31 - CRUISING TO PARADISE
Lacey
We took a shuttle from the airport to the port, and when the ship came into view, I forgot the rest of it.
It was enormous.
I'd seen cruise ships in photographs. Photographs turn them into hotels.
They don't prepare you for standing under one, the deck stack climbing past the point your eye wants to follow it, white tier on white tier, balconies running the length of the hull in rows, like drawers in a cabinet built for something larger than people.
Glass elevators crawled up the outside. Lifeboats hung halfway down, orange and the size of buses and dwarfed anyway.
"Janice," I said in awe.
"I know," she said. “Welcome to the Calypso.”
"This isn't transportation. This is a floating city with a drinking problem."
She laughed. "Pretty much."
The terminal moved like an airport that had decided to be cheerful about it.
Families steering luggage carts. Couples handing phones to strangers and arranging their faces.
Crew in white directing the current toward the check-in counters.
Within a few minutes someone I'd never met had taken our bags off us and handed us boarding cards in return, and nobody asked me to fill anything out, and I had a small, embarrassing flush of importance.
When we stepped aboard, I stopped walking.
The atrium went up through the middle of the ship, deck above deck above deck, open all the way to a glass ceiling that put the whole well of it in full sun.
Staircases curved between the levels. The railings were brass and somebody polished them, which meant somebody's whole job was the railings.
Restaurants and lounges opened off every side of the drop.
People were wandering the floor with drinks in their hands and it wasn't even noon yet, and the old version of me had an opinion about it, and the new one looked at the drinks and thought, why not.
"This is ridiculous," I said.
Janice slipped her arm through mine. "Welcome to cruising."
"I feel like I should be carrying a small dog and wearing a monocle," I said.
We found our cabin eventually. Janice insisted on calling it a cabin, which sounded infinitely better than a room.
A king-sized bed took up one wall, dressed in crisp white linens.
A small sitting area, a desk, a wall-mounted television, and enough storage to make me wonder how long some people stayed on these things.
Janice barely looked at any of it. She grabbed my wrist and pulled me straight through the room.
The balcony doors slid open.
I stepped outside and forgot the room existed. The ocean ran out flat to the edge of everything. The ship sat so high above the water that looking straight down pulled at my stomach. The harbor spread around us, the smaller boats moving through it like toys.
"Oh my God."
The breeze caught my hair.
"Janice, if somebody fell from here—"
"Nobody is falling."
"I mean it."
She leaned against the railing, comfortable. "You are dramatically overestimating how likely you are to fall off a cruise ship."
I looked over the edge again. "Nope. Still terrifying."
She laughed and turned back toward the room. "Come on. Let me show you the rest."
I followed her inside.
And that was when I let myself see it.
The bed. The singular bed.
I stopped. "Janice."
She looked up innocently. "Yes?"
"There's only one bed."
"Sure is."
"There's only one bed." I raised my eyebrows in a way I thought was intimidating. Evidently it wasn't.
She folded her arms. "Would you rather have two tiny uncomfortable beds or one giant comfortable one?"
I looked at the mattress. It was huge.
Janice shrugged. "Don't worry. I'm skinny. I don't take up much room."
Then she winked. Somehow that wasn't reassuring. I tried, briefly, to find a way to ask Janice what exactly was happening here. But I couldn't say it. Janice was my best friend. I was being silly.
I was on a ship going into the Caribbean. For the first time in years, I had no patients waiting, no paperwork stacking up, no Brad disapproving of me. And I had a body that hadn't stopped humming since my run with Ricardo.
I intended to enjoy myself. Or at least panic somewhere tropical for a change.
Later that afternoon, we wandered the upper decks. The pool area was packed with women laughing, talking, drinking frozen cocktails, soaking up the sun.
And I was looking.
I'd spent my life learning to look at women without seeing them.
Clinical, registering and dismissing, the way I'd look at a magazine cover.
But not today. A redhead at the pool edge, whose breasts moved a particular way when she laughed.
A woman near the bar with deep tan lines and a small tattoo at the base of her spine.
I caught myself admiring and I didn't look away.
Almost every woman here was wearing a much smaller swimsuit than I owned. Mine suddenly felt as if it belonged to somebody's aunt. An elderly aunt.
I leaned closer to Janice. "Do they sell swimsuits on board?"
She immediately smiled. "Oh, absolutely."
"Let's go shopping."
The ship's boutique carried everything from designer sunglasses to evening dresses. The swimsuit section took up an entire wall.
I picked up a sensible one-piece.
Janice put it back. "No."
"What do you mean, no?" I asked.
"No." She handed me a bikini. Navy blue, simple and elegant, and not even close to what I'd have chosen. The bottoms were cut high on the hips, lengthening the leg, showing far more skin than I was used to. The top was supportive and minimal, built to flatter rather than conceal.
"Janice."
"You have fantastic legs."
"That's not the point."
"It is absolutely the point."
I held the bikini up. I turned it over, looking for the rest of it. There was no rest of it. "There is barely enough fabric here to qualify as clothing."
"Exactly."
I stared at her. She stared right back.
Then I was carrying it to the register.
Back in the room, Janice stripped down, dropping her sundress over the back of the desk chair and stepping out of her panties like she'd been undressing in front of other women her whole life.
I'd seen most of her body before, in the club, in different lights and contexts. I'd told myself those were the contexts. The club had a context. The dance floor had a context. Janice's body in our cabin in the afternoon light, two feet from mine, didn't have a context. It was just there.
She was beautiful in a way I'd always pretended not to notice. Tall, lean, athletic, warm brown skin, small breasts that didn't need a bra, narrow waist, hips that came from working out.
The arousal went down through me before I'd noticed I was looking. The same place it had been for weeks.
She pulled a black string bikini out of her bag and put it on, talking about a panel discussion she wanted to catch tomorrow. The top was small enough that her nipples showed through the lining. She tied the strings behind her back without looking.
She caught me watching.
She didn't smile. She just kept talking.
I wasn't as shy as I used to be. The Second Circle had taken some of the shyness off me, and Ricardo had taken more, and what was left was a thinner crust than I'd realized.
But there was still some crust. Stripping in a cabin in the afternoon, sober, with my best friend two feet away, felt strange.
Not the club. Not a changing room. A bedroom. A bedroom with one bed in it.
I put the bikini on anyway, deciding to change with my back to my friend.
It was even smaller than I'd remembered. I turned to the mirror and my stomach fell.
"Ugh," I said out loud.
Janice came up behind me, taller in the glass, and her eyes found the problem right after mine did.
"It looks great on you," she said. Then, "Oh, yeah. I see the problem."
The bottom of the bikini was high-cut enough that the upper edge of my pubic hair was visible.
I'd never thought about it. I'd never had to.
Brad hadn't believed in waxing. I'd been a trim woman.
I'd thought a trim woman was modern enough.
Modern, it turned out, had moved. Nobody had sent me the memo. Nobody sent me any of the memos.
My cheeks reddened.
"Well, I can't wear this, Janice. I should've bought the first one I picked out."
"Nonsense, Lacey." She waved it off. "Just enter the modern world with the rest of us. Look, I brought my kit to touch up. It won't take fifteen minutes to have you ready to go."
"What are you talking about? Waxing? You're going to show me how to wax?"
Janice waved that away too. "No, silly, I don't need to teach you that. I can do it for you."