Reckless Girls(12)

I laugh at that, and Nico grins, throwing an arm around my shoulders and pulling me in closer. “Oh, totally love at first sight. For me at least.”

I roll my eyes even as I smile. “He’s lying. We met while I was working at this restaurant with the ugliest uniforms you have ever seen. No man has ever fallen instantly in love with a woman in khaki shorts.”

“I did,” Nico insists. “I went back every night for two weeks just to see you in those khaki shorts.”

“Of course, my coworkers and I felt sorry for him because as you can see, he’s super homely,” I add, making Brittany and Amma laugh, as Nico jokingly jostles me.

“Anyway,” Nico goes on, “I finally sacked up and asked about her, and she came to my table, and that was that.”

“We’ve pretty much been together ever since,” I say, smiling at the memory of that first night, remembering the thrill I’d felt when Nico slipped his hand in mine, that sense that, finally, I was anchored to something. To someone.

Brittany is still smiling at us, her eyes bright. “I love everything about this,” she says. “Meant to be.”

I lean my head on Nico’s shoulder, feeling the familiar, solid warmth of him.

Meant to be.

I wasn’t sure if I completely believed in that kind of thing. Fate, destiny. I think Nico walked into my life at the right time, and I think he liked that I needed rescuing, that he could offer me something I wanted so much. Not just another person to share my life with, but adventure, new experiences.

Nico continues, “The first time I saw those sad eyes of hers, I was a goner.”

I lift my head. “Sad?”

He’s never said that to me before. He usually jokes that it was my bright red hair that caught his attention, the pale milkiness of my skin.

“Mm-hmm,” he says now, taking a glug from his bottle of water. “Every time I came in, even when you were smiling, you just looked really sad. I wanted to know why, I guess.”

Brittany is still smiling warmly, but I don’t like the picture he’s painting, the sad girl moping around a seafood joint, waiting for the right guy to ask about her tragedy.

“I mean, yeah, that was a rough time, but I wasn’t exactly going around crying,” I say, scooting away a little. “I was holding it together despite … all of that shit.”

“What shit?”

Amma is watching us now, her elbows on the table. “My mom got sick five years ago,” I say. “Cancer. I’d dropped out of college to take care of her, and then once she was gone, going back to school was a lot of work, and—”

“Was she your only family?”

Brittany’s brows are drawn close together, and there’s something in her expression that tells me she actually cares about my answer.

“Kind of?” I shrug, uncomfortable, my neck going hot. “My parents got divorced when I was eleven, after my dad decided to become a living cliché and knock up his secretary.”

“Jesus.” Amma exhales, and I nod.

“Right. So the two of us moved to California for a fresh start while he started his brand-new family in Nebraska. And when Mom got sick, me and my dad weren’t talking, so yeah. I guess she was it for me.”

I don’t tell them about the phone call I made to my father, close to the end. Money was running out, Mom couldn’t even eat anymore—her bones had started jutting out beneath her papery skin—and her insurance was refusing to cover in-home hospice care.

I don’t tell them how calm his voice was on the other end of the phone.

Your mother made a choice, Lux. She didn’t want me in her life. Neither did you. So now you both need to live with that.

Just the memory of it—of the shame and the rage and the total disbelief that he could be that cruel, that I have that man’s DNA in my blood—makes my stomach clench.

“Anyway,” I say, making myself smile, “it sucked, but it all led me here, you know? To Nico and the Susannah. If I’d stayed in college, I would’ve had a B.A. in English lit and probably still ended up as a waitress, only with a lot of student debt.”

“Sailing to a deserted island does sound better than that,” Amma says with a nod, and I turn away, grateful that she’s found a way to graciously end the conversation, but still feeling more than a little raw.

Through the small cabin window, I can see that the night sky has grown dark, and Nico stands up, stretching. “I’ll take first watch.”

Brittany looks up. “Watch?”

Nico gives her a smile that I’ve seen before, the one that’s a little condescending, not showing any teeth, his dimples deepening. I’ve never liked that smile, and it’s especially unsettling from this perspective. Suddenly, I catch a glimpse of what he must’ve been like before, back when he wasn’t Nico the Cool Boat Guy, but rather Nicholas Johannsen III, growing up in La Jolla with his lawyer dad, his Botoxed mom, his fancy prep school uniform, and his expensive car.

It’s a jarring reminder that despite living together in tight quarters for the last six months, there’s still a lot that I don’t know about my boyfriend.

“We can’t just all go to sleep,” he tells Brittany. “Someone has to keep an eye out.”

“But…” She gestures at the radio panel, the radar that sits on a little shelf jutting out from the wall between the sleeping cabin and the main galley. “It’s the twenty-first century. Isn’t everything basically done digitally now?”