Lovewrecked

by Halle, Karina

  Then, at sunset, we’ll all sit up top and have a couple of cocktails (heavy drinking is banned since we’re all on watch and I guess falling overboard is a real thing…Tai looked at me when he said that).

  Meanwhile I’ve started a tradition of my own. After I put all my stuff away (well, almost, the big suitcase does take up a whole loveseat), I took out one of my blank notebooks I bought in the San Francisco airport. It has this really gorgeous cover, textured floral patterns over metallic pink. I decided to turn it into a log of sorts.

  Currently, I’m sitting in the cockpit, facing away from Richard who is at the wheel, while Tai is making dinner downstairs. The journal is in my hand, as is a new pen that has the Golden Gate Bridge, a little reminder of home. Land disappeared from sight a few hours ago and Richard says we’ve traveled about a hundred nautical miles. The sun is low in the sky and bright gold and there’s nothing but ocean around us.

  I begin to write.

  Daisy’s Log: Day 1

  I am writing this journal in hopes of having some sort of respite from what is sure to be a tumultuous voyage across the sea.

  Okay, I don’t know why I’m writing this like it’s 1881 and is actually going to be read by someone, lol.

  Anyway, I’ve never been good at keeping a diary but I hope I do this time since I’ll probably need someone to talk to that isn’t one of the three grumps on board.

  I suppose Richard, AKA Little Dicky, isn’t a grump like Tai, nor is he super serious like Lacey. But he is a dork and he’s in cahoots with the two of them, so he’s not to be trusted.

  He’s watching me right now as I write this, staring down at me through thick glasses. He’s a hybrid of Bill Gates, Milhouse VanHouten, with a bit of Ross Gellar thrown in. Don’t believe me? I asked a question about kiwi fruit and I got an hour-long lecture about pollinating, bees, and manuka honey.

  Richard aside, everyone else seems to have calmed down from this morning. That was pretty intense. I really hoped that Tai would have sailed me back to the dock and dropped me off, but no such luck. We’re all in this together, which I guess is another term for making each other miserable.

  But yes, Lacey has been nicer and even Tai has loosened a little. I can hear music playing down below, some reggae group, and Lacey and Tai are talking animatedly about something interesting. I have to say, I’m looking forward to dinner, just to see what kind of meal Tai can prepare. And then of course there’s cocktail hour, which we all desperately need. At least I do. I’ve needed a drink since I stepped on this boat.

  Well, I guess that’s it for now. I am a little curious (okay, a lot curious) about what Lacey said about Tai’s past…how he’s been through a lot. It could explain why he’s such a prickly person….or maybe that’s just his personality. Either way, I would like to know more about him. I suppose with our shifts coming up, maybe I’ll get that opportunity.

  Of course that doesn’t mean I’ll get any answers.

  Over and out.

  Seven

  Tai

  “Cheers. To the first day out at sea,” Richard says.

  We all raise our drinks in front of the setting sun, the golden rays causing a prism effect through the wine glasses, distorting the dying light.

  The newlyweds stare deep into each other’s bespectacled eyes as they drink, probably superstitious over that whole seven years bad luck (or bad sex) thing.

  I figure Daisy must be wanting to avoid that also, since she’s had so much bad luck these days (not too sure about the bad sex, and I don’t want to know), but she’s avoiding my eyes, looking off into the sunset instead.

  She looks astoundingly pretty, the red in her hair looking like fire in this light, dancing around her face in the ocean breeze.

  There’s a pinch in my chest as I drink my wine, watching her. I’ve been a little harsh on her. I guess we all have been, though Lacey’s reasons I’m sure are different from mine.

  Mine are pretty simple.

  Daisy is a distraction.

  She’s not sailing material, she’s drawn the ire of everyone on the boat, she tends to get in the way no matter what she does, and she rarely shuts up. This ocean passage isn’t as easy as I’ve made it out to seem, and I need to stay focused on getting us all to Fiji in one piece, if we all don’t kill each other first.

  Plus…look at her.

  Right now I should be scanning the horizon for freighters, but instead I’m watching her. I’m always watching her when she’s not looking. I like studying the real her, the one behind the bright smile, the one that pretends everything is fine.

  Although, I have to say that’s been hard for her to do lately. Lacey has been going after her whenever she can, and even though their sibling rivalry is none of my business, and I’m staying out of it, I do think she’s being a little unfair to her.

  Which, of course, makes me feel like a dick for being a dick.

  Hey, I’m not heartless. Daisy may be a distraction, and she may live to annoy me, but I feel for her.

  I just can’t let myself feel for her too much. Been down that road before.

  At least everyone seems to have calmed down. The drinks help, of course. Though I don’t want to be a part of the whole social aspect of it, it’s good for the rest of them to loosen up a little.

  That’s a tall order with Richard and Lacey though, and Daisy can take the loosening up thing a little too far.

  Judge her all you want, but you loved the way she was falling all over you at the wedding.

  I elbow that voice in my head to shut up.

  For clarity’s sake, there’s truth in that.

  When the wedding reception really got going, Daisy got going as well. As in drunk. At least she was a happy drunk and was running around taking photos of everyone. I kept watching her, wondering if she’d eventually get around to taking a photo with me.

  Had to say, I think I might have been jealous of the attention she was giving everyone else.

  It was almost as if she smelled those jealousy fumes coming from my direction, because then she turned her attention to me and would not let up.

  I pretended it bugged me. I’m good at that.

  In reality, I liked it.

  She wanted photo after photo and I obliged her. I liked the feeling of her arm around my neck, I liked watching her smile and laugh and blush, I especially liked the feel of my cheek against her breasts, as playful as it was. Her skin is on a whole other level—warm, silky and sinfully soft.

  Then she asked me to dance.

  It was a slow song, some sappy Ed Sheeran, and I said no.

  I guess I could see where she was going with all of this and I got cold feet.

  Can’t really say why, just that it’s been happening to me a lot lately when an opportunity with a woman comes up. Those roads I don’t want to go down. Even when it’s just for a night, they never end up being what I want them to be, they’re always far more complicated than that.

  She looked so sad and heartbroken for a moment, but she laughed it off.

  I went back to the bar and watched her, thinking she’d turn her sights on someone else.

  Instead she went to the dance floor and closed her eyes, swaying to the music by herself, lonesome among a sea of couples.

  Don’t know why that sight affected me so much, but it did.

  I went back out there and took her into my arms before she could say anything.

  I’m glad I did too, because she was toasted and leaning into me like deadweight.

  So I held onto her, both because I needed to keep her up, and because I liked holding her. She was so soft and warm and tender that it moved something deep inside of me, and no, it wasn’t my dick. Although I can’t say I wasn’t hard as hell. Thankfully, she was too drunk to notice. I don’t even think she remembers any of this.

  After the dance, I knew the right thing to do would be to get her to bed.

  Daisy had other ideas though.

  She had bolted from the dance floor in the b
ackyard and run all the way down the beach to the water.

  “Come skinny-dipping with me!” she cried out, trying to undo the tie at the back of her neck. I hate to admit that I was a complete pig and just stood there, watching her struggle, hoping that the top would fall loose and those gorgeous tits of hers would be on display.

  But her breasts stayed covered and she gave up. Probably for the best. Not sure what I would have done if I was presented with them. I’m getting hard just thinking about them right now.

  “Tai?” Richard asks, making me jump in my seat.

  “What?” I say, clearing my throat, instinctively about to get to my feet and look at the bow, but my hard-on makes me stay put.

  Richard watches me carefully, then glances over at Daisy who is sipping her wine and still staring at the waves, the sky a splash of purples and pinks. Gorgeous sunset, infuriatingly gorgeous girl.

  He looks back to me, brow raised. “I was saying, I wonder about our VMG.”

  Right.

  VMG is Velocity Made Good, a nautical measure of how fast you’re going in the actual direction of your waypoint based on speed, distance to target, and a little trigonometry. Richard loves the trigonometry part.

  “It’s about 0.5 at the moment,” I tell him, which isn’t great. It doesn’t particularly matter if you’re rocketing at eight knots heading west if your destination is east. At the moment, the wind is trying to push us away from Fiji, which means just after dinner we had to do some course correcting. Hopefully the winds will switch when a new front comes in. And hopefully that front isn’t too bad.

  I limit myself to one glass of wine, even though what I really want is a highball of whisky, maybe with a squeeze of lime. I need to stay sharp, especially if I’m going to be waking up at 3 a.m.

  With Daisy.

  Yes, I’ll need to be especially sharp for that.

  * * *

  The alarm goes off at 2:45 a.m.

  I can’t remember the last time I had to get up at this hour, maybe when Holly and I sailed to Marlborough Sound.

  The thought of my ex-wife makes my brain stutter. I’m relieved that I don’t seem to have any complicated feelings along with that thought, after all it’s been a few years since our divorce. It’s just an odd feeling sometimes to have so many memories wrapped up with one person, a person that’s no longer part of your life. It’s unfair. If they don’t exist in your life, they shouldn’t exist in your memories.

  But life isn’t like that, is it?

  I get out of bed before my thoughts get any darker. It doesn’t help that I had the world’s most uncomfortable sleep. Even with earplugs in, which I hate, it was hard not to listen to Lacey and Richard talking as they did their night shift. Plus the couch is awful to sleep on, too short for me, and my lower back is already sore.

  No wonder I’m a fucking grump, I think as I head over to the stove to boil water for the coffee. Complain, complain, complain.

  While the water is boiling, I stick my head up top.

  “Good morning,” I say to Richard and Lacey, who are in each other’s arms. Lacey is asleep, snoring, Richard has one hand on the steering wheel, barely holding on.

  “Oh thank god,” Richard says softly. “I was afraid I couldn’t hold out any longer. I never even stayed up this late at university.”

  That doesn’t surprise me in the least.

  “Go to sleep,” I tell him. “You’re officially being relieved.”

  I head back down while he wakes up Lacey, and go straight to Daisy’s cabin.

  I knock, but there’s no answer.

  I swear I saw her set an alarm on her phone. She probably should have used an actual alarm clock like the one I have. You can’t trust phones in a dire situation.

  “Daisy?” I call out.

  I open the door and peer in at her.

  The sidelight is on.

  She’s sleeping on her back, mouth open, drooling.

  I have to stifle a laugh.

  On her chest is her phone, rising and falling with each breath.

  She’s so not made for this.

  “Daisy,” I say louder, reaching over and shaking her shoulder until her phone slides off her.

  “Huh, what?” she mumbles, rolling over until she sees me.

  Then wipes the drool from her face.

  “Shit. Sorry. What time is it?”

  “Time to get up.”

  “I must have turned off my alarm,” she says, looking embarrassed. She’s cute when she goes red.

  “It happens. Come on.”

  I wait until I see her reaching for a hoodie, making sure she doesn’t fall back asleep. I could let her keep sleeping. I’m totally fine up there alone for the rest of the night.

  But I want to put her through her paces. Just in case Lacey is right and Daisy is used to coasting by, I figure it can’t hurt to put her to work.

  While she’s getting ready, I stop by the kitchen, fill up a thermos of coffee and grab some insulated mugs, then head up top. Lacey and Richard are no doubt fast asleep below in their cabin.

  I get behind the wheel and put my head back, taking in the night sky.

  Being on a boat at night is a view that will never fail to take your breath away. A velvet black sky so dense that you swear you can see just how deep the universe goes. The stars are embedded like white diamonds, some of them fully formed prisms, others just speckles and stardust, like someone threw a bunch of sparkling sugar up into the night sky and it stuck, swirling around in multicolored galaxies.

  “Holy bejesus,” Daisy says as she appears on deck, looking extra small in her hoodie. She’s staring open-mouthed at the sky above. “Is this for real?”

  I nod. “This is dark sky territory,” I tell her. “No night pollution from anywhere. You’ll never find as many stars anywhere as you do right here.”

  “Wow,” she says, breathlessly. There’s something about her wonder I find so refreshing, like she’s looking at the stars for the first time.

  “Guess you have a lot of fog in San Francisco,” I comment.

  “Yeah, but even on my parent’s farm, the sky never looked anything like this.”

  I hold out the cup of coffee for her. “Here. This will help wake you up.”

  “I’m already wide awake,” she says and then fixes her big blue eyes at me. Even in the dark they seem to glow. “But thank you.”

  She reaches for the mug and our fingers brush against each other.

  It shouldn’t mean anything. And it doesn’t.

  But it shouldn’t be something that stands out either.

  And it does.

  The feel of her finger as it brushes against mine shouldn’t take me back to being a child and holding hands with a crush for the first time. But it’s more than that. There’s a buzz, an electricity between our contact that can’t be imaginary.

  Get a grip, I tell myself. Eyes on the horizon.

  “So this is the night watch,” she says as she sits down to the left of the wheel, cradling the mug between her hands.

  “Generally unexciting.”

  She gives me a look. “I should hope so. Dare I ask what an exciting episode would be like?”

  “I guess it’s something only I’d find interesting. If the winds were in our favor, we could really be skipping along here. Have you ever been on a boat like this, when you’re going downwind, constant breeze, doing five knots at ease so you can just sit back and let it go?”

  “Obviously not,” she says, placing her mug between her knees and tucking her hair beneath the back of her hoodie. “But it sounds nice. This is nice.”

  “This is a challenge,” I tell her. “The winds keep pushing us in the wrong direction. But in time, it should work out. Maybe add a day to our journey.”

  She stiffens at that.

  “Don’t worry,” I tell her. “Not all days will be like today.”

  I’m kind of lying because it’ll probably just get worse.

  “I’m hoping for the best and exp
ecting the worst,” she says wryly, then sighs. “Which is kind of sad, because once upon a time I hoped for the best and expected the best.”

  I watch her carefully, the way she is worrying her lip between her teeth. “You know, I think that’s how we all want to operate. You’re lucky to have done so for so long.”

  She tilts her head back to look at the stars. “I’ve heard that all my life. That I was lucky. Now I’m not so sure I was.”

  “What makes you say that?”

  She shrugs. “I don’t know. It’s not that things haven’t been easy for me…I’ve worked hard, contrary to anything Lacey might say.”

  “Lacey can say all she wants, but she wasn’t there and has never been in your shoes.”

  Her eyes focus on mine and an impish smile plays across her lips. “Are you sticking up for me?”

  “I wouldn’t go that far.”

  “So diplomatic,” she muses. Then her expression darkens as she stares into her coffee. “Lacey thinks everything has been handed to me because she got the shit end of the stick when it came to my parents.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “She’s only three years older, but it feels more like ten years when you look at how my parents raised her versus how they raised me. They’re religious, right? Not in a bad, cult-ish way. They’ve always been very supportive of us. But…with Lacey, they were very strict. I guess my mother struggled a bit before she finally got pregnant, and they were so fearful of losing her that they never let Lacey out of their sight. They didn’t let her have many friends, never bought her new clothes, never let her eat junk food, never let her go to sleepovers. In high school they monitored what music she listened to, she wasn’t allowed to date. They knew she had no interest in the family farm, so they pushed her into studies.”

  “I have a hard time believing Lacey would be pushed into that.”

  “You’re right. But they put a lot of pressure on her to be the best and maybe that made Lacey worse, I don’t know. Because she puts a lot of pressure on herself in order to please my parents and she’s still acting that way, to this day.”