All the trash-talking bought them enough time for their saviors to sail closer, coming alongside the docked yacht in the inner harbor. The closer the boat got, the easier it became to read the banner draped over the highest deck. In wide pink-and-green letters, it read:The S.S. Ship-Faced.
A party spanned both the ship’s decks, each filled to the brim with writhing twentysomethings. The lower looked like a dance floor that boasted a preternatural glow—Fletcher squinted, trying to make it out. Ah, that would be a bar draped in rainbow string lights shaped like flip-flops. Upstairs, there must have been a pool because she glimpsed a few foam noodles, a ring floaty shaped like a sprinkled donut with a bite taken out of it, and someone catching some serious height off a diving board, only to belly flop with a tremendous splash.
A passerelle extended between the two boats. For the sake of her stomach, looking down wasn’t an option. If she had, she knew she’d find the starved shark tracking beneath, hoping she lost her balance.
When they made it to the other side, a sunburned crew member in an airbrushed cutoff whooped, “What’s up! You look like you need a drink!”
Understatement of the century.
The glass-bottomed boat teemed with partygoers. Half the guests wore crop tops painted with “I got Ship-faced,” and the otherhalf wore barely anything at all. Neon nylon and sunscreen-slicked skin swirled together. Everyone had a glass in their hand, well on their way to living up to the boat’s name.
Fletcher had barely stepped off the gangway when she spotted a shock of bottle-blond hair atop an all-too-familiar wiry frame. Shirtless, wearing a Speedo, a fanny pack, and an ungodly amount of glitter. Only one person on planet Earth possessed that much self-confidence.
“Ford?” she barely heard herself say over the blaring early-2000s hits.
“Look what the tide washed up!” Ford crooned. He wrapped her in a massive hug, lifting her feet off the ground and spinning her in a circle. Coconut-scented suntan oil smeared across her cheek. With her feet solidly back on the deck, he scanned her top to bottom. “You look like trash.”
In the name of friendship, she would be ignoring that. “What are you doing here?”
“Day drinking. Seychelles, baby!” He slurped through a loopty-loop straw to really drive home his point. “Plus, I got your texts. You have some explaining to do.”
If Fletcher’s brain hadn’t been so busy figuring out how Ford had gotten her middle-of-the-safari panic texts, she would have been mortified by the knowing look he gave Waylon over her shoulder.
“You…got my texts?”
Ford wiggled his phone out of the highlighter-yellow fanny pack. “Yeah. I was, in fact, taking body shots. You know me so well.” He thumbed to their text thread, where Fletcher’s stream of disjointed thoughts bubbled up one after the other. “If you were—and I quote—going to spend the rest of your short life daydreaming about Waylon’s body, I knew there had to besomethinggoing on.”Waylon snorted. “I gave the DJ a lap dance as a bribe to get him to swing this way.”
“The DJ?”
“The DJ is also the captain.”
Duh.
“The yacht has Wi-Fi,” Waylon said. A smile curved his lips. A little teasing, a little too proud for his own good. “The generator must have powered up the router, so your texts could be sent.” He pivoted to Ford. “Can I see these messages?”
“No!” Fletcher shouted. But then, she couldn’t help it. She giggled. Despite everything, laughter fizzed up her throat, giddy and light. She’d never been so glad to have a doomscrolling addiction and friendship-separation anxiety. “Ford, I love you, you little heathen. I’ll buy you lunch for a month. Three months. The rest of your life, I don’t care.”
She smashed her face against his bare chest again, squeezing him tight. Ford’s slurred laugh vibrated through her cheek. “Does that mean you got the promotion?”
“Something like that,” Waylon said.
A petrified screech severed their conversation. Stalking through the crowd of undulating bodies was Melv.
Stomping, spitting mad, and…dripping wet? A party foul had clearly been had. The brown stain of a spilled Jack and Coke ruined the front of his ironed shirt, and he’d apparently been hit by a confetti cannon, because he sparkled in the midday sun.
“Is thatMelvin?” Ford asked, a little too loudly and a lot too drunk.
Melv’s face burned red. “This isn’t over.”
He looked ready to pounce on them, but then Captain DJ’s omniscient voice crackled through the speakers. “Cannonball contest starts on the upper deck in five minutes. Wet T-shirt contest to follow. Get up there, folks!”
“Let’s go!” one of the partiers shouted. She daisy-chained herself to six other girls in matching Technicolor bikinis. The last of them carried a massive foam floaty under her arm, barely managing to control it.
With a slap, her pool noodle smacked Melv in the chest.
He stretched for the railing, but it must have been slippery from the last cannonball splash, and his fingers slid off. Bobbling, Melv flipped over the edge, disappearing into the deep.
Ford hissed a breath through his teeth. “Should we help him?”
