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I settled for a small amount of water instead.
The girl rolled again, and I could hear the sound of her skin clinging to the bottom of the inflated raft. I thought about how she was probably used to silk sheets and that kind of shit and almost laughed out loud. I shifted back towards the opening because she looked like she might wake up, and I didn’t want her freaking out on me again. I sat back down and watched as she opened her eyes and looked right at me.
She had really nice eyes. I mean, just fucking fantastic – all dark brown and deep and really wide open, like if you looked into them you could fall in or get lost or something – and she was staring right at me. My own reaction to her gaze actually surprised me more than her eyes themselves.
She sat up and pushed herself against the backside of the raft, as far away from me as she could get. Not that it was all that far – the raft was only a ten-footer, so you’re never very far from anything on it. Her eyes stayed on me for a moment, and then she took in the rest of her surroundings.
When she looked away, I wanted to go over to her and turn her back so she was looking at me again. I didn’t do it or anything; it was just weird that I wanted to.
She started to say something, but her voice was all scratchy when she tried to talk. She raised her hand up to her throat and coughed a couple of times before she tried again.
“What happened?”
“My ship sank,” I said, completely unnecessarily.
“How did I get here?” she asked. “The last thing I remember is trying to get up on the deck, but when I did, there was a big wave. I fell in the water.”
“Yeah,” I said, nodding. “I pulled you out.”
“I don’t re
member that,” she said.
“You were half-drowned and unconscious,” I told her.
“Where’s everyone else?”
I shrugged.
“Are they…?” Her eyes got all wide again.
“I don’t have any idea,” I told her. “I’m going to see if I can spot any of the other lifeboats.”
“Did everyone else get in one?”
“I just told you, I have no fucking idea!” I snapped. I hadn’t really meant to, but I felt like absolute shit. I really needed a drink, and I really didn’t want to be talking about this. I tried to calm my voice down a bit. “Now stop with the twenty questions.”
She pulled back and just stared at me again with her mouth hanging open. Fucking high society bitch. She had probably never heard a real f-bomb before. She had better get used to it.
I pulled the canopy back a bit more and got hit with a decent sized trickle of rainwater overflowing from the gutter system.
“Damnit!”
I yanked off my waterlogged shirt and tossed it off to the side. I would need to remember to hang it up, or it would never be dry. It was bad enough my shirt was wet, but wasting the water was going to come back and haunt me later. Landon would have fucking killed me for wasting water under these conditions. I wondered if I could somehow get it out of the shirt.
I heard a gasp behind me and immediately regretted not just keeping the soggy shirt on.
“Wow, your arms are…um…” the girl stammered at me. “And your back…”
I felt my whole body go rigid and my hands clench into fists.
“What?” I snarled, glaring back at her over my shoulder. If the prissy bitch had a problem with my body, she could fucking keep it to herself or go overboard.
“You just…um…look really strong.”
“Oh.” I didn’t know how to respond to that. I thought she was talking about the scars. Sailing takes strength, but I was built up long before I started sailing. John Paul made sure I still worked out a lot to keep me in shape and make up for the poison I drank. Our professional lives might not require it anymore, but John Paul’s favorite saying was still “Strong people live longer.”
I lifted the canopy up the rest of the way and squinted out over the sea. I wondered if a pair of Ray Bans was included in the survival kits. I shaded my eyes with my hand and scanned the horizon again.
