Lexi
Lexi
“Wake up, you’re trapped on a houseboat with an uncaffeinated, unshowered harpy.”
Zeke opens his eyes slowly and looks right at me. He’s on his back, his curls thrown outward onto the pillow like the lines from the sun in one of Mae’s drawings. I expect to see the penny drop in his eyes, the way it did in mine when he woke me at two in the morning, but his gaze stays steady. Zeke seems permanently dreamy—maybe moving from asleep to awake isn’t such a big deal for him, as if he exists in that space anyway.
“Hello,” he says softly. “What’s a harpy?”
I pause. After five hours alone on the deck, watching the dawn, my whole body is alight with panic. When I think of a survival scenario, I imagine it would be very physical—hiking across a barren rockscape, scaling a rainforest tree, sprinting away from a score of zombies. This survival scenario is the opposite. It’s basically a long exercise in sitting still.
I am a pretty sedentary person, but I’m also someone who always has my phone out, or the telly on, or a four-year-old launching themselves at me from the other end of the sofa—I’m not somebody who should be left alone with their own thoughts. And whoever said that ocean sounds were restful had clearly never been lost at sea before, because that endless, repetitive noise in the cold darkness was a total mindfuck last night. I started hearing things in it—a rhythm playing out, ta-ta-da , and then a voice, on repeat, making a sound like a wolf: a-whoo, a-whoo . I’d huddled under two blankets and cried, grateful for the knowledge that Zeke was asleep and wouldn’t ever know.
The result of all this is that I am pathetically grateful for human contact, even if the human is a twenty-three-year-old stranger who knows what I look like naked.
“A harpy is like a…wrinkly old woman? Maybe with wings? You know, I’m not actually sure. It’s Greek or Roman or something.”
“You’re not wrinkly or old.”
He’s making no move to get up. I notice that he’s slept without a top on—I can see the tan width of his shoulders. I stand, shuffling my way down the side of the bed toward the door, head bowed slightly to fit under the sloping sides of the ceiling.
“You think that now, but wait until we’ve been out here for a couple of days without my retinol cream.”
“No wings, either,” he says comfortably, sitting up in bed.
I turn in the doorway. “Are you not panicking? About all this?”
“Not right now. Right now I’m waking up.”
I shake my head. I have this cruel impulse to scare him—to say, We’re screwed, don’t you see? Not a single boat has passed us in more than twenty-four hours . But another impulse swallows the words back. I don’t want him to be afraid. Yesterday morning, it was him versus me, but something has shifted in the darkness, and now it’s hard to say exactly how I see him. Still a stranger, definitely. But not an enemy.
“Come on,” I say. “We need to eat something. And then we need to make a plan.”
I gasp when I step out onto the deck, and the sound brings Zeke right up behind me in a few quick steps.
“Sorry,” I breathe, feeling the heat of his body against my back as he moves past me into the sunshine. “Sorry, sorry, I’ve not seen a ship or anything, it’s just…”
“I think it’s injured.”
Zeke is down on his knees already. Right in front of us, at twelve o’clock to the door, is a seagull. A little one, a baby, maybe. It’s browner than I’d expect a seagull to be, as if it’s not got its final feathers yet. It’s floating on the back of something—a broken kayak, snapped clean, one yellow stripe still visible on its side despite the water’s erosion. It was such a shock to step out here and find something other than blue water and blue sky.
“See how it can’t stretch out its left wing?”
I lean on the railing, looking down at the bird. Does seeing a seagull mean we’re close to land? Or is that just one of those myths, like my mum’s absolute conviction that going out with wet hair would lead to me catching a deadly Dickensian-style cold?
The seagull lets out a small sound, half mew, half caw, and I’m shocked to feel my eyes fill with tears. There is a lot to cry about right now, and this seagull is extremely low down on the list, so I don’t know what this is about. I blink them away before Zeke sees.
“We came out to make a plan,” I remind him, waving a notebook in my hand. It’s his—he dug it out of his bag yesterday for our inventory. I find the idea of him carrying a notebook around almost as strange as him carrying around a bunch of knives—I don’t know any men who write things down by hand.
He doesn’t look away from the seagull.
“Zeke? Hello?”
“Hi,” he says, glancing over his shoulder, eyes narrowed against the sun. “You OK?”
“Yeah, I just…” I pause. “Are you thinking the kayak might be useful? Do you think we should try to get hold of it?”
He’s slow to answer. I respect that about Zeke: he’s not afraid of a bit of silence.
“No,” he says finally. “I’m thinking, how do you save a seagull without Google?”
“You’re not serious.”
He frowns. “We don’t have a lot to do, Lexi. I think we can spare half an hour to rescue a baby bird.”
“How would we even do that? It’s way out of reach.”
He turns, sitting down, one forearm resting across his knees. “We came out here to make a plan, didn’t we?” he says.
Zeke is now down to a pair of boxers. They’re bright red—I am unsurprised that Zeke does not have ordinary boxers—and they sit low on his hips. I look away, out to the water, where the seagull staggers a few steps forward across the broken kayak.
“I am wondering whether get in the sea is such a great plan after all,” I say, eyeing the very amateur rope ladder we’ve just made so that he can climb back up again—or either of us can, if we ever fall in. “It’s only a bird. Birds get injured and die all the time. We should be worrying about ourselves.”
“I can do that, too. I can multitask,” Zeke says.
“The bird will probably die anyway.”
“OK.” Zeke gives a one-shouldered shrug. “But we’ll have tried.”
Something shifts a little in my chest, like a block of ice breaking loose. Look at him, framed against the seascape with his abs and his chocolate-and-gold eyes, talking about saving an injured seagull. I may be a tough woman, but nobody is that tough.
“I won’t do it,” Zeke says, voice softening. “If you don’t want me to.”
I look at the bird. “Fuck,” I say.
Zeke waits.
“You’re just looking for something to save because we can’t save ourselves,” I tell him.
“Uh-huh,” he says, not missing a beat. “Absolutely.”
I blink. I don’t know any men with enough self-insight to accept that without pause. The surprise throws me.
I look back at the bird. “Fuck,” I say again.
“You swear a lot,” Zeke says. And then, “Why do I like that so much?”
That makes my stomach flutter, a strange sensation after the heavy, sickening panic that’s sat there for the last day and a half. I look at him sharply, but he’s looking at the sea; I can’t tell for sure if he’s flirting.
“Fine. Let’s do it,” I say, turning my gaze away.
Zeke bends to grab the rope, the one we tied to itself—sometime yesterday he sorted that loop on the side of The Merry Dormouse , which I was grateful for, since every time I saw the rope snaking over the railing it made me want to scream at our own stupidity. Now that we’ve made a ladder from the only spare I could find on the boat, this is our one remaining rope. He ties it around his middle, shoots me a brief, almost exhilarated look, and then dive-bombs into the sea.
The moment he hits the water, he lets out a huge gasp, almost a scream. My whole body flinches at the sound.
“Zeke? Zeke?”
“I’m OK, I’m OK. It’s just…cold.”
I watch him smooth his sodden hair back, his legs kicking in the water as he adjusts to the temperature, still breathing hard. I am a lot more nervous about this than I’d realized. I know he’s right there, only a meter or so below me, but now it’s just me up here on this deck, alone, feet bare on its grainy surface, hands clinging to its flimsy railing. It’s not a good feeling.
Still breathing hard against the cold, Zeke swims toward the broken kayak. The seagull squawks, flapping. Zeke tugs the kayak closer to the boat, until his back is against the houseboat’s dark blue paintwork and the seagull is inches away from him, still clinging to its life raft.
“Lexi?” Zeke says, treading water. He has the kayak in one hand and the rope in the other. “What do we do with Eugene when we’ve got hold of him?”
“Eugene?”
He looks up at me, squinting against the sunlight. His breathing is steadier now.
“You don’t like it? I think it suits him.”
“We don’t even know it’s a boy seagull.”
“You want me to check?”
“My plan this morning did not involve examining seagulls for penises. Can you remind me how we ended up here?”
“Uh, well, we basically tied the houseboat to itself instead of…”
“No, please, I didn’t mean that part,” I say, covering my eyes. “I do not want reminding of that. Eugene is fine. He can be a Eugene.”
I find myself thinking of Penny, perhaps because she would have saved this seagull, and probably named it, too. She wouldn’t have made a plan, though, or a ladder, or tied herself to the boat—she’d have thrown herself into the water without thinking, and I would have had to figure out how to get her back again. That’s our dynamic: from the day we met, she became the cute baby sister I always wanted. Penny is all sunshine; she’s spontaneous, perky, the human equivalent of a cup of coffee. You need a hug, gorgeous , she says to me sometimes, wrapping her arms around my middle, and then, Succumb! she’ll command me, when I resist.
Thinking about Penny takes me to Mae, but that’s too painful, too much, and my mind rears back from it like the thought has teeth.
I wonder if Penny’s worrying about me. Whether they’ve sent out search parties yet. I hope she just thinks I’m not replying to her WhatsApps because she kicked me out; the thought of her being frightened makes my stomach bottom out. I know she’d keep it from Mae for as long as she could, but…
I shiver. How long does it usually take for people to report someone as missing? Surely the busybody neighbor at the marina would have sounded the alarm when she saw the houseboat gone in the morning. So why are we still here?
“I’m not sure…how much longer I should stay in the water,” Zeke says, and I can hear his teeth chattering as he speaks.
“Sorry. Let me go find something to put him in.”
I spin on my heel and step inside the boat, the little door swinging shut behind me. I head for the bedroom, which is a mess—in a space this small, it doesn’t take much to make it look untidy—and I open the wardrobe. I’ve not hung up everything from my bag yet. Avoiding creases didn’t seem a priority, and I’m reluctant to do anything that feels like moving in, which is obviously ridiculous, since moving out is currently impossible.
My first thought is my holdall, though a distant corner of my brain reminds me that it cost me fifty quid and will probably never be the same again if it’s had a terrified seagull inside it. But while I’m emptying out the contents into the base of the wardrobe, I lose my footing and end up falling forward against the back wall, one hand slamming into the wood. And a panel comes loose.
I yelp, flinching back as it clatters to the base of the wardrobe. It’s exposed a small, hidden cubbyhole, built into the wall of the boat, just wide enough to hold a cardboard shoebox on its side. The box looks old, its lid stained and warped; if it’s Penny’s, I don’t recognize it.
I ease it out, wrinkling my nose at the fusty smell, and lift the lid. There are five, maybe six large notebooks inside, leather-bound and battered. Ship’s Log is printed on the front of each one.
“Lexi?”
I stand up so fast I make myself dizzy. Zeke’s bobbing around out there in the freezing cold sea while I’m getting all Nancy Drew in here. I tip the logbooks out on top of our bags and leave the bedroom, grabbing my towel from the bathroom as I go, then doubling back just as I reach the door to snatch the scissors out of the sink. Whatever the deal is with this shoebox, it’ll make a better seagull holder than my bag, and that’s all that matters right now.
“This is looking very Blue Peter ,” Zeke says, eyeing the objects I’m clutching. One of his arms is now wrapped around the back of the broken kayak. “Do you think Eugene is concussed? He’s gone still.”
I finish punching holes into the lid of the shoebox and lean over to examine the bird. It’s sort of staring at nothing, but don’t birds generally do that? What is a standard resting bird face?
“He’s fine,” I say firmly.
Zeke, on the other hand, looks worryingly cold. There’s a faint tinge of blue to the edges of his lips now.
“Are you OK?” I ask.
“Just a bit cold, that’s all.”
I’m sweating through my long-sleeved tee—it was cool out here first thing, but now the sun is warming the deck, and the sea is turning a deeper, purer shade of blue. It looks like it should be warm, which I guess is probably what Zeke thought before he leaped in.
“Here,” I say, “use this to hold him.”
Zeke catches the towel above his head, then gently wraps it around Eugene, who flaps a little and lets out a single quiet caw , but nothing more. This feels like a bad sign. If I was a bird, and a giant human was trying to wrap me in a towel, I’d want to object a bit more than this.
“OK. Hmm. I didn’t think about how few hands I’d have at this point, did you?” Zeke says, voice labored as he attempts to clamber onto the broken kayak, one knee up, like a spider trying to lever its way up out of a plughole.
This is all as per the plan we drew up in the notebook, complete with diagrams that I now realize gave us very little other than a sense of control over something, but at least I’ve found out I would be able to beat Zeke at Pictionary.
He keeps getting up onto the kayak, grabbing at the rail, then almost losing his hold on Eugene and splashing back again. It’s like watching Total Wipeout . I can’t quite believe he’s doing this. The muscles in his shoulders and stomach are popping as he tries to balance—it’s the strangest mix of sexy and daft, and despite myself, I’m smiling.
I lean over the side just as he manages to get into a standing position on the back of the kayak, surfer-style. He pretty much throws me the bird in its bundle of towel, and then he’s twisting and losing his footing and splashing right into the water again, a proper belly flop. I’m laughing, the sea-splattered towel clutched close to my chest. The wind picks up the loose hairs at the nape of my neck and cools the spots of seawater on my bare feet. For a moment something seems to open up inside me, like a shell cracking, as though my slightly frantic giggling is setting something free.
I get Eugene into the shoebox as Zeke hauls himself up the rope ladder and then collapses on a deck chair, immediately drenching its blue-striped fabric. It’s a while before I look around—I’m checking Eugene over, as though I think I’m some sort of seagull vet. Beak: present and correct. Wings: yes, two. Talons: unnervingly sharp.
The moment I turn and see Zeke’s face, my stomach lurches.
“Are you all right?” I ask, alarmed.
“Fine,” he says, but his chest is heaving and his face is drawn.
Reality seeps back in: here we are, stranded in this awful barren sea, and if the weather worsens before we’re rescued, if it gets colder out here…
“Let’s get you inside. You should change into something warm.”
“Right,” Zeke says, staggering slightly as he stands, despite the fact that the boat is barely doing more than a slow rolling dip on the water.
I carefully carry Eugene into the bedroom while Zeke heads to the bathroom. As I set the seagull down on the bedside table, I lift the lid and peek inside his box.
Eugene stares up at me, eyes ink black, soft feathers ruffled. He’s so still. Maybe we should have left him out there—what if his mum was coming back for him? He doesn’t look like a tiny baby, more like a teenager. Do mother seagulls still care about their babies when they’re adolescents, or was his mother like Penny’s mum, the sort who decides you’re on your own once you’re no longer cute enough to dress up like a doll?
I close the box and head to the wardrobe in search of something I can wear instead of this top, which is now sweaty, sea-splashed and smelling strongly of seagull. It’s a mess in here, that weird loose panel leaning behind Zeke’s duffel bag, dust everywhere, ship’s logs upended across our bags. Those books are next on my list—they might say something useful. We could really do with useful right now. God knows the injured seagull doesn’t qualify.
I strip down to my bra and trousers, ignoring my reflection in the narrow mirror inside the wardrobe door and choosing a blue shirt I bought years ago, now soft with overwear.
“Ah, sorry,” says Zeke from behind me.
I spin around, clutching the shirt to my chest. He’s only a couple of steps away from me—that’s pretty much always true in this boat. He’s wandered in wearing just jeans; one of his hands is still on his head, as though he’s paused midway through rearranging his curls.
He can’t see anything with the shirt where it is, but I’m aware of my bareness, the cool wood of the wardrobe pressing against the skin of my back as I step away from him. The boat sways beneath my feet, and the sight of him like this, wet and lean and gorgeous, makes my breath falter.
This is different from seeing him in his boxers on the deck. We’re in the bedroom; I’m half-naked. Our night together flashes through me. Dizzy, slick desire. The way his dipped gaze met mine, slow and honey-sweet. How his breath caught when I touched him. I think of the Zeke I conjured up yesterday when I was afraid he might hurt me, and it seems so absurd now, after seeing him cradling a wounded seagull in his arms, after hearing him say, You can have my knives . There are so many versions of this man in my head.
Zeke turns away from me, dropping his gaze. “I’m really sorry. I went into the bathroom without…”
He gestures toward the wardrobe without lifting his eyes.
“Oh yeah, of course.”
I step awkwardly to the side. He hesitates, finally glancing up again; I can’t quite read his expression. He’ll have to brush past me to get to the cupboard—there’s not room for anything else. We say nothing, eyes locked, the hot, still air silent between us, and there’s a weird sense of timelessness to it all, like we’re caught somewhere between our night together and the reality of our lives as they are now.
“Listen, Lexi,” Zeke says, looking down at the floor again. He clears his throat. “I just want to say—after yesterday—I—sorry, could you just pass me my T-shirt? I feel stupid saying this topless.”
“Yes, yeah, of course,” I say, spinning to grab his T-shirt and holding it out to him.
The moment has broken, but my heart is still beating too fast. I’m already braced to dislike whatever he’s about to say—it has the tone of a rejection.
“I hope you feel safer with me now,” he begins.
“I’m fine,” I cut in. I still feel a bit embarrassed about yesterday, though I know if it was Penny saying that, I’d tell her she had every right to feel the way she did. “It’s fine.”
He frowns slightly, pulling on his T-shirt with one swift tug.
“But we’re stuck here together. If you want to get away from me, you can’t. I don’t want you to feel uncomfortable.” He takes a breath. “So I just want to say, just really clearly say, that I’m not expecting—I’m not going to hit on you or…I know things started that way between us, but it’s different now. I think we should just…ban it.”
My mouth is dry. “Ban it?”
“Yeah. No…”
For the briefest moment his gaze kisses the bare skin of my chest and shoulders, and the heat still pulsing under the surface flares up in me again.
“No sex,” he says.
Well, that pulls me up short.
“Right,” I say, trying to keep my face blank.
“No touching or kissing or anything sexual.”
“Right. Great. Yeah.”
“All sex acts strictly forbidden,” he says, waving a hand in a cut motion.
“I’ve got it, Zeke,” I say sharply.
Christ, sex acts ? Where are we, the courtroom?
“Sorry. I was so crap for you yesterday. I want to be better today.”
I melt slightly. He is being considerate, really. And he’s absolutely right: the dynamic between us is complicated enough as it is. We can’t sleep together again; that would be madness. I mean, there’s no morning-after pill out here if the condom breaks, for starters. And the brutal reality is that in my experience, sleeping with a guy never ends with a positive relationship. I needed to hear him say all this.
But needing something and wanting something are different matters entirely, and even though it probably does have to be this way, I’m surprised to discover quite how much I wish it didn’t.
“Right,” I say briskly. “I’ll just get dressed, then. Platonically. So…”
“Yeah, sorry,” he says, spinning on his heel and heading out of the room. He pauses briefly in the doorway, glancing over his shoulder. “Thanks for having that conversation,” he says quietly, and the hint of a smile tells me he’s remembering me saying the same on the deck yesterday. “It helped.”