Zeke
Zeke
Two in the morning. She’s curled on her side on the bathroom floor. She keeps saying, I’m fine . It’s just the seasickness . But she hit her head so hard. I’m sure she wasn’t vomiting this much before the fall. I wish I knew how to tell if she’s concussed or bleeding in her brain or…or…any of the thousands of bad things streaking through my mind right now.
I play the fall over and over. I was too slow. So stupid. I didn’t get to her side in time. By the time I was there, she was unconscious. It was just a few seconds, but she was definitely out. I shook her shoulder, and she didn’t respond, and I thought, You can’t die , I’m not sure I can live if you die . I look down at her now—eyes closed, cheek lying on the tiles—and this great balloon of emotion expands inside me. So big it hardly fits in my chest.
I don’t know if I’ve ever cared about another human being the way I care for Lexi. I tip my head back against the wall. I’d throw myself overboard if it would help her right now. I’d give her every scrap of food left, the clothes off my back, just anything . I guess this is what all those self-help books were on about. Here’s my “authentic connection,” right here on this bathroom floor.
No wonder people say that love is torture.
I should probably be out on the deck keeping watch, but for now I’ll have to settle for checking through the windows as dawn creeps over us. I can’t bear to leave Lexi on her own like this.
The rain’s thrumming on the roof of the boat. Our tarp and cloth covering for the shower drain gave in about an hour ago under the new challenge of the rocking waves. I’ve stuffed it with fresh fabric, but it’s already soaked, and I know I’m going to have to start using the towels, maybe even bailing. There are three leaks in the ceiling now, too: one in the bedroom, right over the bedside table, and two in the living area. But they’re small, and I’ve plugged them as best I can. We’re still afloat. We’re still OK.
As long as Lexi’s not dying.
“Hey.” She sits up carefully on the bathroom floor, reaching for the thermos of water tucked between my back and the wall. “I feel a bit better for that sleep.”
“Good.” I try to remember what I’ve seen about head injuries in films. “How many fingers am I holding up?” I ask.
She’s not focusing on my hand at all. Her eyes skitter to the side over and over, like she’s watching fast traffic from a car window.
“Somewhere between two and four? Three? Three point five?” she says.
Hmm. Not good.
“Just…lie back. Rest. And get better. Please.”
I wonder if I should be keeping her awake, but I’m sure I read somewhere that it’s a myth that it helps, and she looks so tired.
“If I tell you something now, when I am probably dying from a bleed on the brain, will you promise not to be angry with me?” Lexi says, laying herself slowly down on the tiles again.
She pulls her knees up, her socked feet pressed to the side of my boots. I eye the darkening fabric stuffed into the shower drain.
“That’s a fairly manipulative bargain you’re trying to strike, there.”
“I know. I’m an arsehole. This is not news,” she says, closing her eyes. “But you’ve got to admit, I’m in a position of strength here on the bathroom floor, and I’d be a fool not to use it.”
“You’re not an arsehole, Lexi. You’re lovely.”
She rolls her head to the side, pressing the center of her forehead into the tiles. She’s still in those damp, rainy clothes—I’ve laid a blanket over her, but she’s shivering.
“Let me get you a jumper,” I say, moving to stand.
Her hand flies out to grab my leg.
“I looked in one of the logbooks,” she says.
I slowly lower myself back to sit on the bathroom floor again.
“I’m so sorry. I was scared. I wanted information. I saw it was basically your dad’s diary, and I did it anyway. I told you I’m an arsehole.”
“Lexi…”
I rub my forehead. My heart’s pounding. I don’t know what I’m feeling, but it’s not pretty.
“I had no right,” she says, eyes opening and finding mine. “I’m sorry. I can’t even explain why I did it.”
I breathe out slowly. I’m not surprised she doesn’t know why she did it. Lexi has so many walls up, it’s like entering a maze, and I don’t think she knows her way around herself, either. It makes it hard to be angry with her, but…I am, I think. And sad. And scared. And…
“I didn’t see anything explicit, just something about your dad not telling you something, but I do think it might be in there,” she whispers. “The answer you wanted.” She rolls slightly so she can get a proper look at my face, then bats the shower curtain as it catches in her bun. “But honestly, I can’t believe you’ve not read them yet. That level of self-control blows my mind.”
I shake my head. “It’s not self-control. It’s…cowardice.”
Her eyes are soft. “You’re scared to find out for sure? That your dad isn’t your dad?”
“I guess,” I say, but I don’t think that’s all of it. Opening those books means actually listening to my father, a man I’ve chosen to shut out for most of my life, and I don’t know what he’ll say, but I’m pretty sure it’ll hurt me. I know he never cared for me the way he cared for Lyra and Jeremy. Turns out I’m just not ready to see that written in black and white.
“I mean, does it matter if your birth father was someone else?” Lexi says. “Because your dad is your dad, right? I don’t think the scumbag who knocked up Penny has any right to be part of Mae’s life, personally, and on the same basis…”
“I think, if my relationship with my father had been better…” I clear my throat. “Yeah, maybe I’d feel that way. But I feel like there’s something missing. I’ve always felt like that. That I don’t belong. And maybe finding my real dad…”
Lexi closes her eyes again. “I worry about that all the time, you know,” she says. “With Mae. That she feels that absence.”
I want to tell Lexi that I’m sure she’s enough for Mae, that her little girl’s not missing anything, but I had a dad and I still wanted another one, so…I’m not really one to talk.
“I don’t think everyone feels the way I do,” I say eventually. “Lyra calls me perpetually lost .” Lyra likes using words like perpetually , words I’d never be able to spell. “Always grass-is-greener. Maybe this is just that.”
Lexi moves suddenly, pulling herself up and retching into the toilet. Her shoulders slump in exhaustion.
I reach over and smooth her hair back, then pause, hand hovering. But she leans back into my palm like a cat wanting to be stroked, so I do it again, careful to avoid the lump on the back of her head.
“God,” she says, as she reaches for the pump handle to flush the toilet. “I would never, ever let a man see me like this usually, you know.”
“Not even your boyfriend?”
She raises her eyebrows, taking a sip from her thermos. The houseboat lurches beneath us—a bigger wave, I guess—and Lexi and I lock eyes. We hold our breath for a second. This has happened a few times now. We’re getting into the new rhythm. Got to roll with the punches out here or you’d spend your whole time screaming your head off, basically.
“I don’t date men nice enough to hold my hair back when I’m throwing up,” she says, setting down the thermos and pulling her blanket closer.
I’ve wondered about Lexi’s dating life. She’s thirty-one—she’s had eight years of dating on me. She must’ve had men lining up to take her out. So why’s she single? Who was stupid enough to let her go?
“What kind of men do you date?” I ask.
I take a sip from my own thermos. Water is seriously underrated. I guess when I get home I’ll gulp it down without thinking again, but right now I can’t imagine seeing a glass of water as anything other than a miracle.
“You want the short history of my dating life?”
“Or the long one.” I want it all, really—everything about her.
“Well, there was Johnny, in Year Eleven. He was the one everybody wanted, so I hung on to him at all costs, and the cost was fairly substantial,” she says, shifting into a more comfortable position. “Then there was Lee. He was very nice until he wasn’t. He taught me why ‘crazy’ is a bad word even if they’re laughing when they say it. Then there was a string of casual ones, all as bad as one another, and then Theo, who left me after I took on supporting Penny and Mae, and then I just gave up, really.”
I stare at her in horror. She snorts.
“Believe me,” she says, “this is not an unusual story, tragic as it is. Every thirty-something single woman has at least a few nasty ones in her history, even if she doesn’t recognize it. Good men are hard to find.”
“How old did you say Mae is?”
“Four. Four and two months, to be precise, which she always prefers you to be.”
“And Theo left you before she was born?”
“Yup.”
“And you’ve not dated since? Not…at all ?”
She snorts at my expression.
“Sorry,” I say, blinking fast. “I just thought…that’s a really long time to go without…”
She shrugs. “I had the odd encounter at The Anchor that ended up in bed. Two or three times, maybe. But yeah. Didn’t you clock that I was a little rusty?”
I think about that night. Kissing the skin of her stomach, feeling her nails scrape my shoulders. Burying myself inside her and just losing it as the world seemed to fall away around us.
I clear my throat. “No,” I say firmly. “You did not seem…rusty.”
I catch the ghost of a smile before she swipes it away.
“Do you mind if I lie down again?” she asks, her voice a little weak.
“Course not,” I say, moving as close to the door as I can to give her some space.
I feel embarrassed now. Only two or three one-night stands for almost five years? It’d been four months since I’d last had sex when I took Lexi back to this boat, and I felt like a monk.
“Penny’s dating life was enough to put me off every time I considered dipping my toe in again. She’s only ever had a string of terrible men who left her the second things got serious.” She sniffs. “You know, this one guy walked out because she asked him to pick her up a Mooncup from Boots?”
I laugh.
“He just said, Look, love, no offense, but this isn’t really my scene . I know I shouldn’t generalize, but it just seems to me like men can’t handle the nitty-gritty. Real-life stuff, shit happening, the grind. Over and over, that’s what I’ve seen. I think if any of the other men I’ve encountered in my life had been on this houseboat with me, they’d have…” She pauses—nausea getting worse for a moment, maybe. “They’d have taken charge to begin with,” she continues. “Then they’d have got angry because they were scared. Then they’d have given up and sulked and gone to pieces. But you’ve not done any of that. I don’t think you would have left me out here even if you could have.”
“Of course not,” I say, shocked that she’d even think it.
She lies down with her head in my lap, which surprises me, but no complaints here. I stretch my legs out as best I can in the tiny space as she wriggles her hairband free and then massages her scalp. Her eyelids dipping in pleasure. I swallow. She looks so gorgeous, even after vomiting all night. I want to say, I would never, ever leave you , but I can’t, because that’s not what this is.
“What about you? Come on,” she says, snuggling in, knees curled up to her chest. “Entertain me with tales of your exes. I know you’ve slept around a bit, but what’s your dating history?”
I stay quiet, chewing my cheek. She cracks an eye open, turning her head to look up at me.
“Come on. First serious girlfriend? There must have been one .”
I don’t often think about Nicky. She’s come up in therapy a bit—how could she not, really—but these days, it doesn’t hurt to remember her. Just makes me kind of curious. Who would I have been, if I’d never met her?
“Oh, there was one,” Lexi says with satisfaction.
“Just one, yeah.”
“Broke your heart?”
“I mean…”
I guess she did, really. Or changed it. I was just a kid, looking for someone to make me feel at home, and for a while, I was hers—installed in her flat, hardly ever out of her bed, as obsessed with her as she seemed to be with me. But it barely lasted two months. I’ve taught you everything I know, cuteness , she’d said. You knew this wasn’t going to last. You’re very pretty, but we were never going to be anything serious, were we?
“How old were you?” Lexi asks.
“I was sixteen.”
“And she was…”
Lexi’s so good at reading me now.
“Twenty-eight,” I say reluctantly.
Her eyes snap wide open. “ Twelve years older than you?”
“Mm.”
“How did that happen?”
“We met when I was waiting tables at a golf club one summer.”
She’d caught my eye with a glass of wine dangling between finger and thumb, at lunch with her father and his new wife. Draped in her chair, languid, beautiful. I’d seen her straighten at the sight of me. When I’d reached the table to take their order, she’d said, I don’t suppose you could show me to the bathroom? By the time we’d reached the corridor outside the restaurant doors, her body was already brushing close to mine. I’m Nicky , she’d said. I’m here all summer and I’m ever so bored.
“You totally have a thing for older women.”
I frown and shake my head. “I don’t have a thing , I just…” But I trail off, because I kind of do, really. “I just always feel more connected to women who are a bit older than me. They know what they want, they’re…They just seem more interesting.”
“If by interesting you mean damaged and jaded, yes.”
“That’s definitely not what I mean. That’s so…that’s so far from how I see you.”
She says nothing for a while. “I don’t know whether it’s better or worse that you’ve been with older women before.”
I smile slightly. “Why does it bother you so much? The fact that there’s an age gap between us?”
“It doesn’t.”
I wait.
“All right, it does a bit. A woman over thirty with no home of her own, who goes back with a twenty-three-year-old she meets in the pub…she sounds a bit of a mess.”
“Not to me,” I say, running my hand up and down her arm. I remember doing this in bed, how soft her skin had felt. It’s difficult to match the woman in my lap with the woman I took home on that first night. She’d been a stranger then, and this is my Lexi, my only person in the world. “She sounds like someone who didn’t really get her twenties. It makes sense she’d want a person who’s at a similar stage.”
Her eyes fly open again. Wide-wide.
“You’re not at a similar stage to me,” she says, staring at the bathroom wall instead of up at me.
“No?”
“Zeke, I’m a thirty-one-year-old woman. I want kids of my own. I should be with someone sensible to father my children, not a beautiful twenty-something who makes me feel alive for a night, or whatever.”
“What, I’m not sensible? And how do you know I don’t want to have kids soon?” I say, my hand stilling on her arm.
At last, she looks at me. She doesn’t say anything, and her eyes are still dizzy-looking, but they’re sharp, too. Missing nothing.
“There’s more to a person than their age,” I say quietly. “You can’t just decide who I am because I’m twenty-three. I wouldn’t say every thirty-one-year-old woman wants, like…” I reach around for a handy cliché. “To get married, or to have a baby, or to get Botox, or something.”
“No,” she says after a moment, with slight amusement. “I wouldn’t advise saying any of those things.”
I give her a small, tight smile. She frowns.
“That’s fair. I’m sorry,” she says.
I watch her swallow. I can see it hurts her, and I wish I could smooth that away.
“ Do you want kids?” she asks.
Her wide eyes are vulnerable. Maybe defiant. It’s hard to tell the difference with Lexi.
“I can’t wait to be a dad,” I say. “I think about it all the time.”
She breathes in, a sort of two-part hiccup. The way she might inhale if I’d just got down on one knee.
“It’s part of what made me go to therapy. I didn’t think I could handle a relationship, but knew I wanted kids, a family, and…it didn’t add up.” This is harder to talk about than I thought it would be. “I think Nicky—the woman I really fell for when I was sixteen—I think she just confirmed for me that I wasn’t worthy of real love. But she did make me feel like I was good at sex. So…I did a lot of that.” I shrug. “I wasn’t being honest with myself about what I wanted. Or I was too scared to go out and get it. Sex, that’s easy,” I say.
I feel her tense slightly and I wince.
“I mean, like…I know I can…”
“It’s OK,” she says. “I get it. You were saying: sex is easy…”
I take a deep breath. “Trying to fall in love? Find that one person, raise a family with them, trust them to love you forever? That scares me. That’s hard.”
She nods.
“But yeah, I want kids. I can say that now. I want to be a dad who does everything. Middle-of-the-night get-ups and school drop-offs and all the heart-to-hearts. I want my kids to know I’m always there for them.”
Her eyes are fixed on my face.
“But…”
“But?” she says, her voice barely a whisper.
“One of the things I worry about is that I’ll…mess them up. I tend to mess stuff up.”
Lexi frowns, lifting her head from my lap and straightening to sit against the sink.
“What does that even mean?” she asks.
“Like…I’m kind of stupid.” I cringe, closing my eyes, tipping my head back to the wall again. “I never live up to people’s expectations. It’s OK, I’m used to it. But I wouldn’t want my kids to be disappointed in me.”
Lexi doesn’t speak for so long that I open my eyes to check she’s not fallen unconscious or something.
“Did you mean all that?” she says, disbelieving.
I stare at her. “That’s what…yeah. Yeah, I mean it. I’m not looking for you to make me feel better about it or anything, I just…”
“Zeke. You are not stupid. Oh my God . Did you see the contraption you built to collect us water? You thought of that in half a second. You’ve been so brilliant and inventive surviving out here with me—you’re the ideas person. You’re the one who figures everything out.”
I close my eyes again. It feels so, so good to hear her say that. Just like when she called me clever at The Anchor. And I want to believe it so badly. But I’m not the ideas person. As a kid, I was the tagalong, doing whatever Jeremy and Lyra told me to—whatever it would take to fit in. Until it became clear that I never would, and then I just tried not to mind.
“I’m really not, but it’s cool. I’ve made peace with who I am,” I say. “Velvet trousers, remember? I don’t mind being a bit different.”
I can feel the embarrassed thumping of my heart in the flesh of my wound.
“We don’t need to talk about all this,” I say, forcing myself to open my eyes and look at her.
She’s bracing herself against a wave of nausea that I can almost see moving through her. She shakes her head, frustrated, taking another moment to collect herself.
“Everything you’ve told me about your life,” she says, “it doesn’t sound like you let people down. It sounds like you’ve not found people who make you feel like you’re enough.”
“Nah, I…” I trail off.
Because she’s named it exactly. That quiet sadness in the back of my mind. The certainty that there’s no way to make myself into the right shape to fit in. I don’t remember ever feeling any other way—except lately. With Lexi. As terrifying as life is out here, I’m not straining to live up to something or acting out before I have the chance to disappoint. I don’t get that nagging sense that I’m just not quite right .
She makes me feel at ease.
“That was…deep,” I say, tipping her a look. Trying not to let her see how much she’s shaken me.
“I know,” she says, raising her hands to run her fingers through her hair, beginning to work on some of the tangles. “It’s the wisdom of age.”
“Lexi…”
“Mm?”
“You’re not that old.”
“I feel ancient,” she says, dragging the word out. “Especially right now. I feel like they took eighteen-year-old me and put her through one of those old-fashioned coffee-grinder things.”
“What was eighteen-year-old you like?”
“Sharp. No bullshit. A woman who got things done.”
“Sounds like thirty-one-year-old Lexi.”
“No, no. Thirty-one-year-old Lexi is jaded and insecure and tired.” Her eyelids are drooping.
“Right now thirty-one-year-old Lexi is really dehydrated, which probably isn’t helping,” I say, holding out her thermos. “Drink. And rest.”
“Will you…”
I nod. I know what she’s going to ask. She’s sent me out to check for leaks every couple of hours or so. I haven’t told her about the holes I just stuffed with cotton wool in the ceiling.
“Zeke?” Lexi whispers.
“Mm?”
“You’ve surpassed all my expectations,” she says, her voice fainter now, as if she’s about to fall asleep. “Every single one.”