Chapter 27
Celebrating didn’t last long.
An elbow crashed against Waylon’s shoulder. Melv stripped the gun out of his hands and grabbed Waylon by the arm, spinning him around so he could slam the pistol against the chest of the only living Cartwright.
“Enough,” Waylon said. Blood dribbled from his nose, new bruises forming over every patch of skin, but his shoulders straightened with determination. “It’s over, Melv.”
An oily laugh seeped out. “For you.”
A steady thumping pulsed across the waves as their rescuers sailed nearer. Morse code? No. It almost sounded like…trap music. They were coming, but not fast enough. Fletcher had to do something before Melv did.
She tapped on Melv’s shoulder. “Say cheese!”
Her camera shutter clicked, capturing the moment in perfect clarity—Melv with a fistful of Waylon’s shirt and ramming the gun into his sternum, Waylon with his hands spread wide on either side of his face in innocence.
Melv’s interest in Waylon immediately waned. He twisted, arms extended with incredible form and his finger hovering over the trigger. Ready to kill. “You want to go first? That’s fine.”
Through the viewfinder of her camera, Fletcher centered the barrel of the gun. A twist of the lens, and Melv’s face came into focus behind it. She set the aperture, shortened the depth of field. The kind of photo that belonged on front pages.
Melv’s trigger sank.
A flashbulb popped.
The moment stretched, infinite almost, in that postflash haze as the gun still smoked from its last desperate shot. There was nothing but brine and gunpowder, iron and salt. There was nothing at all.
Then, a scream as Lil Jon’s voice tore through the moment.
The rescue boat drifted toward the dock with each thump of an 808. Crunk had never sounded so good.
Fletcher lowered her camera. Smiled. “Great work, Melv. Has anyone ever told you how photogenic you are?”
A roar tore up Melv’s throat. He pulled the trigger again and again. The gun exhaled soot and little else.
“You’re all out of bullets.” Waylon dragged Melv away from Fletcher and wrapped him in mooring line. “I’d say your plan backfired, but I guess it didn’t actually fire at all.”
Fletcher tied the last knot. “Stranding us with two bullets? Diabolical. Great for the theatrics, but a truthfully poor execution.”
Melv tried to respond, but Waylon gagged him with a twist of rope. Wedged between the two of them and forced to listen to the worst performance review of his life, Melv floundered against his holds, likely trying to decide which of them to pummel first once he freed himself.
“Your complete disinterest in basic human decency served you well. You really nailed the comic book supervillain vibe,” Fletcher ribbed. “I feel like you had us there for a minute. Those sharks got pretty close. Ultimately, your downfall was all your own. You had to have the last word.”
“But now we get to have it,” Waylon added, triumphant. “And the word I’d like to go with is ‘goodbye.’ ”
All the trash-talking bought them enough time for their saviors to sail closer, coming alongside the docked yacht in the inner harbor. The closer the boat got, the easier it became to read the banner draped over the highest deck. In wide pink-and-green letters, it read: The S.S. Ship-Faced.
A party spanned both the ship’s decks, each filled to the brim with writhing twentysomethings.
The lower looked like a dance floor that boasted a preternatural glow—Fletcher squinted, trying to make it out.
Ah, that would be a bar draped in rainbow string lights shaped like flip-flops.
Upstairs, there must have been a pool because she glimpsed a few foam noodles, a ring floaty shaped like a sprinkled donut with a bite taken out of it, and someone catching some serious height off a diving board, only to belly flop with a tremendous splash.
A passerelle extended between the two boats. For the sake of her stomach, looking down wasn’t an option. If she had, she knew she’d find the starved shark tracking beneath, hoping she lost her balance.
When they made it to the other side, a sunburned crew member in an airbrushed cutoff whooped, “What’s up! You look like you need a drink!”
Understatement of the century.
The glass-bottomed boat teemed with partygoers.
Half the guests wore crop tops painted with “I got Ship-faced,” and the other half wore barely anything at all.
Neon nylon and sunscreen-slicked skin swirled together.
Everyone had a glass in their hand, well on their way to living up to the boat’s name.
Fletcher had barely stepped off the gangway when she spotted a shock of bottle-blond hair atop an all-too-familiar wiry frame. Shirtless, wearing a Speedo, a fanny pack, and an ungodly amount of glitter. Only one person on planet Earth possessed that much self-confidence.
“Ford?” she barely heard herself say over the blaring early-2000s hits.
“Look what the tide washed up!” Ford crooned. He wrapped her in a massive hug, lifting her feet off the ground and spinning her in a circle. Coconut-scented suntan oil smeared across her cheek. With her feet solidly back on the deck, he scanned her top to bottom. “You look like trash.”
In the name of friendship, she would be ignoring that. “What are you doing here?”
“Day drinking. Seychelles, baby!” He slurped through a loopty-loop straw to really drive home his point. “Plus, I got your texts. You have some explaining to do.”
If Fletcher’s brain hadn’t been so busy figuring out how Ford had gotten her middle-of-the-safari panic texts, she would have been mortified by the knowing look he gave Waylon over her shoulder.
“You…got my texts?”
Ford wiggled his phone out of the highlighter-yellow fanny pack.
“Yeah. I was, in fact, taking body shots. You know me so well.” He thumbed to their text thread, where Fletcher’s stream of disjointed thoughts bubbled up one after the other.
“If you were—and I quote—going to spend the rest of your short life daydreaming about Waylon’s body, I knew there had to be something going on.
” Waylon snorted. “I gave the DJ a lap dance as a bribe to get him to swing this way.”
“The DJ?”
“The DJ is also the captain.”
Duh.
“The yacht has Wi-Fi,” Waylon said. A smile curved his lips. A little teasing, a little too proud for his own good. “The generator must have powered up the router, so your texts could be sent.” He pivoted to Ford. “Can I see these messages?”
“No!” Fletcher shouted. But then, she couldn’t help it.
She giggled. Despite everything, laughter fizzed up her throat, giddy and light.
She’d never been so glad to have a doomscrolling addiction and friendship-separation anxiety.
“Ford, I love you, you little heathen. I’ll buy you lunch for a month.
Three months. The rest of your life, I don’t care. ”
She smashed her face against his bare chest again, squeezing him tight. Ford’s slurred laugh vibrated through her cheek. “Does that mean you got the promotion?”
“Something like that,” Waylon said.
A petrified screech severed their conversation. Stalking through the crowd of undulating bodies was Melv.
Stomping, spitting mad, and…dripping wet? A party foul had clearly been had. The brown stain of a spilled Jack and Coke ruined the front of his ironed shirt, and he’d apparently been hit by a confetti cannon, because he sparkled in the midday sun.
“Is that Melvin?” Ford asked, a little too loudly and a lot too drunk.
Melv’s face burned red. “This isn’t over.”
He looked ready to pounce on them, but then Captain DJ’s omniscient voice crackled through the speakers. “Cannonball contest starts on the upper deck in five minutes. Wet T-shirt contest to follow. Get up there, folks!”
“Let’s go!” one of the partiers shouted. She daisy-chained herself to six other girls in matching Technicolor bikinis. The last of them carried a massive foam floaty under her arm, barely managing to control it.
With a slap, her pool noodle smacked Melv in the chest.
He stretched for the railing, but it must have been slippery from the last cannonball splash, and his fingers slid off. Bobbling, Melv flipped over the edge, disappearing into the deep.
Ford hissed a breath through his teeth. “Should we help him?”
At once, Waylon and Fletcher said, “No.”
After everything he’d done, all the pain he’d caused, Fletcher didn’t mind letting him sleep with the literal fishes.
For a half second, Ford contemplated this. Then he shrugged. “Cannonball time!”
With as much liquor as he’d clearly consumed, Melv’s interruption would be blacked out of Ford’s memory by morning.
He trailed after the stampede upstairs, leaving Waylon and Fletcher to mull around the rapidly emptying dance floor. Through the glass bottom, the center of the boat windowed into the ocean as they routed away from the marina and back out to open sea.
Schools of vibrant fish parted, revealing a raging attorney, tangled in the kelp.
As if sensing her gaze, Melv craned his neck toward the surface.
A stream of bubbles left his mouth with what Fletcher could only assume was a deeply unpleasant combination of profanities.
He raised his middle finger. Wicked to the very last breath.
“Can I get you something to drink?” the bartender called. He looked like Waylon’s party boat alter ego—sun-bleached hair grown long enough to wrap in a bun, a beard that hadn’t been trimmed in god only knew how long, and a stripe of zinc down his nose.
Waylon cracked the faintest hint of a smile. “Oh, she’ll have a—”
“Actually.” Fletcher tapped her nails against the counter, perusing the shelves behind his head. With a thoughtful hum, she said, “I want to try something new. What’s your special?”
The bartender sliced a pineapple. “That’s the Dramarama Bahama Step-Mama.”
“What’s the dramarama?” Waylon asked, his eyebrows doing that wiggly thing again. Uncertain but intrigued.
Pouring as he went, the bartender said, “Five types of rum: dark rum, aged rum, banana rum, coconut rum, and spiced rum.”
Fletcher hesitated. “What part is the…step-mama?”
“It’s strong enough to make you forget your old life,” the bartender deadpanned.
“Incredible,” Fletcher beamed. “We’ll take two.”
An umbrella poked out of each of their frozen drinks, skewering a slice of pineapple, a plump cherry, and an orange wedge.
Nary an olive in sight. Fletcher and Waylon elbowed through the throng to find a quiet corner by the rail where the pulsating kick drum faded out, leaving only the hypnotic wash of the ocean.
“I propose a toast.” Fletcher lifted her pink plastic cup.
Waylon lassoed her closer with a hand skimming beneath her loose shirt. “What to?”
“To defining ourselves and exploring new horizons. Together.”
“Together,” he echoed. His gaze sparkled like sunlight glistening against the sea. “I could get used to together.”
Fletcher inched onto her toes and pressed a kiss to his lips. “The feeling’s mutual.”
As they tipped their cups together, a wave crested over the top deck and soaked them with pool water. Above, the announcer shouted, “Ten points for Fooooord Jepson!”
Fletcher sputtered, lips slick with chlorine. Waylon hadn’t fared any better. And when they laughed, it almost erased all the bad parts of this week from her memory. Almost.
She craned her head against Waylon’s soaking-wet chest as the tide carried them away.
They stood like that until the ice in their drinks melted, until Lydell grew speck-small in the distance, until all that remained was the churning blue sea, the whipped white clouds, and the wind in Fletcher’s hair.