8. Over the Bounding Main
8
OVER THE BOUNDING MAIN
PRENTICE
I felt it in the air the moment I woke up. Rain coming.
No need to consult my grandfather’s barometer hanging by the door or the high-tech weather app on my phone. It was going to rain today.
And a few brief squalls of rain could be labeled as a spring storm on Long Island Sound.
Given my intentions regarding one Malcolm Becker, the looming clouds were a sign that all the gods approved of my plans.
The big cooler in the garage would fit in the trunk of my Honda. After my mother and father left to pretend they had any faith at all at the local Episcopalian social gathering—I mean, church—I scrounged in the hall closet for some of the foul-weather gear my brother, Chris, left behind when he moved out.
Mrs. Priss had just pulled fresh scones out of the oven, and I raided her cookie jar before zipping across the driveway to my lair. I had one large duffel and one large cooler packed and in my car by the time Mal texted me.
Am I picking you up?
I was tempted to get him to leave his van in front of my door where it would tweak my disapproving mother, but in the end, was she so wrong to think I should marry into a family she trusted? No. Her views weren’t going to stop me, but I didn’t have to rub her nose in it.
Meet me at the yacht club
See you there at ten
Yes. Perfect.
So my intentions wouldn’t be too obvious, I took a quick run to the yacht club and had Benny run me out to The Siren so I could store my supplies and air out the cabin. I was back on dry land and sitting on the trunk of my car when Mal pulled in.
I almost rubbed my hands in delight. He was driving the disreputable white van again—perfect, he’d told me, for loading up the equipment of a band that had not yet earned enough to employ its own roadies or trucks. The van was banged up and travel-worn. That would look like a slap in the face next to Johnston’s demonmobile, should Johnston show up and wonder where I was. Good.
Hot on Mal’s heels were a small convoy of gleaming sports cars. Blonde heads popped out once they parked, already scanning the lot to see who was here. Oh. I forgot.
“Mal,” I said once we were all within speaking distance, “this is Elizabeth, Liz, Wizzy, and Melissa.”
He shook hands while they goggled at him. “Wizzy?” he asked for clarification.
“Short for Elizabeth.” She giggled.
“Of course it is. Melissa, do you ever feel out of place?”
She giggled too.
Liz spoke up. “How clever of you, Prentice, to bring a big strong man to help us clean up after the gala!”
“We’re the younger members of the party committee,” I explained to Mal, “so we get cleanup duty.”
“And none of us thought to bring a helper,” Wizzy said.
Back off there, Miss Big Boobs.
“I’m sorry to disappoint you, ladies.” I put my hand on Mal’s impressive bicep. “If I’m going to win Johnston’s sailing challenge, I need to get my first mate up to speed. We’re sailing this morning. Will you forgive me if I miss the cleanup?”
At the mention of the sailing challenge, all four were distracted from eyeballing Mal. “Prentice,” Wizzy said, “you’ve got to win. For all womankind!”
She slapped me a high five, and we all cheered. Mal looked confused. “None of you women sail?”
“Oh no,” Melissa said. “We all do.”
“But you don’t want to be in the race?”
Elizabeth summed it up: “That’s going to be, like, an eight-hour race. And Johnston will win. He always does. I’ve got better things to do.”
“Yeah,” Liz teased, “like Stefan. Or cocktails.”
“Or a nap,” Wizzy added.
“No,” Elizabeth went on with a touch of her usual malice. “Prentice is our girl. We’re backing her in this race. She’s peppy .”
Of course, she said the word as if it were an insult.
“I am peppy,” I agreed with a social smile. “Peppy enough to beat Johnston to a pulp in a fair race.”
“All right,” Mal said with a smile that weakened all the knees around him. “Let’s get to that!”
Liz put a hand on his chest. “See that guy down there by the Boston Whaler? That’s Benny. He’ll take you both out to Prentice’s little boat. Why don’t you head down there? I just want to run some committee stuff past Prentice, you know? Give her a minute, will you?”
She nudged Mal down the path to the docks. He checked with me, and when I nodded, he did as he was told.
“That’s good,” Liz called to him. “Yes, just down there. We won’t be but a moment!” Then she turned back to me, the others grouped around her. “What do you want us to tell Johnston if he shows up?”
The girl was looking for gossip. Typical. Liz was Elizabeth’s sidekick and would help to land Johnston for Elizabeth like a prize marlin. May they have very great success with that goal. “Tell him anything you want,” I said. “I don’t care what Johnston thinks.”
Elizabeth shook her head. “He’ll be mad if he knows his fiancée is going sailing with some other guy.”
“His—his what?” Was I hearing correctly?
“It’s okay,” Wizzy said. “We’re sworn to secrecy. We told him we wouldn’t tell until you guys were ready to announce.”
I stepped back and inhaled deeply. “I am not engaged to Johnston. I am not going to be engaged to him. Trust me on this.”
“He says you are. You’re sure?” Elizabeth had a predatory air. Good. Poach that man. Take him. Please. Quickly.
“I’m quite sure. Again, I’m sorry about missing the cleanup. I’ll probably see you all when we get back from the sail.” If you’re planning on spending the night here , I added to myself.
I turned away resolutely, smothering my anger at Johnston and the lies he was spreading.
Melissa stopped me with a hand on my arm. Always the sweetest of that bunch, Melissa let the others head to the clubhouse without her so she could scan the sky. “Don’t be gone too long,” she said. “Don’t you think it feels like rain? I do.”
She was one of the better sailors too. Impulsively, I kissed her cheek. “I know. I’m actually sort of counting on it.”
Her eyebrows went up, and she darted a glance to where Mal was talking with Benny. “Yeah? And you’re really not . . . with Johnston?”
“Liss, Johnston is bad news. Seriously, stay away from him for your own good. But if you want to encourage Elizabeth to go after him, I’d sure be grateful.”
Melissa burst out laughing. “She’s such a bitch, right? I have no idea why I like her so much.”
I laughed. “Well, she does have it in her to be a lot of fun. I get it! Enjoy your cleanup. Sorry to ditch.”
“No worries. Me, I’m just here for the Bloody Marys.”
I laughed, and we parted as friends.
Benny drove us to the boat and steadied the launch as Mal clambered aboard. Mal stood in the cockpit and looked around. When he ducked down to peer into the cabin, I murmured to Benny, “We might be gone overnight. Don’t worry about us.”
He gave me the eyebrow and laughed. Then he was gone.
There. Who was going to cockblock me now? I’d like to see them try.
“Do you see the sail bag in there? It’s the yellow one. Haul that out here, will you?” I showed him how to clip the jib to the forward stay while I set the mainsail. “While you’re up there,” I called, “can you see how to unclip from the mooring?”
“We’re ready?”
“We’re ready. Set us free!”
He did and made his way back to the cockpit carefully, working hard to avoid stepping on the mountains of downed sails. “Now what?”
“Mainsail first. See that sheet? No, sheet means rope. Grab that rope. Good. Pull.” He cheered when the main rattled up the mast, and I showed him how to cleat the line. “Now the jib. Beauty.”
The wind caught in the sails, and my heart lifted. “Feel that?” He sat across from me, and his expression asked for clarification. “There’s this moment . . . I don’t know. You get on a moored boat. It’s a stable, stationary place, a hole in the water lined in fiberglass, swinging on the anchor line with the tide and not going anywhere. And then the wind catches the sails, and the boat leaps forward, and all that stability . . . I don’t know. It turns into movement. Into energy and power and wind and—and hell, I don’t know how to explain how good it feels.”
Mal cocked an eyebrow. “It feels like freedom.”
“It feels like freedom! That’s it!”
He nodded. “It feels good. This wind feels good. I like this,” he said.
My hand was on the tiller, my foot on the seat by his thigh. We slid gracefully past the yacht club. Past the town launch. Past the beach club. We left it all behind, carried on the invisible, inevitable power of the wind.
“Welcome to The Siren ,” I thought to say.
“Thank you.” He smiled back at me. “I’m trying to think of why that feeling you described seems so familiar—that transition from normal to exhilarating. And I guess it was . . . I don’t know, maybe five years ago? There came a moment when Archer, Ian, and I stopped practicing and started playing. We were doing an opening gig on a Tuesday, for god’s sake, for some total unknown. And we were unknown. No surprise either. And there was this moment . . .” His voice trailed off. He wasn’t looking at the shore or the water or the wind in the sails; he was seeing into the past.
“What happened?” I asked.
He shrugged. “No one else ever would have noticed it. We hadn’t even started yet. There were about twelve people on the dance floor, and no one was paying any attention to us. The stage manager was still fucking around with cords. But Archer looked at Ian and then at me, and I felt this link. And I counted off the beat. We were leading with a cover of a Fall Out Boy song back then. Anyway, something happened. We went from stable and normal to?—”
“—the wind catching in your sails.”
His face cleared, and his smile was like sunrise. “Yeah. Like that. You start out with a few drums and a few guitars, nothing but potential. It’s not music yet. It’s nothing. But it could be something. And that night, we weren’t thinking about how to play the music—the beat, the words, the dynamics. Instead, we were inside the music. We shaped it. Pushed it around between the three of us. Found a connection.” He shook his head. “Tough to put into words.”
“I think you’re doing a pretty good job.”
He huffed a laugh. “Thanks. Tell me about the boat.”
“Okay. A little vocabulary—that’s the bow up there. We’re sitting in the stern. You’re on the starboard side, I’m on the port. Port has four letters, left has four letters. Port wine is red, the color for the port side is red. Starboard will just confuse you if you try to make sense of it, so focus on port first. Port, left, red. Okay?”
“I’m keeping up so far.” He sat easily, relaxed. His arms were along the gunwales, which made his big chest look even wider. Mm.
I walked him through the basics of movement. I showed him how I tacked across the wind, making a zigzag course across the water. I demonstrated how fast The Siren could move, dark blue water rolling almost to the gunwales as he laughed with a combination of nerves and excitement. I talked about the jib and the main and how a spinnaker would ride in front of the boat like a beautiful, colorful bell if the wind was at our backs.
He listened attentively, asked smart questions, and had no problem with the rocking motion. “You’re going to be a good sailor,” I said.
“You could run this race by yourself, couldn’t you?”
I shook my head. “Not to the lighthouse and back. That’s a long run.”
“How long?”
“Depends on the wind, but I’m estimating it’s an eight-hour round trip. Roughly.”
“For you? Or for Johnston?”
I acknowledged the question. “He’s bought himself this unbelievably complicated craft that he thinks is going to get him into the America’s Cup trials. That thing . . . shit. When he’s got enough wind, it’s designed to rise up out of the water on these long fins so there’s no drag at all. It’s pure engineering, and absolutely mesmerizing. Terrifyingly fast. I can’t even call it a boat anymore. Those crafts are jaw-dropping.”
“How fast will they go?”
I tried to convert knots to miles per hour. “Maybe fifty miles an hour? With the right wind?”
“And how fast will The Siren go?”
I laughed. “This beauty? Perfect conditions? I’d be pushing it if I said nine miles an hour.”
“Damn.”
“Yeah. That’s why no one took Johnston’s challenge at first, other than his buddies. In his overengineered thing, he could make it to the lighthouse in . . . forty-five minutes? You’d have a very hard time beating him, even in one of those high-powered cigarette boats.”
“So no one wanted to race him.”
“Only Trip, Steff, and Macklin. Those three would follow him off a cliff if he jumped first.”
“But now that everyone is in a boat like The Siren , what happens?”
I grinned. “Then it comes down to who is the better sailor. And guess who isn’t much of a sailor?”
Mal smirked. “Would that be Johnston?”
I pumped a fist in the air. “He has no sense of the wind. No ability to anticipate. He thinks everything is just going to unfold in front of him the way he wants it to go. And that works out just fine in the world of business when Jack Furneau is your father and people are willing to jump through Johnston’s hoops to keep Jack happy. But out here? On the water?” I laughed, delighted. “There’s no controlling this wind. This water. Daddy’s powerful friends won’t help. Trust funds won’t do you a lick of good. But if you know how to work it . . .”
“You can get where you want to go.”
“And get there fast!”
“All right!” He smiled, and I felt sound and whole and good all the way down to my bones. “So where are we going today?”
“Come sit on this side. What do you see?”
He ducked his head under the boom and crossed to my side. “What am I looking at?”
“Over there, on that bluff. See?”
“Oh, shit. That’s the Furneau estate.”
We studied it together. A long stone building with colonnaded porches, suitable for the undisputed leader of the financial world. A new greenhouse, three stories tall, had recently grown there like a mushroom. It was said to hold sixty-foot-tall palm trees. To the other side and through the woods was the plate-glass architectural marvel that was Johnston’s place. It pushed arrogantly between the trees like the prow of a ship.
From our angle, we could see the staircase that ran along the face of the bluff, past a sheltered seating area covered with thick wisteria vines, and down the hillside to a branching—one stairway leading nearly straight down to an impressive dock complex with a massive boathouse, the other stairway taking a gentler path down to the gatehouse that guarded the causeway.
“That’s where my mother lives,” he said. “In the gatehouse. That’s where I grew up.” He was quiet for a moment and then went on. “It’s Sunday morning. She’s probably sitting in her chair right now. She can see this boat. I can’t count the number of times I looked out my window to see the sailboats going past.” He shook his head, possibly clearing his mood, and smiled at me. “And now here I am. With you.”
“With me.” And within kissing distance, too—not that I noticed. Not that my heart was slamming around in my torso. “As for where we’re going . . . how long do I have you for?”
He shrugged and then shifted to sit across from me. My slamming heart slowed down, and I tried not to feel disappointed. Was he turning away from me, or turning his back on the Furneau estate? “I have nothing going on. No gigs to play, no drums to bang. Not even any tux fittings in the middle of the night by guys I’m beginning to think are very exotic vampires. My schedule is free. I thought maybe I could take you to dinner tonight.”
My next question would imply interest. That scared me . . . but I was hopeful. He’d wanted more the night before; I knew he had. “And what about tomorrow? Are you busy tomorrow?”
His eyebrow went up. “Allow me to clarify. We go into the studio next Monday—not tomorrow, but a week from tomorrow—to record our next album. Until then, I have no obligations at all. From now until then, I am your willing slave.”
“Good answer.” My heart was slamming again.
He narrowed his eyes as he looked at me. Trying to figure me out, Mal? I’m going to take care of you.
Which reminded me.
“Oh! I’m sorry. Take the tiller.”
“Me?”
“Just keep heading this way.” I ducked into the little cabin and pulled supplies out of my cooler. “Here’s a thermos for you. That’s coffee with a little milk.”
He took it from me, delighted. “How did you know?”
“That’s how you took it at the diner. Take my thermos, please. I’ve got scones here. Ah, they’re still warm!” I passed the platter to him and came back into the cockpit to retake the tiller.
“This is amazing. You made scones?”
“Nah, that was my mother and father’s cook, Mrs. Priss. Short for Przwalski. She’s an amazing baker. Try this.”
“Wow. This is quite a lunch. Thank you.”
“No, no, I’ve still got lunch to go. This was supposed to be breakfast, but I forgot.”
He lowered his magnificent head to regard me through suspicious eyes. “Lunch, huh?”
“Maybe some dinner too,” I said primly.
He grinned. “Are we ever coming back?”
“Maybe. I don’t know. Depends.”
“On what?”
I nodded at the sky ahead of us. “Take a look at that.”
Surprised, he turned. “What am I looking at now?”
“Rain clouds. A lot of them. When we come around the point, we’re going to be hit with a bit of a storm.”
His attention distracted, Mal half crouched in his seat to check out the weather ahead of us. He turned back to me. “We’re going to keep going?”
“I want to,” I said flatly. “There’s a cove I know, where the walls of the bluff crumble more every winter. No mansions overhead. Thick marshland at the foot. No one around for miles. We could ride the storm out there. Have some . . . lunch.”
He sat across from me and put his sneaker up on the seat by my leg. “I like lunch.”
“Good. Me too.”
His gaze heated up. He bit his lip and nudged my thigh with his foot. I dropped my free hand and slid my fingers inside the edge of his jeans, finally reaching the skin above his ankle. I knew I was flushed; my skin was hot, and my cheek muscles were tired from attempting to curtail a very uncool smile.
But he was smiling too. Maybe as interested as I was.
But the wind was picking up as we came to the point. I let go of his ankle. “In the cabin, there’s a duffel bag. See if you can find a black rain jacket, will you?”
“Yes, Captain,” he said. He ducked his head undercover, and I admired the view of his lean ass as he pawed through the bag. “There are a lot of clothes here,” he said, and then emerged with the foul-weather gear. “Here you go.”
“No, that one’s for you. Mine is blue. Did you see it?”
“You just happened to have a raincoat in my size?”
“It’s my brother’s. It’ll be a little small on you, but it will help. Thanks. We should put these on now. See the rain on the water? Here we go.”
“We’re going to sail in the rain?”
“Why not? There’s still wind, right? Put your hood up. No, I know it looks dorky, but you’ll be glad later. Use the drawstrings—yeah, there you go. Not so bad, right?”
Once we got past the point of land and turned to the east, the rain stopped being a soft mist and became a driving, I-can’t-really-see downpour.
“We’ve got another half an hour,” I estimated. “You okay?”
“It’s sort of exciting, isn’t it?” He grinned at me and I smiled back, blinking away rain. Tough guy, huh? Good. I could pick up a little more speed if he didn’t mind us heeling over a little in the wind.
He didn’t mind; he actually shouted with glee. The Siren slid through the waves like a bird. We were flying—wet and windy and getting a little cold, but still flying.
“Have some coffee,” I called. “It will help. You can go below if you want.”
“No way! This is great!”
“Okay, take the tiller. Feel the difference? It’s harder to hold her steady, but the reaction time is a fraction of what it is in calmer conditions. Watch the wind. You can see it on the water as well as feel it. Like it?”
“It’s—it’s hard. And man, to be able to control this? That must really feel good. No, don’t sit. Stick with me here. Where am I going?”
I got us to the cove and took the tiller back to negotiate the downed trees I knew were there, even though I couldn’t see them. We got to the deep spot—safe even when the tide went out—and we dropped our sails. I put the anchor off the bow and showed Mal how to set the storm anchor at the stern. I lashed the sails down and then nudged him into the cabin.
Three boards slid into a groove to make a door, and the hatch slides closed above. And there we were, snugged into a tiny cabin with the rain drumming on the deck.
I had two battery lights that I flicked on before I fought out of my slicker. “Put yours down this bunk here, below the cockpit seats.” He shoved his jacket, dripping wet, into the bunks lovingly referred to as coffins, leaving us the large double berth under the bow for our consideration.
“If you take your shoes off before you step up, we can keep the wetness in the well.” I slipped out of my shoes, and Mal toed his sneakers off. “Well,” I said, taking a breath, “we’re now at the point where we really ought to remove more of the wet clothes, but it could get awkward, you know?”
Then he was facing me, close enough to feel the heat of his body. “I don’t mean to be presumptuous,” he breathed, “but would it be less awkward if I finally really kissed you first?”
“Oh.” My breath left me on an exhale, and I lost the ability to offer a witty comeback. “Yes. Yes, please.”