Total pages in book: 135
Estimated words: 128211 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 641(@200wpm)___ 513(@250wpm)___ 427(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 128211 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 641(@200wpm)___ 513(@250wpm)___ 427(@300wpm)
Before heading to the beach, I popped down to Leah’s cabin, knocking softly and sitting on the edge of her bed in the dark room.
“How are you feeling?”
“Getting better,” she said, wincing as she maneuvered her way to sitting up. She took a sip of the electrolyte drink next to her. “Although I’m absolutely devastated to be missing this beach picnic.”
“I did promise you I’d let you get off the boat as soon as we had one, but…”
“Yeah. Throwing up on the guests probably wouldn’t make for a good tip.”
I smirked, squeezing her knee.
“Y’all okay?” she asked.
God, no, I wanted to reply, but I forced a smile, instead. “We’re just fine. You rest up and we’ll all be back to normal soon.”
“I feel awful, Em.”
“I know. But it’s okay. I promise.”
I patted her leg, ready to tell her to get some rest and I’d check in on her later, but she stopped me.
“Em?”
“Yeah?”
“What’s the story with you and Finn?”
My gut churned. “What do you mean?”
“Well, you guys used to date, and now you’re here together again, but he’s with Gisella… and I don’t know, I just feel like there’s some animosity there. Was it a bad breakup? Were you together long?”
I blew out a breath. I shouldn’t have been surprised that the whole crew knew about me and Finn now, the way gossip travels on floating tin cans like this. I was fairly certain the producers had a hand in the wildfire spread of our past, too.
“It was only four months,” I said, though my body betrayed how casual I made those words sound.
“A lot can happen in four months. Especially on a boat.”
I nodded.
“Why did you end it?”
“I didn’t want to,” I confessed softly. “I thought we were leaving the boat together. We talked about it all the time — where we’d work next, how we’d spend some time off traveling together before we took our next job. I had a friend in the Bahamas who hooked us up with her captain. We had all these plans…”
I shook my head, the pain so fresh even two years later that I half-expected to look down and see blood gushing from a wound.
“But the last night of the season, he told me he was going home to Dublin to open a restaurant,” I said, swallowing. “So… I guess I’d never really been a part of his plans. He let me think it, let me live in my delusional fantasy until the very last moment.”
“Oh, my God… why would he do that?”
“To have a little fun on a boat and not have to face the consequences, I guess.” I shrugged. “It was just a boatmance to him. I was stupid for thinking it was more.”
Even as the words slid from my lips, I didn’t believe them. I’d spent two years trying to get myself to face reality — that I’d meant nothing to Finn. But he’d played my heart so expertly that I still wanted to believe he cared about me, even when I had all the proof that he didn’t.
“He never let on that it was just a fling to him?”
At that, I let out a soft, painful laugh. “He was a mastermind,” I whispered, meeting her gaze. “I swore he loved me. Everyone else on that boat swore it, too.”
That admission had everything inside me going sharp and sour, the memory of how broken I’d been when I’d walked off that boat slamming into me like a cold block of ice. I’d thrown myself into my next charter, desperate to fill my time and stay busy so I wouldn’t think about how much I missed him. I got a new piercing. I got a new tattoo. I drank and partied with my new crew. I tried to build a new life without him.
None of it made me feel any better.
Eventually, I moved on — but not in the “I’m over him! I’m healed!” sort of way. I moved on because time gave me no choice. I moved on because I put one foot in front of the other, and eventually, weeks turned to months, and then to years.
And now here we were, two years between us, and all it took was one look at him for me to spiral.
I asked my mom once what it was that kept her and dad together all this time. They’d been college sweethearts, and it just seemed like a miracle to me that they could survive that youth, and then graduating, jobs, marriage, buying a house, having a kid.
She’d looked at me with a small smile as she washed dishes and said, “Some people come into our lives and then fade out, and we miss them, but not in a desperate way. We think of them fondly, but we can go on living without them. But others come into our lives and something inside us clicks into place, like a missing gear that has the power to make our whole system work properly. We can’t let those people go — even when it gets hard, even when common sense says we should. They’re a part of us. We will go to battle for them without a second thought. We’ll lay down our own lives for them, no questions asked.” She’d shrugged then, her eyes that mine mirrored swinging my way with a twinkle. “Some loves are inevitable — meant to be. And when you stumble upon that kind of love, it becomes an impenetrable force. Nothing can break it — not trial or time or distance. It just… survives.”