by J. Haymore
“I am,” Ethan says mildly. He grabs a cup from his shelf and takes the pot from me. He likes his coffee black, so he raises his cup to his lips at the same time I do. We both take a sip, gazing at each other over the tops of our cups. Looking at him—I can’t help it. It melts me every time. And as the coffee reaches my lips, they’re curving into a smile.
I feel it instantly. Even before the coffee’s gone all the way down.
The oddest sensation explodes in the back of my throat—like it’s just been crammed with a hundred hairy, squirming caterpillars. I start to gag, trying to cough it up, but it’s too late to stop the swallowing reflex. The coffee’s gone down whether I wanted it to or not. I turn away and spit into the sink, but it’s too late.
Immediately, Ethan’s hands are on my shoulders. “What’s wrong?”
My hand goes up to clutch my throat. My voice sounds strangled. “Peanuts…or something. ”
His brow furrows. “What do you mean?”
“In the…coffee.” Already, it’s getting hard to breathe. I suck in air, imagining my lungs constricting and my windpipe narrowing to nothing and refusing to take in any oxygen, and the panic attack starts.
People suddenly surround me: Nalani, Kyle, Ethan. They all know about my peanut allergy. There is concern—fear—on their faces as they swarm around me, talking to me in urgent tones. I claw at my throat. It itches like crazy, but I can’t reach the itch so I can scratch it. I can’t find any relief. My face blooms in heat, and it’s itchy too.
“Peanuts,” I keep saying, the words growing hoarser by the second. “Peanuts. I’m very…allergic…”
Then Kyle is shaking me. “T,” he says loudly, as if I’m across the room, not two inches from his face, “where’s your EpiPen?”
EpiPen—that’s right. I have an EpiPen—I have four of them. Epinephrine will fix this.
“Top drawer,” I manage to croak out. “In…in my underwear.”
“Go,” Ethan commands.
Kyle shoots off, and Ethan and Nalani guide me to the couch and try to get me to sit down. I resist because it feels like sitting will cut off my air supply once and for all. My breaths saw in my chest, loud and labored, and fear and adrenaline pump through my shaking body. There’s no way to tell which symptoms are caused by the allergic reaction and which are caused by the panic attack. They seem to mesh together and exacerbate every single effect of both on my body.
Kyle rushes back up, and there’s true fear in his eyes when he sees how much worse it’s gotten in the few moments he was gone. “It’s not there! Shit, Tara, where is it?”
Oh God… He didn’t find it. What if he doesn’t find it? I’m going to die, that’s what. The people seem to spin around me. I can’t get enough air.
“Top…drawer…” It sounds like I’m speaking through a tiny tube.
The EpiPens. They have to be in the top drawer. They have to be. That’s where I left them. I see them there every day when I put on my underwear.
But did I see them today? I don’t know. I can’t remember.
I stumble, and black spots begin to speckle the edges of my vision. It’s as if I’m underwater and swimming with all my might to the surface of the ocean to take in a full, deep gulp of air. But the harder I swim, the farther away the surface is.
Ethan yells something, but the sound grows fainter as he moves away. A dark figure—no more than a blob, but it has to be Ethan—rushes toward the port stairs that lead down to our cabins.
“Epi…Pen…” I croak.
“It’s not there.” Someone is shaking me. It must be Kyle. I claw at his forearms. “Where did you put it, T? I checked all your drawers. Think!”
I try to think. But all I can see is where I put my EpiPens, in the top drawer among my bras and socks and panties. “Top…top drawer,” I wheeze, but the words are so garbled, there’s no way he could understand them.
He shouts, but I can’t make out his words either—panic roars in my ears, making it worse, the fear that overwhelms me. I can’t calm my breathing, even if I wasn’t having this awful reaction. I’m going to die of asphyxiation, right here. Right now. Tears leak from my eyes, but there’s not enough air to cry, so what emerges from my throat instead are great choking, dry convulsions of emotion.
Not being able to breathe is hell. It hurts on a cellular level, but it’s not only that. It’s the all-consuming panic. Logic and reason mean nothing. There’s only the primordial need to breathe, to do anything to get a lungful of air.
Giant blobs of darkness narrow my lines of sight until I can only catch incomplete snapshots of sight around all the black. My knees give way beneath me, but I don’t slam to the floor—someone must be easing my way down. And then I’m staring up at the ceiling of the cabin, my breaths wheezing but slowing.
Maybe I’m calming down. Maybe I’m getting enough air after all. Maybe… But then my vision wavers, and the gray begins to fade to blackness. It’s peaceful, the darkness, and I run toward it with open arms.
Chapter Fourteen
The sharp pinch in my thigh snaps me back to wakefulness. A few seconds later, I heave in an enormous breath. Air. God, air never tasted so good. I take another breath, then another and another, taking my fill of oxygen like a Roman glutton at a feast.
The darkness recedes slowly, and three faces come into focus, hovering over me as if they’re disembodied for a moment before I can differentiate the bodies attached to them.
My gaze moves sluggishly over them. Nalani, whose dark eyes are wide and afraid. Kyle, whose lips are pale and who has a bead of sweat running unnoticed down the side of his face. My hearing returns as I gaze at Kyle’s moving lips. He’s counting slowly. “Six. Seven. Eight…”
Ethan takes my hand and presses the back of it to his lips as he releases a ragged sigh that whispers over my skin. He presses the back of my hand to his stubbly cheek.
There’s another tug in my leg, and Ethan shifts his position. He’s holding my EpiPen in his other hand, and the needle is out.
I’m lying flat on my back in the main cabin of the Temptation, and the three of them are on their knees surrounding me, Ethan on one side, Kyle and Nalani on the other.
My breaths come in gulps now, my gaze jumping between them, panic surging through me all over again. This time it’s irrational—though that hardly seems to matter.
“Look at me, Tara,” Ethan commands. When my eyes finally focus on him, he starts counting with me, just like he did during the last panic attack. My focus zeroes in on his calm blue eyes as he coaches me through it. He must have experience with this, because everything he does is so soothing, so calming, my inhalations slow and return to normal in just a few minutes. My muscles are restless and twitchy, though, and my heart feels like it’s going to gallop out of my rib cage.
I rise unsteadily, Ethan propping up one side of me, Kyle the other.
“You still have three hours left on your watch,” Nalani says. “I’ll take the rest of it for you. You need to rest.”
“That’s okay.” The words are breathless and trembling, but the truth is, resting is the last thing on my mind right now. “I’m fine.”
“No,” Ethan says flatly, “you’re not fine. She’s right—you need to try to relax and let the epinephrine work through your system.”
I nod shakily, then turn a smile to Nalani, focusing on her for the first time since things have calmed down. Where her words were kind, her eyes are not as they gaze at me. They’re hard and flat. It’s clear she hates me. Any hope I ever had of her liking me, or at least respecting me, was ground to dust under the heels of Kyle’s confession last night.
For a split second, I’m certain she’s responsible for this. She deliberately ground up some peanuts and put them in my coffee. But then I shove that thought away. No. No, I just can’t believe that of her. It’s just another crazy accident. They should crown me Queen of Crazy Accidents.
Anyway, Nalani is generally fair-minded, especially when it comes to the
handling of the Temptation, so in spite of what she feels for me personally, she helped me just now. She’s going to be fair, like she always is.
So she couldn’t have been responsible.
Without another word, she turns away and heads out to join Mick on deck. Ethan leads me to the sofa and presses me into it before sitting beside me, turning over the EpiPen in his hands, careful of the now-exposed needle. Kyle stands there for a second, then he sits on my other side.
When Nalani is out of hearing range, Ethan says, “Peanuts? Are you sure?”
I nod. I’m sure. The last time peanuts caused this kind of reaction in me was a long time ago, but the feeling is something a person never forgets.
“Could it have been something else?” he asks.
“I don’t think so.” I’ve tried a lot of foods and been tested for just about every allergy under the sun, and nothing has ever provoked a reaction except peanuts.
“But how?” Kyle asks. “There couldn’t have been peanuts in your coffee.”
“There were.” I stare at the coffee cup, which still sits innocently on the counter in the galley. “Or in the cream or sugar.” But I’d used both the cream and the sugar yesterday with no ill effects. It had to be the coffee—I just opened the new package this morning. “Could peanuts have been accidentally mixed in with the batch of coffee at the coffee company?” I wonder out loud.
“No,” Ethan snaps out. I shift on the sofa restlessly—my heart is still racing—then glance at him. He’s pissed. “No,” he repeats, his fingers curling around the EpiPen. He jams it back into its hard plastic case. “That was no accident.”
Kyle makes a scoffing noise. “What else could it have been?”
“I don’t know,” Ethan growls. “Was it you?”
The two men stare each other down. Sitting between them feels like being caught in a testosterone-laden cross fire.
“Stop it,” I say to Ethan. “It wasn’t him. I don’t believe it was anyone, but out of every single person on this boat, I know Kyle the best, and I trust him implicitly.”
A muscle in Ethan’s jaw flexes. My statement has pissed him off even more, and it’s clear why. I know Kyle better than Ethan, which is true, but the implication is that I trust Kyle more than Ethan. That might not be entirely the case, but it doesn’t matter. What matters is that I trust Kyle to the marrow of my bones.
“Why the hell would someone do that?” Kyle glances up at the windows that open out over the bow of the Temptation. “Nalani doesn’t like you much, but she wouldn’t…she wouldn’t.” He isn’t talking to us but to himself. “And Mick. Why? He’d have no reason to do something like that to you. It makes no sense.” He shakes his head. “It just…no.”
Kyle is right. The idea that either Nalani or Mick could possibly be responsible for somehow putting peanuts into my new bag of coffee or my cream or sugar just seems impossible. Even ludicrous.
Because if this was deliberate, then that’s exactly what it was. Attempted murder.
No way. It must have been a fluke.
But there’s no way to know for sure.
Kyle is talking again. “Where’d you find her EpiPen, man? I looked everywhere.”
“It wasn’t hers,” Ethan says darkly. “It was mine.”
“Wait, what? Why do you have an EpiPen?” I ask.
“Allergies. Not as bad as yours. I’ve never had to use it.” He shrugs. “I brought it just in case.”
“Shit,” Kyle mutters. “If you hadn’t had it…”
I don’t want to go there. “Wait a second. My EpiPens are in the top drawer with all my underwear.”
“I looked there,” Kyle says. “They aren’t there. Trust me. You’re not going to like the state of your bunk when you go back down. I took every single thing out of every single fucking drawer, and the fucking things were nowhere.”
“They were, though,” I say. “I put them in the top drawer. I know I did.”
Kyle shakes his head. “You must have moved them or ended up putting them somewhere else.”
“Or someone else took them out so that she couldn’t find them when she needed to,” Ethan says quietly. Both of us turn to stare at him, and my stomach churns with a sickening combination of fear, confusion, and dread.
“I’m not leaving your side,” Ethan tells me. “You’re not going to the head without me coming with you, Tara. Understand?”
I glance at Kyle, and he gives a sharp nod.
Kyle must really love me, I realize. Enough to push aside his feelings about me being with Ethan to ensure my safety.
“I understand.” My words are for Ethan, but it’s Kyle I turn to, Kyle I wrap my arms around and squeeze tight.
I love him so much…but still, it’s not enough. I pull back and mouth the words thank you at him. He nods, then, blinking, he turns away.
My Kyle pendulum has swung firmly back into the “this man is one of the most important people in my life” position. But then I remember why I’m angry with him—his secrets, his invasion of our privacy, what he’s done to Nalani. The anger isn’t completely gone, but it has dulled.
Kyle and I just might be able to salvage some part of our old friendship out of this.
He rises suddenly. “I’m going to go up to check on Mick and Nalani.”
“Okay.” I watch as he leaves the cabin, shirtless and dressed in the sweats he slept in, the tattoo on his arm flexing as he grabs the edge of the companionway and steps out.
The rest of the day passes slowly. I keep telling Ethan he needs to work, and he does for a while as I sit on the sofa and read, but he meant it when he said he intended to stay at my side. He hasn’t let me out of his sight since the peanut incident.
The words blur on my iPad. Truth is, ever since this morning, fear has tingled over my skin. The little hairs on my arms and the back of my neck are standing up as if infused with static electricity.
First the slick on the deck that I should have been the one to slip in, not Kyle. Now this.
Why? If Ethan is right and both occurrences were deliberate, I don’t know how to feel. I don’t know what to feel. It’s too surreal, too impossible, to feel anything at all.
For the rest of the day, Kyle treats me as if I need to be handled with kid gloves. Nalani’s eyes skim over me with a sort of cool disdain. Mick, once Nalani told him about my anaphylactic reaction, came down to check on me and make sure everything was okay, and since then, he’s been the same old friendly Mick.
Still, it’s awkward. There’s a tension between the five of us that wasn’t there at the beginning. We’re not just colleagues in crewing a sailboat with the single goal of getting to Hawaii safely. Threads and bonds bind four of us together—some of those bonds are strengthening, and some seem to be unraveling.
Only Mick stays on the outside of the drama. He’s the only one who seems to hold on to the original goal. He seems to be the only one with sense. Yet, Ethan doesn’t trust him—at all. Every time he gets near me, Ethan grows still and tense. And I can’t bring myself to trust him anymore either.
Who do I trust? Even Kyle has been lying to me. I want, with every cell in my body, to trust Ethan, but can I?
A little niggle somewhere in the recesses of my brain tells me this might have been Ethan. He knew about my peanut allergy. His explanation of his presence here is way too vague. None of us knows much about him. He’s seemed inordinately fascinated by me...
No. No no no no no. Not Ethan. It couldn’t have been him. He’s been the one who saved me from the peanuts, after all. If he’d wanted me gone, he wouldn’t have given me his own epinephrine.
I’m so confused. But if it was someone on the Temptation, it wasn’t Ethan. And it wasn’t Kyle. That leaves only Mick and Nalani.
My trust in Nalani is wavering. Sure, she can captain this boat and get it to Hawaii safely, but she despises me. How can I really trust someone who views me the way she does?
And Mick… No, I can’t trust him either. He’s an enigma.
A friendly presence, a competent sailor. But I know even less about him than I do about Ethan. If someone is really after me and I had to choose one person on the Temptation to be the one responsible, it’d be him.
Ethan has clearly chosen him.
Ethan’s computer screen isn’t filled with his usual spreadsheets, but his word processor is open, and he’s typing away.
“Is that for work?” I ask him.
He glances toward the front windows. Nalani is out on the bow by herself, sitting on the trampoline with her legs drawn up to her chest.
Mick and Kyle went out earlier—they must be on the bridge.
“No,” Ethan says. “It’s a description of Mick and questions I’m sending to a private investigator I just hired.”
I blink at him. “Oh.”
He opens up his e-mail page and attaches the document before sending it off. Then he looks over his shoulder at me. “Hopefully he receives that e-mail sometime before tomorrow.”
Ethan really does hate how slow the Internet is out here.
As he comes to sit beside me, I ask, “What are you having the PI investigate?”
“His name’s Garcia. He’s in Miami, which is where Mick is from. Supposedly. I want him to get a better idea of who Mick is.”
Supposedly? “Do you think he lied about where he came from?”
“Maybe.” Staring at his computer screen, Ethan drums his fingers on the table. “Goddamn. I hate this. There’s nothing I can do but wait. I want answers.” His lips are flat, and that muscle works in his stubble-covered jaw.
Back home, Ethan probably just needs to snap his fingers and people will fall over themselves to do his bidding. “We’ll be in Hawaii soon,” I reassure him.
“Not soon enough,” he mutters.
Yesterday, he said we have two or three more days to go, and a part of me was sad about that because I wished I could stay on the Temptation with him forever. Now, I want to get there as fast as humanly possible and be able to get off this boat and away from all this tension.
