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 herfeet 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 womanand 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 ofmad craicspun out at sea. No matter how real it felt. No matter how tight my stomach knots.
5
WILLOW
The first timeI threw up, I blamed the peanuts.
Charleston in September is a humidity you can drink, and I’m old enough to know better than to eat bags of boiled peanuts from the Charleston market, their age and condition mysterious.
But one of the regulars at the market, who often trolls the place for local art, had offered a hundred dollars for something I painted—not a woven basket or a benne wafer or a duck call carved from a shell or whatever other tourist traps were available, butmy art—and he had tossed in a bag of boiled peanuts to sweeten the deal.
Besides the kindness of the gesture, I was weak and starving after a day in the shaded, but not air conditioned, shotgun-style complex. And so I took them and ate them, and by midnight, I was on my knees in my tiny bathroom, forehead against the cool tile and stomach in my throat, promising God or an oyster god if there was one or Poseidon or Bill Murray or whoever needed promises from someone like Willow Abel that I would pray or stop praying…by the end of it I felt like I had no guts or linerinside me and all that was left was a series of desperate promises made.
This time, there are no peanuts to blame.
