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“Wha’s Cassel starin’ at?” Rio asks.
“Absolutely nothing,” Jenou says. She sighs. “The care and feeding of drunks. All this way to deal with drunks. I could have stayed home and helped pour my father into his bed. Come on, Cassel, let’s get you to where you won’t wash over the side.”
Rio watches them stagger away and is overwhelmed by a wave of sadness for Jenou. Both Jenou’s parents are heavy drinkers. Rio’s known that since she was eight and witnessed the two of them throwing dinner plates across the dining room. It’s a burden for Jenou.
Jenou leans close to Rio, puts her mouth right up close to her ear, and says, “You’re drunk, honey. Don’t do anything you shouldn’t do.”
“Wha’ should I . . . should not, shouldn’t I do?”
“Okay, I’m coming right back for you,” Jenou says, pointing a warning finger at Rio. “Don’t get washed overboard before I get back.”
“M’be righ’ there,” Rio calls after her friend.
“Uh-huh,” Jenou says, and guides the comatose Kerwin away like she’s leading a blind man.
“Where are they . . . huh . . . ,” Jack says, and sways into Rio, causing her to giggle, which causes him to giggle, and the two of them roar with laughter when a wave sneaks up the port side to slap at them and barely misses.
“Almost got us,” Rio says.
“Nazi wave. Thass wha’ that was,” Jack says.
“I thought Britannia ruled them. The waves.”
“Not tha’ one. Tha’ was a bloody treasonous wave.”
It is the last assault of a sea that is calming by degrees. Rio and Jack lean back against the steel bulkhead and stare blearily out at the convoy around them. A Royal Navy destroyer is a mile off, eternally patrolling for submarines. A second troopship is nearer, in line just astern. The sky is ragged, scudding clouds below a silvery moon, sky and moon both untroubled by the storm below.
“I’ve got . . .” Jack holds the bottle up to see that it has less than an inch of auburn liquid left in it. “That much lef.”
“No more,” Rio says.
Jack upends the bottle, swallows all that remains, and then belatedly says, “Sure you don’t want some?”
He is suddenly standing very close to Rio, or perhaps she’s standing very close to him, close enough that they no longer need to shout.
“You sing . . . good,” Rio says.
“You shoot good,” Jack says. “You shoot, I’ll sing.”
At which point he launches into a largely incomprehensible version of a song Rio has never heard.
“Come, come, come and make eyes at me, down at the old Bull and Bush, la-la-la.”
“Make eyes,” Rio says, and follows it with a snorting laugh. “I don’t even know wha’ tha’ means. Make eyes.”
“Hah!”
“Jenou, she . . . I don’t . . .” Something has gone wrong with her brain and her body, the sober voice buried deep inside her inebriated brain notices with alarm. Her body is way too cold and wet to feel this warm.
Jack turns to her and looks directly into her eyes.
“What. Are. You. Doing? Jack Stafford?” Rio enunciates as carefully as she can.
“Making eyes at you,” Jack says.
Rio is going to laugh but doesn’t. She’s about to give him a playful shove but doesn’t do that either. Instead she feels herself falling toward him, as if some kind of gravity wave is beaming from his suddenly serious eyes.
