The Unhoneymooners(34)

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BACK NEAR THE BOAT, WE emerge soggy and breathless. Adrenaline dances through me—I want to tell Ethan we should do this every single day of the vacation. But as soon as our masks are pulled up and we are helped from the water, reality returns. Our eyes meet and whatever he was planning to say dies a similar death in his throat.

“That was fun,” I say, simply.

“Yeah.” He peels off the wetsuit vest, handing it to Nick, and then steps forward when he sees I’m struggling with my zipper. I’m shaking because it’s chilly, so I let him unzip me, and work very hard to not notice how big his hands are and how capably he works the stuck zipper free.

“Thanks.” I bend, rummaging in my bag for my dry clothes. I am not charmed by him. I am not. “Where should I change?”

Nick winces. “We only have one bathroom, and it tends to get pretty crowded when we start to turn back and everyone’s cocktails are hitting their bladder. I’d suggest heading down there soon—but you two are welcome to go in together.”

“To . . . gether?” I ask. I look down toward the narrow steps to the bathroom and notice that people are already starting to gather their things to go use it themselves.

“Nothing you haven’t seen before!” Ethan says with a wicked grin.

I send a militia of harmful thoughts at him.

He soon regrets being so cavalier. The bathroom is the size of a broom closet. A very small broom closet with a very slippery floor. We crowd into the soggy space, clutching our clothes to our chest. Down here, it feels like the boat is in the middle of a storm; we are victims of every tiny lurch and lean.

“You first,” he says.

“Why me first? You go first.”

“We can both change and get this over with,” he says. “You face the door, I’ll face the wall.”

I hear the wet splat of his board shorts just as I’m working my bikini bottom down my shivering legs, and am highly aware that Ethan’s butt is probably only inches away from mine. I experience a moment of pure terror when I imagine how mortifying it would be for our cold, wet butt cheeks to touch.

A little panicky, I scramble for my towel and slip, my right foot coming out from under me in a shallow pool of water near the sink. My foot hooks on something, Ethan shouts in surprise, and I realize that something was Ethan’s shin. After his hand slaps loudly against the wall, he loses his balance, too.

My back hits the floor, and with a splat, Ethan lands on top of me. If there’s pain, I am too distracted by the chaos to register it, and there is a horrified beat of silence where we both realize what’s happened: we are completely naked, wet, and clammy, and a tangle of naked arms and legs and parts in the most mortifying game of Twister anyone has ever experienced.

“Oh my God, get off me!” I shriek.

“What the fuck, Olive? You knocked me over!”

He attempts to stand, but the floor is slippery and in motion, which means he keeps falling back down on me as he scrambles to find footing. Once we’re up, it’s clear we both want to die of mortification. We give up on the facing the door or facing the wall in favor of speed; there is no way for us to do this without flashes of butt and boobs and all manner of dangly things, but at this point, we don’t care.

Ethan scrambles to pull up a clean pair of shorts, but it takes me about four times as long to stutter-pull my clothing up over my wet body. Thankfully, he’s dressed relatively quickly and turns away, pressing his forehead against the wall, eyes closed as I wrestle with my bra and shirt.

“I want you to know,” I tell him as I tug it down my torso, “and I’m sure you hear this a lot, but that was by far the worst sexual experience of my life.”

“I feel like we should have used protection.”

I turn to confirm what I’ve heard in his voice—repressed laughter again—and catch him smiling, still facing the wall.

“You can turn around now,” I say. “I’m decent.”

“Are you ever really, though?” he asks, turning and blushing and grinning at me. It’s a lot to take in.

I wait for the annoyed reaction, but it doesn’t arrive. Instead, I realize with surprise that seeing his real smile aimed my way feels like getting a paycheck. “You make a good point.”

He seems equally surprised that I haven’t snarked back at him, and reaches past me to unlock the door. “I’m feeling queasy. Let’s get out of here.”

We emerge, red faced for reasons that are immediately misinterpreted, and Ethan gets a high-five from a couple of men we’ve never met. He follows me to the bar, where I order a margarita and he orders a ginger drink to help his stomach.

One glance at him tells me that he wasn’t kidding about feeling queasy—he looks green. We find seats inside, out of the sun but near a window, and he leans forward, pressing his head to the pane, trying to breathe.

I blame this moment right here, because it creates a tiny fracture in his role as nemesis. A true nemesis doesn’t show weakness, and for sure, when I reach out to rub his back, a true nemesis wouldn’t lean into it, moaning in quiet relief. He wouldn’t shift so that I could reach him more easily, and he certainly wouldn’t scoot down the bench and rest his head in my lap, staring up at me in gratitude when I gently rake my fingers through his hair, soothing.

Ethan and I are starting to build more of these good moments than bad; it sends the balance swinging into an unfamiliar direction.