Lexi
Lexi
When I wake the next morning, the sunlight is blindingly bright against the cream-paneled walls of the dorm room. Zeke is sitting by the boxy window, his hair disordered, one of his knees drawn up in front of him on the chair. He looks gorgeous, and a little wild, a new rough-edged version of the well-groomed man I met at The Anchor.
And he’s reading.
He’s reading one of the logbooks .
“Oh my God,” I say, sitting up too fast and wincing as the movement makes my head thump.
Zeke looks up at me, and I feel as if I’m looking through his eyes to the little boy who came to that houseboat hoping to find a father who’d make him feel loved.
He clears his throat. “Hey. Morning.”
“You’re doing it,” I whisper, my gaze dropping to the book.
“I’ve read four so far,” he says, nodding to the pile on the chest of drawers beside him. “And went down to check on The Merry Dormouse as well. I freshened up the drain blocker and bailed the water out a bit…”
I blanch. “Bailed? How bad are we talking?”
“She’ll be fine. I think we just need to go down every…eight hours or so.”
I breathe out. “OK. That doesn’t sound too bad.” I redirect my gaze pointedly to the book in his lap. “And…have you got…” I am about to say an answer , but instead I say, “what you wanted?”
He smooths the page, eyes downturned. “Some cryptic stuff that looks pretty obvious to me, but he’s never actually said he’s not my father. And he’s not said who my dad really is.”
“I’m sorry.”
I wait, give him time.
“It’s so weird, to be honest. Reading it. It makes me remember…all the other sides of Dad, the ones I’ve forgotten about. I focus so much on the times he excluded me or favored Lyra and Jeremy. But I’m actually mentioned in here a lot.” He looks up with a halfhearted smile. “Mostly stuff about him not understanding me, but still.”
“Not understanding someone and not loving them are not the same thing.”
He swallows. “Maybe. Anyway, I’ve started reading them. That’s something. I was sick of being too scared to open the books, and after yesterday…” His smile turns genuine as he looks at me. “I felt kind of inspired to be brave.”
I look down at the duvet cover, half-pleased, half-embarrassed. I was brave yesterday. I can hardly believe what I did. I hope one day I can tell Mae all about it, and that she’ll be proud of her auntie Lexi. I’m pretty proud of me.
“But I’m glad you’re up,” Zeke says, snapping the book closed. “No more logbook angst. We’ve got big plans.”
“Have we?”
“Oh yeah. Full agenda. Because today we’re on holiday.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“Holiday,” Zeke confirms, with a definitive nod. “In an exclusive resort.”
I prop myself up on my elbows, looking at him. His eyes turn warm.
“I want to make today…good. I want us to have a good day, like the day we might have after a kiss like that if we weren’t stranded in dystopia. So. Stay there. Relax. Enjoy the fact that you can’t drown right now. I’ll be back in a minute with your flat white.”
He heads out of the door as I say, “What do you mean you’ll be back in a minute with my…”
He’s gone.
I lie back against the pillow and pull the duvet up to my face to hide my smile.
He makes us coffee with a tin of condensed milk that should have been used by 2020. My attitude to best-before dates has really flexed since this trip started. I drink mine with my legs in his lap in our bunk bed, and we catalog which of our muscles are currently hurting.
“What’s this one called?” he says, wincing as he pokes his upper thigh.
“Oh yeah, I’ve got that one,” I say, massaging mine. “And my calves. They’re dead . And, weirdly…my toes?”
He cocks his head, directing his attention to my bare feet. “Your toes?”
“Don’t touch them!” I yelp, withdrawing my legs so fast I almost spill my precious, delicious coffee. I put it down. “Oh my God, Zeke, I’ve not had a proper wash since Thursday, you cannot touch my feet.”
He looks amused. “I don’t care about that.”
“ I do.”
He reaches for one of my ankles. I flail, scrabbling back against the pillow, but he lunges for the other so fast he almost catches it.
“Zeke! You do not want to touch my feet!”
“Do too. And I’m quicker than you.”
“No, you’re not. You’re recovering from an injury,” I say sternly, as he flashes me a cheeky grin and grabs for me again. “And I’m more motivated!” I shriek, sticking my feet up in the air.
Zeke sits back on his knees at the end of the bed and tilts his head the other way, eyebrows raised. I realize I am now lying back on the pillow with my legs up in the air, wearing nothing but knickers and a giant plaid shirt I found in the bedroom cupboard. I make a sound a bit like arp and wrench up the duvet to stick my legs underneath it instead. My heart is galloping, but Zeke doesn’t come closer; he sits back on his heels, and his expression reminds me of the little, wicked smile he wore when he chatted me up at The Anchor.
Then he pulls a piece of paper out of his pocket with a small flourish. I lean forward to peer at it, but he tweaks it so I can’t see what he’s written.
“First holiday activity,” he says. “We’re going for a seaside stroll.”
“This is incredibly weird. You know that, right?”
Zeke adjusts his ridiculous hat, and then mine.
“I’m shooting for ‘quirky.’?”
“It’s giving ‘I lost my mind at sea.’?” I pause. “Did I use ‘it’s giving’ right?”
He grins, and a pulse of joy goes through me at having made him smile. We’re close, a little closer than we’d usually stand, even on the houseboat—and now we have what feels like all the space in the world, out here at the edge of the rig with the wind around us. But I just want to touch him. Even if he has made me wear a “seaside strolling hat,” otherwise known as one of the half-squashed straw hats he found in someone’s dorm room.
We’re in that delicious sliver of time in which nobody yet feels the need to clarify anything—to ask what we are to each other, what we’re doing. There’s a small, awful part of me that’s already saying, Come on, Lexi, he’s only looking at you that way because there are no other women on earth at the moment , but I’m giddy enough to ignore it. Right now this is just lovely, and after everything that happened yesterday, staying in the right now feels like the only reasonable thing to do. There might not be a later anyway.
“Just look at that,” he says, spinning on the heels of his boots. They’re considerably more battered than they were when we first met, marred with lines of white salt left when the water dries, scuffed from endlessly stubbing his toes on the houseboat.
“Look at what, exactly?” I say, inspecting the moldering mechanics, the endless blank sea, that god-awful tower. Behind it, a solitary cloud rests against a sky the color of washed-out denim.
“That view. Lexi, look. A three-hundred-and-sixty-degree sea view. We’ve stopped seeing it, but it’s still there, and when I came back up here from the houseboat this morning I just…” He trails off, the way he often does. “This morning I felt lucky. When we were on the boat, I kind of forgot we’re lucky. I kept thinking how un lucky we are, the stupid series of mistakes that got us stranded…But now that we’re here, it feels genuinely possible to live in the moment. I thought, people pay so much for that feeling. Yoga retreats, gap years, meditation apps…”
I want to stand on tiptoe and kiss the triangle of his chin, so I do, and he smiles, reaching for my waist.
“What was that for?” he asks.
“Just for your brain,” I tell him. “And for keeping me positive.”
He kisses me—the first time he’s kissed me properly since the moment on the tower. My stomach swoops, my tired, broken body suddenly alight with energy, and he chuckles against my mouth.
This time I’m the one to pull back. I want him—I want us to go to bed together, any of these hundred beds, and I want to spend all day with him there, reminding myself of the details of his body, the ones I’ve tried to recall in minute detail more times than I can count. But I want to savor today, too. I want the silliness of Zeke’s “holiday,” more stolen hats, more kissing. I want to feel lucky.
“You reckon that one’s him?” Zeke asks, pointing at an entirely random seagull.
Eugene left his box sometime yesterday afternoon—Zeke is convinced he tried to fly up and help us climb the tower, which is an adorably ridiculous idea, but I have to admit, I kind of like the thought that Eugene might have been one of the birds I heard on my way up the ladder. That healed-up seagull is so much more than just a bird—he’s proof that sometimes daft humanity can win out after all. I miss him already.
“My expertise stretches just about far enough for me to say, that is probably a seagull,” I say, and Zeke laughs.
“It’s him,” he says. “I know it.”
We start walking again. Or strolling, as Zeke is insisting it shall be known.
“You’re right, you know. There is a kind of mindfulness to this. The near-death experience: your pathway to Zen,” I say.
Zeke laughs. His hair gets buffeted beneath his straw hat, catching against his beard; there’s a smear of dirt along his neck like a shadow.
“Shall we sell it?” I suggest. “A week absolutely shitting yourself in a decrepit houseboat? A weekend trying not to die on a rusty oil rig?”
His smile turns serious. I watch the little muscle beneath his ear that tenses and flickers when he’s hunting for what he wants to say. There is something about this man, his warmth, his depth. He is unlike anyone I’ve ever known.
“That’s not what you’d need to sell,” he says eventually, looking down at me. “That’s not why I feel lucky.”
I look away from him, but he turns my face back to his gently, with one finger on my jaw. We’ve come to a stop on a rusted walkway on the far side of the rig, the sea stretching out before us.
“It’s you,” he says, “by the way. It’s less cute if I spell it out, but I feel like if I don’t, you’ll tell yourself I’m talking about something else.”
He’s right: I’d tell myself, He doesn’t mean me . Nobody ever does. Except…maybe Zeke. Maybe this beautiful, gentle, extraordinary man really does look at me and feel lucky. The thought is so tempting I can hardly bear it.
“Come on,” I say, taking his hand. “Aren’t we meant to be strolling?”