Lexi
Lexi
Life is full of extremes right now. Either I’m doing absolutely fuck-all for hours on end, or I’m dashing around panicking. Either I’m lazily daydreaming about Zeke, or I’m thinking he might be about to die. As I sit down next to him and place a hand on his bare chest, I take a moment to appreciate the human brain and its capacity to cope with absolutely mad shit, and then I get on with the task at hand.
Slicing through the thread is difficult—the area is so swollen that the stitch is deep in the flesh, and I can see it hurts Zeke when I finally manage to slide the knife under the thread. Fresh blood blossoms the moment it’s done. I reach blindly for the flannel I brought out and press it down, imagining all the other stitches popping, the wound gaping open like it did at the start.
Zeke lays his hand over mine. “Thank you,” he says, breathing hard.
The contact is unusual; I feel it more than I should, as if he’s stroked me or pressed his lips there. I love it when he touches me—a swift hand on my waist as he moves past, a thumb to my cheek as he wipes something away. Sometimes I long to lean into him, catlike. He keeps his hand where it is, and I hold still, hoping he can’t tell how it’s making my body heat.
“Here,” I say, handing him a mug with the other hand. “I used the boiling water to make us little hot coffees as a post-surgery treat.”
“Am I drinking espresso with a hint of sterilization?”
“You are. Bet you’d pay three pounds sixty for that in some wanky London coffee shop,” I say, and he nearly spits out his mouthful.
I’m funnier with Zeke. He laughs so readily it makes me braver about saying the little things that pop into my head.
“That is so delicious,” he says, closing his eyes as he swallows.
I do the same. It really is phenomenal. I think of all the times I knocked back a coffee on my way out of the door, or left an inch of it cold in the bottom of my mug, and it makes me truly furious with myself.
It’s strange, the things that get to me. I am so pissed off that I didn’t pack a better spare bra, for instance. The two I’ve got are both underwired—I can’t be doing with that nonsense right now. And I wish I had more than two tampons rattling around in the inside pocket of my bag. I’m not due on for another two weeks, so it’s not my period I’m worrying about, it’s just that tampons absorb liquid, and I’ve already decided that they might stop a small hole for a while if there’s a leak.
I keep my hand under Zeke’s, pressing down on his wound. I have no idea how long you’re supposed to do this for, and already the temptation to check if it’s stopped bleeding has set in, like the urge to cough when you’ve got a tickle in your throat. The warmth of his hand is a soft, quiet reminder of how close we are, how bare he is.
“Well,” Zeke says, closing his eyes, “if I’m going to die, at least the weather’s nice.”
“Shut up,” I say sharply. “You’re not going to die. Don’t joke about that.”
He cracks an eye open, watching me. “It’s a coping mechanism,” he says after a moment.
“Well, pick another one. Do denial, that one is my favorite.”
“No thanks,” he says, closing his eyes again. “I don’t like lying.”
My stomach tightens as I think of the words I saw in his father’s logbook.
Paige thinks I should tell him the truth…I sometimes long to, but I know when he finds out, he’ll never come back to this boat.
I’ve never been one for making a distinction between lies and withholding the truth: the fact is, I’m lying to Zeke. But what do I say? I suspect that there is a big dark secret about you in your father’s logbooks ? The man does not need that right now. And surely he’ll read them eventually. It’s crazy to me that he’s not cracked and binged them all—I know I would have.
“Tell me about your family,” I say suddenly.
If he’s surprised, he doesn’t show it. “We’re like most families,” he says. “Bit complicated.”
“You have two siblings?”
“Yeah,” he says, eyes still shut. He’s lying back now, head resting in the crook of his arm, knees pulled up in an upside-down V so he can fit on the deck. “We’re quite different. Jeremy and Lyra are super smart, for starters. They both went to uni, whereas I got shitty exam results. Their careers are, like…things they built for themselves. Jeremy’s in insurance, and Lyra’s a lawyer. Me, I hung around doing pond-life jobs in kitchens until my friend Brady gave me a kick up the arse to apply for a junior chef job at Davide’s, which is a proper fancy restaurant in Putney. Jeremy and Lyra were a team, two peas in a pod, and then there was me. The youngest, tagging along. I was always the odd one out.”
Of course, he’s different , the logbook had said. I swallow. I can so see Zeke as the people-pleasing youngest sibling, jogging to keep up with the others; it makes me a little sad.
“What about your mum? What’s she like?”
“She’s…she’s great. She’s good. She wants the best for me.”
He’s uncomfortable—with the question, not his wound, I think. I wait.
“We clashed quite a lot,” he says eventually.
He begins absently stroking my hand beneath his as he talks; I’m not even sure he knows he’s doing it. I’m slightly ashamed to note that I feel each movement of his fingers low in my belly.
“I was one of those teenagers. A difficult one. She’s quite…I don’t know. Helicopter parent. Always hovering, always pushing me. She was an academic before she retired—she studied plant cells, it was all super technical. That’s how she sees the world as well, in black and white, and I’m kind of…gray, aren’t I?”
I tilt my head. I know what he means, actually. I remember how hard I found it to define Zeke when I first saw him at the pub, with his old-soul eyes and his cool necklaces and his self-help book.
“I was pretty disappointing for her, I think,” he continues. “But she was as patient as she could manage to be with me. She was a good mum, basically.”
“Was?”
Zeke opens his eyes, looking disturbed. His hand stills on mine.
“Is,” he says. “No, is, sorry. I don’t know why I said that.”
I get it: people have started to feel past tense to me, too. It’s hard to imagine a world outside of the confines of this boat.
“I was only four when they split up, so I don’t really remember Dad at home—he’s always been on this houseboat,” Zeke says.
I wonder what that must feel like—not just the strangeness of being on this houseboat again, but the feeling of only really having known your parents apart. My dad walked out on us when I was seven years old. I visited him and his new girlfriend a few times before everyone decided it was better for those visits to stop. I watched him go from the father who lived with me to the person who sent me presents in the post, and then cards, and then nothing at all. It’s not hard to trace the impact he’s left on my life, and every guy who has walked out on me or Penny since has only made me more convinced that you can never count on a man to stick around when things get hard.
“I still haven’t got a clue why he left the houseboat to me instead of Jeremy,” Zeke says. “But the minute all the probate stuff was sorted and I’d turned eighteen, I came up to Gilmouth, sold the boat, drank too much, and left the next morning without looking back.”
A thought occurs. “You must’ve met my mum,” I say, shifting my wet hair to the other shoulder. It’s dripped down me, and the fabric of the T-shirt sticks to my skin, cool in the day’s heat. “If you sold her the houseboat?”
He turns his head to look at me. His gold-brown eyes are almost orange in the sun, fire-colored.
“Yeah,” he says. “Yeah, I must have, briefly. We met in the marina. I can’t remember the woman’s name, but she was maybe…fifties? She had a cool hat on, a pink beret.”
I tear up, then blink, shocked to find the emotion so close to the surface. Mum’s been gone for more than four years now, and it’s rare I cry about her death. For a good six months, I couldn’t seem to cry about it at all. I pull my hand out from under Zeke’s and rub my eyes.
“She thought this boat was so cute,” I say, then clear my throat as my voice comes out strangled. “She thought everyone in the world would want to stay on it—when she first listed it to rent, she tried charging a fortune.” I laugh wetly. “We make a bit of money on it each month, but I don’t know if we’ve ever earned back what she paid you for it.”
Zeke’s hand flickers on the flannel, as if he wants to reach for me but holds himself back.
“Anyway. So weird you met her. I kind of like that she knew you, in a way,” I say, then I frown, surprised at myself. “What was it that made you want to buy the houseboat back now? Why not sooner?”
He gazes out to sea, thinking. “Last month, me and Jeremy went for a pint together for the first time in…I don’t know, years, probably. We do talk, we’re part of each other’s lives, but it’s complicated. We hardly ever manage to catch up properly without arguing about something. And we never talk about Dad. But this night in the pub, I don’t know what it was—Jeremy seemed more open than usual. We ended up getting a bit drunk together and telling each other all the secrets we’d found out as kids. I told him Dad smoked sometimes, out on the deck, when he thought I wasn’t watching. He told me Dad believed the moon landing wasn’t real. I told him Dad put in a fake insurance claim on his van. He told me he knew I always thought Dad wasn’t my dad, and he thought I was right.”
My mouth falls open.
“You always thought your father wasn’t really your father?”
My mind has gone straight to that logbook. When he finds out, he’ll never come back to this boat.
Zeke nods. “As a kid, I was sure of it. Dad said something once when he came to pick us up— I won’t tell him, all right? I promised you that . After that, I looked for evidence of it everywhere—proof my mum cheated, anything that might tell me who my real dad is…”
He smiles slightly.
“I just never belonged, and it turns out I wasn’t the only one who knew it. Jeremy suspected the same. He was an expert at figuring out Dad’s hiding places. When we went for that pint, he told me he always knew Dad hid stuff on the boat, and if I really wanted answers, I should’ve looked there. So I googled it. Your mum and Penny didn’t change the name of the boat—it was easy to find. And it looked just the same. Knowing Dad, he would’ve hidden the truth somewhere only he could find it. I thought, odds are, whatever it is might still be on there, if the current owners didn’t do more than add a bit of paint and some new cushions.”
“How could you afford it?” I ask. “A houseboat, cash?”
“My granddad left us each some money when he died. I’ve been sitting on mine. Waiting for something.” He shrugs. “Something that felt important enough, I guess. Something I cared about.”
“I sometimes wish my mum had sold up and left me the money rather than leaving me the pub,” I say, then I bite my lip.
I don’t think I’ve ever said that out loud before. When Mum’s cancer was finally picked up by the doctors, it was so late, and things happened quickly—we only had two weeks to say good-bye. It was unspeakably awful, the worst time in my life; I can still hardly bear to think of those final days. The idea of selling The Anchor was the last thing on our minds.
“Obviously the pub was her dream, and I wanted to carry that on for her,” I add quickly.
Zeke looks at me, thoughtful. “It’s not what you chose, though,” he says.
“I chose them. Mum, Penny, Mae.” I shrug. “They’re my family. And my mum was amazing. Even though she was run off her feet all the time, even though she had a pub to look after, somehow she always made me feel like she had time for me if I needed her.”
It used to be so hard to talk about my mother, and it still makes me ache with missing her, but it feels good, too. I don’t ever want to forget a fraction of her: I want to remember the daft songs we’d make up in the car, and the exact smell of her hair after she’d washed it, and the way she’d chuck my chin if I was scared and say, Hey, I’ve got you, OK?
“She sounds amazing,” Zeke says softly. “And she looked after Penny, too?”
“Like she was her own. Penny stayed over most weekends from the age of about…six, maybe? Her mum was a singer, when she was clean enough to work, so she was often out late or disappearing off to some other town for a gig. Eventually, when Penny was ten and pretty much living at ours, Mum just turned our spare room above The Anchor into her bedroom. For most of her teens, Penny never went to her mother’s—she called the pub home.”
I remember the first time she did it, and what a thrill I felt—like we’d finally managed to steal Penny away for ourselves. I loved the nights when Penny slept over. We’d watch cartoons together on the living room rug in our pajamas; we’d make friendship bracelets and all sorts of wild promises about being together forever. Then we’d wake up in the morning and tumble down the stairs to eat our cereal at the bar while Mum got the pub ready, and I’d feel like all my favorite things were in one place.
“Did it ever bother you that your mum left the houseboat to Penny? Even though she wasn’t her kid?” he asks.
“Mae’s not my kid, but I’d leave everything I had to her.”
Zeke’s eyes widen slightly. I might have sounded a bit snappy there.
“Sorry,” he says.
“No, it’s OK, I just…There’s more to family than blood. In my opinion,” I say, tipping back my coffee mug and catching one last drop from the bottom, letting it moisten my dry mouth.
“Definitely. Sorry.” He pauses, thinking. “You guys grew up together at the pub, then? What was that like?”
It was loud and warm and chaotic. It was toddling between bar stools and petting dogs by the fire and watching Mum pulling pints, hair falling back as she laughed her big, rough, dirty laugh. It was cold leftover burgers for dinner and homework at the always-empty table by the toilets, then it was shifts that bled one day into the next, with only a short trip upstairs to sleep in between.
“It’s a way of life all of its own,” I settle for. “Pub life.”
“Did you drink a lot?”
I shake my head. “Not me. Penny did, for a while. She leaned into the whole sexy-young-barmaid thing, always doing shots with cute tourists. She only really snapped out of it when she got pregnant. Before that, she was all about the late nights and one-night stands.”
“Late nights,” Zeke says, pressing his lips together to hold back a smile. “ Wild .”
“You know what I mean.”
“Let me guess.” He cracks an eye open. “The sensible one?”
“Guilty as charged.”
“I bet you could be wild,” Zeke says, opening his other eye, lifting his forearm to shade the sun so he can look at me properly. “I feel like it’s in there. Just kind of…trapped.”
“Oh yes, I am Eugene in his cardboard box,” I deadpan, but I like that he’s said it. I like that he sees me that way. “Shall we?” I ask, tilting my head toward his midriff. We’re sitting with our thighs almost touching now, facing each other, flank to flank on the deck. The sun is getting fierce: I lift a hand to my wet hair and find that it’s almost dry at the back already.
Zeke moves the flannel. The wound is red, and there’s pus leaking from the end where the stitch had been infected.
“It’s OK,” I say quickly, because his face has fallen. “It’s good that it’s coming out.”
“Yeah,” Zeke says. “Yeah. Maybe I should let it breathe?”
I really have no idea. We’re so completely clueless. I hate these moments—I can kid myself that we’re coping fine out here when we’re sipping espressos and talking in the sunshine, but when I’m staring at the vicious red line of Zeke’s wound, I feel like a child. Sometimes I fantasize about waking up from this to a soft bed and a person in a white coat saying, It’s going to be all right, Lexi—it was all a bad dream . I rub my eyes with my thumb and forefinger; my head is feeling a little fuzzy in the heat.
“You need a water,” Zeke says, looking at me closely, sitting up on his elbows.
“I’m fine.” I drop my hand.
“When did you last have one?”
Eight o’clock this morning. I try to take less than my four cups per day—I’m conscious that Zeke is healing and must need it more than me.
“A bit ago,” I say vaguely.
“You look pale. Lexi…” Zeke sits up, bringing a hand to my cheek, looking right into my eyes.
I breathe in. The sensation of his thumb smoothing over my cheekbone as he examines my face only makes the light-headedness worse.
“Let’s get out of the sun. We shouldn’t be sitting out here.”
He levers himself up, his body brushing mine, and something flutters in my throat at the contact. I’m a bit dizzy when I stand; I try not to let Zeke see me stumble, and as I do so, I notice him doing exactly the same—catching himself on the doorframe, glancing quickly at me to check if I saw.
“I’m fine,” he says, at my expression. “You don’t need to look after me, Lexi.”
I frown. “Of course I do.”
“I can cope.”
The door swings shut behind me. It’s fusty in here—it smells of sleep and the warm, rotten fridge. I wrinkle up my nose. It is literally impossible to get that fridge clean, for reasons I cannot understand.
“I know you can cope. That’s not what it’s about. I’m looking out for you because you’re my person.”
He goes still.
“As in,” I say, heart beginning to thud, “you’re the only person I have. You’re my one person on this boat with me. That’s all I meant.”
He looks at me over his shoulder for a long while. I hover on the bottom step, adjusting my hair, feeling my gaze slide away from him to the windows. Things must have got really uncomfortable if I’d rather look at the empty ocean than Zeke’s face.
“You’re my person, too,” he says eventually, and the corner of his mouth rises in a crooked, closed-mouthed smile.