Lexi
Lexi
Zeke’s hair is officially long enough for a topknot—well, a half one. He was complaining about missing the band he usually wears to keep his hair back from his forehead when he’s working, so I used a black scrunchie from my makeup bag to create him a little half bun on the top of his head. Instead of looking comically cute, as I’d hoped, he actually just looks like he’s starting a trend. Put anything near that face and somehow it turns out stylish.
“Like the new look, do you?” he says, smiling crookedly at me from the kitchen.
He’s making something undoubtedly delicious from our remaining raw peppers and the pasta we boiled in seawater yesterday. I try to focus on the thought of the food, not how desperately I want a drink. It is taking at least fifty percent of my energy not to notice how thirsty I am right now.
“I actually do,” I say. “You look…”
He looks relaxed. Sun-kissed and sexy and tousled. And always, always, like he’s just slid out of bed.
“You look good,” I settle for. “It works with your style.”
He smiles slightly. “And what’s my style?”
“Oh, I don’t know, world-weary pop-star chic?”
He laughs, and I bite down on my smile.
“Not what you’re going for?”
He shrugs. “I just like playing around with clothes. Wearing what I want to wear.”
“Have you always been that way?”
I pull my bare feet closer and run a finger over the chipped polish on my toenails, trying not to think about the sunny Saturday afternoon I spent doing “nail art” with Mae the week before we got lost out here. She wanted hers polka-dotted—I messed them up, and Penny turned them into little flowers, and Mae had been so delighted. I close my eyes. I would kill to see her smile right now.
“Nah. I started doing a lot of things differently about six, maybe seven months ago,” Zeke says. “I guess that was when I changed my look a bit.”
He’s stopped talking, but I’ve got a lot better at telling when Zeke’s done talking and when he’s not. It is always worth letting him think for a moment, because whatever he says next is invariably extra interesting.
“It was when I started seeing a therapist about my sex life,” he says.
I knew it. Extra interesting. I look up at him, open-mouthed. He laughs at me over his shoulder. I rearrange my expression, trying to look less gobsmacked.
“I’m not some kind of sexual deviant. Just…was having a lot of sex for a lot of unhealthy reasons.”
I am still staring. I’ve never known a man who goes to therapy, let alone one who goes to talk about his sex life. He chops the peppers so fast his hands are a blur, and I am too distracted by this conversation even to worry about the proximity of the knife to his stomach. What is acceptable to ask him, here, without just being incredibly nosy?
“So the night we met,” I say eventually. “That was a regular day for you, then? A one-night stand with a woman you just met in a pub?”
“Not for a while. I have rules now. I never have sex on a first date. Never sleep with someone if I don’t think we’ll speak the next day. And I never sneak out the next morning after spending the night.” He ticks them off on his hand as he goes. “No judgment on anyone who finds that stuff makes them happy, but it was making me really sad, so…yeah.”
“Oh. But you broke your rules? With me?”
“For you. Yeah.”
I pull my knees in against my chest as he seasons the peppers and tosses the veg over the pasta.
“There was me joking about you leading me astray,” I say, a little weakly. “And…”
He laughs. “It was worth it.”
This has thrown me. I did assume Zeke was pretty well-accustomed to a one-night stand—it was obvious in everything from his confident approach at the bar to the way he kissed me. But…I can’t quite fathom the idea that he didn’t want to do that anymore, and chose to break his rules for me .
“I can see you doing a lot of thinking over there,” he says. “Looks tiring. Pasta?”
“Umm, yeah,” I say, standing to reach for the bowl. “Thanks.”
He meets my eyes as he hands it to me, the corner of his mouth lifting slightly. His beard is getting thicker; it makes him look tousled and rugged, as though he’s spent a few months backpacking somewhere hot.
“I don’t regret it for a second,” he says quietly. “Not even now, with everything that’s happened since.”
“That’s mad,” I say, before I can stop myself, and his smile widens.
“Maybe,” he says. “But I can’t help hating the thought of never having met you.”
He moves past me with his bowl of pasta, heading out onto the deck. I stand for a moment by the sofa. I hate compliments. They make me want to squirm away or redirect the person’s attention; right now I have the weirdest compulsion to point at the window and go, Hey, look, a whale! But as I move to follow Zeke, I realize that since we woke up at sea, I’ve not felt the unworthiness that dogs me on land. I’ve not felt like I’m less.
Maybe it’s the lack of context. Nobody on Instagram to compare myself to; nobody to ignore me and talk to Penny instead. Just Zeke, who says things like I can’t help hating the thought of never having met you like it’s no big deal to tell me that I matter in my own right.
So instead of shrugging off the compliment, I let myself absorb it. He’s glad he met me. That’s lovely. I’m so glad I met him, too.
I pull one of the extra blankets out from under the deck chair as I sit down beside him with my bowl, settling into our usual companionable silence. It’s a bit cooler today, and the sky is dotted with fluffy clouds, the kind Mae would draw with her crayons.
This, I suppose, is the first clue things are about to change.
I take a nap in the bedroom after the pasta—it’s the natural order of things—and wake to find myself about five inches from slamming into the floor.
My hands fly out just in time to catch me as I land. I just…rolled out of bed. I can’t make any sense of this, but as I lie here face down with my forehead pressed to my arm, I realize I’m not feeling good at all .
I just about make it to the toilet before vomiting. On the way there I whack myself into the door, then the sink; I stub my toe on the toilet. It’s not dizziness, though at first it feels like it. It’s the boat.
It’s moving.
“Zeke!” I shout, flushing the toilet.
“You’re up,” he says, appearing suddenly in the doorway with bright eyes and messy curls. “Can you believe we’re moving? Oh, hey, are you OK?”
He steps into the bathroom, eyes widening.
“Shit—is it food poisoning? Or seasickness, because of the waves?”
I long for a glass of water to wash my mouth out. The thirst is becoming harder to bear—my body is craving water now, and it’s even worse after being sick. For a wild second I think about just flipping on the bathroom tap and lapping from it like a water fountain, and the fantasy makes me close my eyes and groan.
“I don’t know if I get seasick. I’ve never been at sea before,” I say. “Except on a ferry. And that was not like this. There was more ice cream and fish and chips, for starters.”
The joke’s weak; it’s the best I can do. I pull myself up and sit down on the toilet seat, leaning forward on my knees, trying to take deep breaths. Throwing up has helped with the nausea—it’s less intense now. I remember last night—the shower—and turn my head to look at the drain.
“Don’t worry, I already checked it this morning,” Zeke says, stepping past me to reach my toothbrush and toothpaste, which have rolled into the sink. “You weren’t sick when we first got swept out, and we’re eating a lot of old food that should probably have been in a fridge…”
I take the toothbrush from him gratefully. The timing seems a bit coincidental if this is food poisoning, and I’m not sure that option is all that much better than seasickness. The danger either way is all the fluid I could lose. I stand unsteadily and peer through the kitchen window.
“How big are the waves? Are we properly going somewhere?”
I look back at Zeke. He nods, dimples showing.
“Wherever we were stuck before, it obviously wasn’t on any sort of shipping route—only that one ship ever came by. But now…”
He’s breathing faster—excited, I think. Zeke is so understated it’s hard to tell. I attempt a smile back at him, trying to ignore the way my head is pounding from dehydration. I want to be positive, but I’m thinking about this boat and what it was designed to do—float down canals, sit in the marina, bob around with the ducks…
“She made it through that first night,” Zeke says.
I don’t have to tell him: he knows what I’m thinking.
“She can do this, Lexi,” he says.
I don’t know when we started calling The Merry Dormouse “she.” I’ve always found referring to boats as women a bit pretentious, but I get it now. This houseboat is a living, breathing thing, the third person trying to survive out here. Or the fourth, if you count Eugene, who was hopping around the deck this morning while Zeke watched for boats, like some kind of rangy stray dog who doesn’t want to join in but doesn’t want to be left out, either.
“Yeah,” I say, as we move unsteadily through to the living area. “She can do this. Absolutely.”
I glance at the kitchen, where the horizon line moves in and out of view in the window. Zeke’s storm-proofing is already being put to the test. There’s a cupboard door partly open, one of our precious tins of baked beans pressed to the gap but held in place by that small loop of string. I feel a fierce wave of appreciation for Zeke and his brain, the way he thinks of things that would never cross my mind: the sail he dreamed up from the tarpaulin; his securing doors with string; rescuing a useless seagull who’s made me smile more times than I’ll admit.
We head out onto the deck and the wind touches my face. I grip the frame around the wheelhouse. The sea has completely changed, no longer glassy and shimmering. Now it’s ruffled and thick, like icing piped on a cake.
“God, that breeze feels nice.”
I stumble slightly and Zeke puts his hand on my waist to steady me. Even with the nausea still clinging to me and the deck rising and falling beneath us, his touch zings through me. If the boat can make it through another day, I know I’ll think about his hand on me as I sit and keep watch for ships in the dark. For now, though, I pack the feeling away, like I always do.
“The sail,” I say suddenly, turning to look at the pole with its fabric wrapped tightly around it, waiting for this moment.
“I know,” Zeke says, already moving to lever himself up onto the roof. “I was waiting for you to get up before I…”
Just as I say a reprimanding, “Zeke!” he winces and drops back to the deck, a hand on his stomach.
“Sorry,” he says ruefully. “Forgot.”
“I’ll do it.”
I go around the edge, the way I did when I drunk-danced up there. As I climb up onto the roof, I flash back to the moment I hitched myself up here with a glass of wine, and I’m almost stunned by the carelessness with which I did it. So much has changed since then.
I open the sail out. It catches and gets buffeted by the breeze; I think I even feel the houseboat shift underneath me. I swear under my breath, trying to angle it in a way that feels helpful—a way that will propel us forward, not slow us down.
“I feel like we need some ropes,” I say after a few ineffectual moments. “Doesn’t this normally involve ropes? We just need to be able to move the…”
“Boom,” Zeke supplies. “I think that’s the horizontal one.”
“Right, OK, the boom—we need to be able to shift it side to side from the deck and then fix it in place.”
It takes us almost three hours, in the end. We start by deconstructing our ladder to get the rope we need. Neither of us is particularly handy, and it turns out there’s a reason why sailors are so famous for tying knots. It’s really hard to fix everything where it needs to go, and the more we get into this, the more obvious it is that we’re essentially trying to learn how to sail from first principles, which is patently ridiculous.
Eventually we end up with something that means there’s tension in the sail and we can manipulate which direction it faces, but I’m starting to wonder if we’ve created a monster here.
“I think we might be going around in circles,” Zeke says bleakly, looking over the side. His voice is sticky and dry with thirst, just like mine. “Maybe we can use the helm now? Steer…into the wind? Not into the wind? I don’t even know. We just want to go somewhere , don’t we?”
“Maybe we put the sail down for now. Just have it for if we need to navigate around something.”
“ Around something?” Zeke says, eyes widening. “Why have I not worried about that yet?”
I hate scaring him, but the shower drain leak has made me so much more nervous about the boat’s integrity, and with these waves, there are a whole host of new things to be terrified about. Still, I liked using the word navigate . It was pleasingly nautical, and gave me a fleeting and very misplaced feeling that I might know what I’m doing.
“Let me make us some food,” Zeke says, opening the door.
His classic coping mechanism. As he heads inside, I stare out at the water, this new sea, as unfamiliar to me as a new town. The sun is low in the sky, only a few minutes from setting, and it’s right in front of me here on the back deck, which presumably means we’re heading east.
I close my eyes and imagine a map of the UK. We were in the northeast of England when we were first carried out to sea, so if we wanted to go home, we’d need to head west. Right now we’re presumably being carried toward Denmark or Norway, depending on how far we’ve traveled north or south while we’ve been drifting.
Surely we’ll cross paths with some ships now that we’re on the move. Surely . We just have to—we can’t keep going like this.
Once I’ve put the sail down, I notice how much safer the deck feels than the roof of the boat—ridiculous, really, when there’s nothing remotely safe about any of this. I put away the deck chair we pulled out for Zeke to rest on, and brush a droplet absently from the back of my neck. The waves are leaving a steady spray on my shins, so I assume it’s seawater until the second drop lands on my shoulder, and then a third and fourth and fifth hit my arms.
“Zeke!” I scream, stumbling to the door.
He comes, wide-eyed, hopeful. “What? What?”
“Zeke,” I say, gripping the doorframe. I beam down at him where he stands below deck. “It’s raining .”
We collect the water in everything we can think of—even Zeke’s stolen trilby.
The issue is securing things with the boat moving. We lose one cereal bowl over the side, and I almost cry as I watch it bob away behind us, spilling its two precious inches of rainwater into the sea. We have to wedge everything in or tie it down. My brain goes Leaks, leaks, what if there are leaks in our hull, what if the water is coming back up the drain , but I’m too busy to look—it’ll have to wait. If we start sinking, I guess that will be my answer.
Zeke sets up an amazing system with the leftover tarpaulin and a makeshift funnel he creates from cardboard toilet-roll tubes. It gets soggy pretty quickly, but it fills the bucket within a few hours; I carry it to the kitchen sink the way I’d carry Mae to her Moses basket when she was tiny, taking every step with the utmost care.
“To your left,” I say, spotting a bowl that’s beginning to overflow.
We’re out on the deck, and darkness is drawing in now; it’s becoming difficult to see what we’re doing. The rain patters sloppily on the deck and beads on the railings, shining in the moonlight. I’m less queasy out here, but I’ve vomited overboard twice since we messed around with the sail, and every time it scares me. I’m losing calories and nutrients, and I really don’t have a lot of those to spare.
“On it,” Zeke says, bending down to lift it to his lips.
At first, we were careful not to gorge ourselves on our new water—we don’t know how long this will last. But since we’ve got the sink as full as it can be without overflowing when the boat moves, we’ve allowed ourselves a whole pint each, sipping slowly and licking our lips, a trick that we’ve learned makes it easier to take the water steadily.
I stumble into the steering wheel as I try to move between water bowls in the darkness. The Merry Dormouse seems to be doing us proud—she’s bobbing along, taking each wave in her stride—but all the same, whenever a larger wash of spray reaches up to the railings, my stomach lurches and my faith wobbles.
We make it inside and collapse on the sofa in the darkness. Zeke’s arm brushes mine and I wince—we’re both soaking wet, but I don’t have the energy to get up again and change clothes.
“We’re doing really well, you know,” Zeke says, pushing his wet curls back from his face. “It’s been over a week. We’re still here.”
“Lost at sea for eight days ,” I say, with genuine wonderment.
“And barely a scratch to show for it,” Zeke says.
I glance at his stomach. I hope he’s not put it under too much strain with all this activity. His lip quirks; he knows I’m fretting about him. He nudges my shoulder, like, Stop it , and I cut him a sidelong look in the darkness, like, You really think I’m ever going to quit worrying about you? His shoulder stays resting against mine for a few moments, his eyes liquid in the darkness, and then—as always—he shifts away.
“I’ll get dry towels,” I say, pushing myself up to stand, trying not to feel disappointed.
I’m tired. My fingers are still too numb from the cold. I’m distracted and emotional and sick to my stomach, so I do something stupid, the way you do when you’re so drained you can hardly function, like when Mae was three weeks old and I poured milk over Penny’s toast instead of over my cereal. My mind is kidding itself that it’s working, but really, it’s barely got anything to give.
As the boat bobs beneath me, I reach to steady myself on the bathroom door. The concertina folds back on itself, the way it always does—I know it does that, and I should know it isn’t a steady handhold.
I lose my grip.
It’s not a straightforward fall. First, I whack my shoulder against the wall, then the boat rocks me the other way and I go tumbling backward toward the kitchen counter. I think my head hits the fridge door before it hits the floor, but it’s hard to tell for sure, because everything goes blurry—and then it goes black.