Chapter Forty-Five Lucky
Chapter Forty-Five
Lucky
A rush of white noise filled my head, blocking out all my senses. This couldn’t be happening. It couldn’t.
I dropped my head down to the table, like I couldn’t support the weight any longer. Each beat of my heart was painful, as if a knife were cutting into my chest. My lungs constricted, and I felt like I was going to throw up.
It was like the worst panic attack I’d ever had.
And all I wanted was for Hunter to be here, holding my hands.
But he was too busy kissing Emilie.
Georgia rushed to my side, putting her arm around me. I couldn’t hear what she was saying, like my hearing had been turned off.
Had he been telling Emilie the same things he’d told me? Saying he wasn’t interested in me or Georgia, that she was the only one for him?
I felt so completely foolish. How did I get taken in by men like this every single time?
Why had he done this? I wouldn’t have sex with him and Emilie would? Was that the reason?
This is Hunter, a small voice said to me. He wouldn’t do this to you. He loves you.
Maybe I had misunderstood what I’d seen. That was possible, wasn’t it?
It would be an easier lie to swallow if I hadn’t witnessed it with my own eyes.
“Lucky? Are you okay?” Georgia’s words finally pierced the foggy, confused haze I found myself in.
“She’s supposed to be sick.” It was the only thing I could think to say.
“I can’t believe this,” Georgia said.
Neither could I. It felt completely unreal. Like it was a movie and not actually happening to me.
“There has to be an explanation,” I said, finding it painful to speak. Didn’t I owe it to him to let him explain?
“I don’t know, mate. How well do you really know Hunter? He’s lied to you about some important things.”
Yes, but there had been reasons for that.
“I don’t want to be a downer here but I also don’t want you to get hurt. What if this is just a fling for him? Do you know how many crewmembers I’ve thought I was in love with?”
This wasn’t like that. Or, it hadn’t been up until about three minutes ago. But what if she was right? What if he and I were caught up in some faux romance because we lived and worked together? How was I supposed to know if this was real or not?
And how could he kiss Emilie?
Somebody stepped into the crew mess and then hurried down the hall.
It was Emilie.
I held my breath, wondering if Hunter was going to come chasing after her.
He didn’t.
“Go into your cabin and splash some cold water on your face,” Georgia said. “Lay down if you need to. Take a few minutes to collect yourself.”
How was I supposed to collect myself when I had been shattered into a billion tiny pieces and scattered all over the floor?
I did as she suggested. My mind was reeling; I was trying to make sense of what I’d just seen. I didn’t get into my bed, though. There were too many memories there. I stayed in the bathroom with the door locked.
And I couldn’t figure out a way to make this okay. There was no reason or explanation other than Hunter had been cheating on me the whole time and I was so caught up in him that I hadn’t realized it.
It certainly wouldn’t have been the first time that this had happened to me.
At some point I was going to have to get out of this bathroom and start cleaning. Georgia couldn’t do it all by herself and Emilie certainly wasn’t going to help—she was too busy sticking her tongue down Hunter’s throat.
I wanted to cry but I knew that if I did, I wouldn’t be able to stop. I didn’t have the luxury of getting to break down and fall apart. There was still work to be done.
“Lucky, Lucky, Captain Carl.”
I fumbled with my radio for a second before I could respond. “Yes, Captain?”
“Come up to the bridge.”
“Copy.” I wondered what the captain wanted now. Maybe he was going to berate me for not letting Brock sexually harass me.
I felt like a zombie as I made my way up to the bridge, numb and incapable of thought. Because remembering what I had seen was too heartbreaking and it was easier to just block everything out.
Captain Carl was waiting for me. “What is this?” he asked, handing me a piece of paper.
I was still so scattered that it took me a bit to recognize what it was. The sCrew List.
My name was on it.
And I had points.
“I don’t know—”
“Save it,” he cut me off. “I don’t actually need you to explain this to me. I can see exactly what it is.”
“But I didn’t make this. I didn’t participate.”
He narrowed his gaze at me. “That paper says otherwise.”
Suddenly everything came into focus. When Emilie had rushed past us in the crew mess, she must have been going after the list, adding my name to it and giving me points for kissing Hunter.
“And then there’s this.”
He handed me another piece of paper and I gasped. Someone had taken a picture of Hunter kissing me in the primary cabin. The captain must have printed it out.
I knew I’d heard something. Emilie must have done it.
Then another paper. This one was a screenshot of my texts with Georgia. Where she asked me if I was hooking up with Hunter and I had sarcastically replied that he and I were having sex.
Georgia never would have shown those texts to anyone. Had she been too drunk that night and forgotten to delete them? She had sent them from Francois’s phone. Would he have shown the captain? That didn’t seem like something Francois would do.
But how did the captain have them? Wait, my phone had gone missing and then mysteriously reappeared. Emilie must have taken it. I hysterically thought about the fact that I had always meant to put password protection on it and now it was too late.
“This was a joke,” I said, my heart beating so fast it felt like it might actually explode. “That’s why there’s a smiley face after it. I was kidding. I haven’t slept with Hunter.”
“There’s photographic evidence of you kissing him, which is against the rules.”
And I couldn’t deny it. He was right.
“You kissing on the primary guest’s bed with a fellow crewmember is inappropriate and unprofessional. What if one of the guests had walked in and seen you?”
My face burned with shame. Again, he was right. Most of the guests had been off the ship but Amber could have easily gone down to her room for any reason.
“This is the third strike, Lucky. The last few weeks you have shown a continual pattern of not doing your job properly or within the parameters I’ve established.”
Sweat broke out on my lower back as I realized what was going on. I was at DEFCON screwed. I had lived in constant fear of the captain letting me go, and now here we were. It was happening.
I was being fired.
“I’m afraid I’m going to have to let you go.”
There it was. My anxiety had caused me to imagine him firing me so many times that part of me had almost been expecting this. The one time I broke a rule and it was destroying everything.
He got my passport and paperwork, along with an airplane ticket. He said I would fly out of Genoa and catch a connection in Rome back to America. “You can take the tender with the guests and the exterior crew.”
Which meant I had to hurry. I was shaking now, so hard that the papers he’d handed me made a rustling noise.
“I’ll radio Thomas to grab your suitcase,” he said.
And that, more than anything, made this feel final for me.
I’d lost my job.
And my dream of opening a bakery.
And the man I loved.
There was no point in trying to defend myself, either. Even though most of it wasn’t true, the main one was. I had kissed Hunter repeatedly in violation of the rules.
I also realized that if I tried to tell the captain about Emilie, I would only come across as bitter and self-serving. He wouldn’t believe me. He would have to find out the hard way. The rest of the crew didn’t deserve to be stuck with her, but Captain Carl certainly did.
I left the bridge and went down to my cabin. I stood there, not sure of what to do. I had to pack up immediately. I knew that.
This was all my fault. If I had been more honest with the captain from the beginning, maybe things would have turned out differently. If I’d had the guts to tell him about how lazy Emilie was, she would have been long gone and I wouldn’t be here, trying to gather up all my belongings.
I had tried so hard to protect everyone, including myself, that I’d only made things worse. I should have been truthful about how I felt and what was happening. The problem was my emotions were a whirling, tangled mess of confusion and I couldn’t see my way clear.
Georgia came running in, panicked. “What happened?”
Thomas must have told her. “I got fired. The captain knows about me and Hunter.” I shared all the other details, like the list and the screenshots. Her eyes widened with shock as I spoke.
“That’s not fair!” she said. “This is partly my fault. I made the list and I encouraged Emilie. I’ll go up there right now and straighten this out.”
“You can’t,” I said. “Then you’ll lose your job, too. Your grandma relies on your help.”
“We’ve all done so much worse than you,” she said in a sad voice, and I could only nod. It felt supremely unfair, but I didn’t want anyone else to lose their position here.
Thomas came into the room with my suitcase. I hadn’t expected to see it again for a very long time. “I’m sorry, Lucky. We’ll miss you around here.”
“Thanks,” I said. Impermanence. This happened all the time. I knew that even if the crew felt bad now, they would get over it quickly and go on with their lives. Nature of the beast.
“I’ll see you on the tender,” he said.
Georgia offered to help me pack and I took her up on it. We had so much practice packing and unpacking for guests that it didn’t take us very long.
“I don’t know how I’m going to do this without you,” she said, hugging me tightly. I was glad that my numbness was overriding my other emotions or else I would’ve probably started crying. I couldn’t imagine not seeing Georgia every day.
“I’ll miss you,” I said, swallowing down the sob that rose up in my throat.
She walked with me to the tender. All the guests and the exterior crew were there already. They had been waiting for me.
Thomas took my suitcase and loaded it onto the smaller boat. The port here required larger ships to stay in the bay near the harbor and be ferried to the pier. It would only be a five-minute ride.
But once I saw Hunter’s face, I had no idea how I was going to make it through the next five minutes.