Chapter 4 Rowan
ROWAN
Present Day
I wake before the alarm. Before the ship’s speakers hum with their disembarkation announcements, before the crew starts bustling down the halls.
My body’s trained for half sleep, the kind you catch in the corner of your eyes, your bag looped around your ankle, your arms crossed over your chest. Years of furtive naps in libraries did that.
So did years in foster care, guarding my things from jealous foster siblings.
The ceiling in Willow’s room is the same pale beige it is in mine, and I have to guess that it’s the same in Sean’s and Declan’s too, but it feels different now, like it’s got eyes on me. Watching. Judging.
On the other bed, Sean is sprawled on his stomach, arm dangling off the mattress like he hasn’t a bother in the world. Declan’s curled up against the wall, his breath steady. They look like themselves. Normal. I don’t feel normal. Not after last night.
Willow isn’t in the room. I roll over to sit on the edge of the bed and put my elbows on my knees, setting my face into my hands.
I press the heels of my hands against the images rotating through my mind—her widening green eyes when I slammed my cock into her, the blush of her skin under my touch.
And Sean’s. And Declan’s. The arching of her body, the whispered names…
I rub harder at my face, like I can scrub the memories out of me.
I’m not used to sharing. Not women, not intimacy.
A drink, sure. A story, fair play. But not a woman.
I’ve never even flirted with a woman who liked a friend of mine.
There was one time in high school when a friend of mine liked a girl I liked, and I took myself out of the running immediately.
Although the images are stuck in my mind, it isn’t that it felt wrong exactly.
Strange, maybe. Certainly different. Like getting drunk with a friend for the first time or telling them about your traumas.
Not like a battle for attention or even to win her orgasm.
Not a battle in any way that I might have thought.
I wasn’t resentful when Declan pulled her tighter or when Sean pressed closer to her.
There was space, somehow, for all of us—the three of us and her.
I’d never felt something like that before with my friends, or ever—a shared goal and space between men.
Competition yet alignment. Medical school had something like it—waiting to find out where our residency would be while drinking sweaty beers in Sean and Declan’s Dublin apartment that I sometimes visited.
Residency at John Hopkins, fellowship, even working together.
Then being recruited by MUSC together—all of that wasn’t dissimilar.
But we were responsible for ourselves. And I liked it like that.
All that time in foster care gave me an appreciation for my own space and my own things.
It’s why I never lived in the apartment with Sean and Declan, why I ate my lunch alone and didn’t join the others for beer after a long day.
I like my individuality, like being able to retreat into my thoughts alone.
I hadn’t felt a togetherness like that ever in my life. Now, in the cold light of morning, it feels dangerous.
I stand, grab the sweaty clothes I peeled myself out of last night, and duck out of Willow’s room before the others stir, hoping to find her before they even wake. Hoping to earn one moment alone with her before the ship docks today and the spell is broken.
Before I can even look down the hallway for her retreating form, I hear the door to the room open and close quietly behind me with a click.
I glance back to see Sean, blond hair mussed and dimples pressed deep like a flower between the pages of a book.
Smirking through a yawn, his mouth curls around the words “Morning, lover boy. Jaysus, you look wrecked, don’t ya? ”
I grunt and start walking down the hallway, my shoulders guiding the way.
I don’t bite. If I let them, they’ll turn it into a joke, reduce it to something casual. And maybe that’s all it was for them. Maybe I should treat it that way too, but I can still feel her nails at the back of my neck, her lips parting under mine. That wasn’t casual. Not to me.
“Pack it in,” Declan says from behind Sean, gravel stuck in his throat before he coughs out the sleep.
Sean chuckles and mercifully lets it be, whatever jokes he wanted to make.
I look for any trace of the woman who changed my life last night.
I feel like I might see sparks down the hallway where her feet have walked, but I see nothing, nothing but the throngs of people making their way out already, ready to be the first back on land in Miami the same way they were ready to be the first off it.
I’m in no hurry. I know Miami is going to swallow up Willow and take her from me.
I know that once my feet are on that dock, I have another airplane back to South Carolina to look forward to. I drag my feet along.
Overhead, the crew announces, not the first time, the ship’s arrival in Miami, the docking time, the check-out time. The only time that matters to me right now is the time it takes to find Willow and ask her not to forget me.
Sean goes one way, Declan another, toward their rooms to get their bags, and I keep pacing the halls of the ship.
It’s big from the outside and the inside, but it feels never-ending when you’re looking for someone.
My stomach is tightening into a knot as tight as a drum as I realize that it might be even harder if that someone doesn’t want to be found.
By the time we’re on deck, the sun’s high enough to turn the water gold and my stomach is a fully knotted suture.
Miami sprawls in the distance, busy and loud and fragrant.
People crowd the rails, clutching bags, snapping last-minute pictures.
The air smells like salt and fuel, grease and body odor.
And then I see her.
She’s standing near the front, hair pulled back, a tote slung over her shoulder. She’s not looking for us. Not waiting. Just another passenger ready to step back into real life.
Sean sees her first, and he lifts a hand in half a wave, but she doesn’t see it.
Or if she does, she pretends not to, finding solace in the peripherals of her vision.
I look at her friends, the woman and the man, and notice the way they stand beside her so close, protective, to shield her from the world or from us.
Maybe I was too much. Not enough. All at once.
I want to walk over and say something. Anything. I could introduce myself to her friends, chop the weirdness in half. I could ask for her number, give her a chance to give me a fake one.
But I stay rooted to the spot, my fingers tightening around the handle of my luggage as my mind runs through all the options, all the ways it could go wrong ten seconds into the future, five minutes, an hour, ten years.
There’s nothing to say anyway, no way to make it real. There’s three of us now, in a city we don’t live in, and none of it’s real life. Sharing someone—that’s a fantasy, spun out at sea, untethered from the world of mortgages and APR and reputation.
Watching Willow look forward, firmly forward like she’s afraid to slip up and see me, I think that maybe she knows that better than I do.
They call her deck to disembark, and the crowd surges forward. She’s swept along with them, and I lose sight of her for a minute, then catch her again, then lose her again—like a leaf in the tide.
My eyes chase her through the press of bodies, a flash of hair—better this way.
The glint of her earrings—but what if it’s not?
A glimpse of her shoulder—it could work, if I wanted it to.
Then she’s gone, swallowed by the tide. I tell myself intimacy’s a myth, just chemistry. Just chemicals. Just a bit of mad craic spun out at sea. No matter how real it felt. No matter how tight my stomach knots.