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“I see,” Joseph said. “Well, I’m not going to argue that. I think it’s great. What is it, though, that you want to do?”
“I have no idea,” I said, starting to laugh. As I laughed, the tears started rolling down my face. I was equal parts confused, scared, and relieved to not have a plan anymore. I knew I was embarking on an adventure all on my own, but I had never done it before and wasn’t sure how to pull it off.
“Does Jessie know?” he asked.
I whimpered. “I don’t think me and Jessie are friends anymore.
“Don’t cry,” he said. “You’ve fought before. She’ll be okay. She always is.”
“No, you don’t understand,” I said. “I just said something really awful to her—and it felt good!”
Just then, the phone beeped. Signal lost. I waved it in the air, trying to get signal back, but to no avail. I tucked it back into my purse and tried to remember what I had been doing when the call came in.
I remembered that I had been heading toward the cabins to apologize to Jessie. I took a deep breath to compose myself before heading to her room to take it all back.
Then I realized something else…
I didn’t want to take it back. I had meant every word of it, and, to be honest, it felt good to finally say it out loud. I knew now, definitively, that it was time to end my friendship with Jessie for good. If there was any shred of a relationship left between the two of us, it wasn’t worth trying to salvage anymore. This trip may not have been everything Jessie thought it would be for me, but it had exceeded my wildest expectations. I had grown as a person since boarding the boat—and I knew I had Matteo to thank.
I rushed to the kitchen to talk to Matteo. He was tired, making marks on a clipboard as he looked through the coolers.
“What are you doing?” I asked.
“Inventory,” he sighed. “We lost some things in the storm. We will have to replace them when we stop at Montego Bay.”
I nodded.
“Can we talk?” I asked.
“What is there to talk about?” he asked me, coldly. I could tell he was still angry with me about the interaction with Jessie.
“What she said—you know what she meant, right?” I asked. “I told you about the game. She thinks I’m playing. I’m not.”
“Aren’t you?” he asked. “It’s hard for me to tell with you sometimes.”
“What do you mean?” I asked. “I’ve always been honest with you.”
I scooted into the kitchen and slumped myself into a stool by the prep table. He glanced over at me, sighed, and shook his head.
“You always say Jessie pushes you to bad behaviors,” he said. “You blame her for all of the negative ways you act toward the service, and then you let her come in here and say those things to my crew. When I tried to stop her, you wouldn’t let me! How much of this can we really blame on her if you don’t seem to want things to change?”
“I came here to tell you I’m ending my friendship with her,” I said.
“And you’ve said it before,” he said. “I don’t think you ever really will, veloce. Now, please leave my kitchen. I have work to do.”
Chapter 17
I was back to being holed up in my cabin, not wanting to see anyone in the outside world. By now I had a pretty firm grasp on chef jargon, having seen so many reruns of the same competitive cooking competition they had come full circle and now started over. I stared at TV-Chef-Matteo on the screen and groaned.
I didn’t want to think about him anymore. The romance with Matteo had become such a disaster that it pained me to even think about him. I wanted to weep every time I even heard his name.
I reached for the remote and flipped through the channels, but nothing caught my attention. I shut the TV off instead and laid in near silence on the bed, alone with my thoughts.
This felt like a never-ending vacation. I was so tired of being on the boat, but also not ready to go home. It felt like there was nothing but stress waiting for me at either location.
My phone chimed, and I jumped.
“We must be nearing signal again,” I mumbled to myself, reaching for the phone on the nightstand.
