CHAPTER TEN
The next morning, Sasha headed out on deck.
“Mornin’, Mr. Smee,” a pirate greeted her as he was scrubbing the wood planks.
“Morning.” She stepped around the man’s work, not wanting to walk through where he’d just been cleaning. That was just rude. It had been weird waking up in the closet of a pirate ship. It had been weirder wandering down to the cook’s mess hall to get coffee and toast with butter on it for breakfast.
It was even weirder that all the pirates were nice to her. They all greeted her like they knew her.I am the boss’s favorite suck-up to them, after all. And maybe gay lover? Lordy, I’m sure there are volumes of that all over the internet.She had taken her little tin mug up to the deck to find the captain.
Because as much as this felt like the world’s weirdest bed and breakfast, she was anxious.
Captain Hook was standing up by the aft of the ship along the starboard side, staring at the island, his flesh and blood hand folded at his back. She stood beside him and waited.
And waited.
Andwaited.
“Do I need to insert a quarter?” She sipped her coffee.
“Very funny.”
“I dunno, I figured maybe you were a pulp comic or something. Had to pay to get the next issue.” She smirked. “Sorry. Not in character. I’ll get better at that.”
“I highly doubt that.”
“I’ll try my best.”
“That I expect you will.” He tapped his hook on the wooden railing. “Peter Pan is still alive, or the story would have ended. I do not know about your sister. It can be a draw if you both die. He may seek to kill you to keep the score at zero.”
“I was going to ask.” At least he offered the information, she supposed. If he was telling the truth. “What do we do next?”
“You have a choice to make today, my dear. We may either do this story the long way or the short way.”
“Like, abridge it?”
“Mm. In a manner.”
Sasha tried to recall everything she could about the Peter Pan novel. “Well, we haven’t met Tiger Lilly or any of the extremely racist depictions of the ‘natives’ yet.” She cringed. “Can we skip that? Or at least change them to be not so glaringly offensive?”
“You’re writing this, not me.”
“Yeah but I’m not trying to. It’s not a conscious effort.”
“I recommend you not be racist, then.” He smiled as if it were the most obvious thing in the world. “Then we won’t have an issue.”
“I’m not the—this isn’t my book!” She threw up her hands. “J.M. Barrie was the guy who wrote ‘redskins’ living in wigwams, smoking peace pipes, and speaking in broken English, while living on a Caribbean island for some inexplicable reason.”
Hook was cackling in laughter. “You’re so upset.”
“Because it isn’t—” There was no point in arguing with him. She sighed. “Never mind.”
He put an arm around her shoulder and pulled her into his side. “Calm down, darling. I’m accusing you of nothing. Humans arestupid, hateful things. And your ability to think spitefully for whatever reason knows no bounds. You are always labeling groups aslesserandother. The target group is always changing and evolving. This story simply has products of a time when you simply had a few more acceptable groups oflessers.”
“What a horrible way to think about it.”
“Villain.” Leaning down, he kissed the top of her head.
It was such a strange gesture from him, she didn’t quite know what to do with herself at first.
