quite the role-reversal for us.
