Float Plan(4)

* * *



The night we met, he was sitting at the end of the bar, a nautical chart book spread out in front of him and a bottle of Red Stripe beside his sun-stained arm. I didn’t know yet that it was a chart book. I only knew that it was not normal for someone to set up shop in a pirate-themed restaurant where the waitresses were dressed like tavern wenches.

Carla, my best friend, was slicing limes as I came on shift. The daytime staff was supposed to leave the bar fully stocked for the night crew—a favor we returned at closing—but she always left the garnish prep until the last minute.

“What’s with the architect?” I picked up a paring knife and began cutting a lemon into wedges, even though it was her job. Usually I worked the floor with the other waitresses, but I’d been covering for Denise, who was out on maternity leave.

“It’s a map,” Carla said. “He’s sailing around the world or something. I don’t know. He’s cute, but I stopped listening. He’d be perfect for you, though.”

“What? Why?”

She shoulder-bumped me. “Because you, Anna Beck, are in desperate need of a little seaman in your life.”

“Oh my God.” I cracked up laughing and glanced over to make sure he hadn’t heard. His focus was on the chart book as though nothing else in the room existed. “You are the worst.”

Carla leaned over and kissed my cheek. “But you love me, right?”

“I’d love you more if you stayed to do the oranges.”

“I have a date and I smell like a beer tap exploded in my face … because a beer tap exploded in my face,” she said, stuffing the lime wedges into the garnish caddy. “So I’m going to have to take my chances with your love.”

“Should I wait up?” I shared an apartment with Carla and two other waitresses from the restaurant. Like flight attendant crash pads, the apartment mostly served as a place to sleep and I don’t think all four of us were ever there at the same time.

“I wouldn’t,” she said with a grin.

“Don’t forget to use a condom!” I called after her, but Carla was impossible to embarrass. She blew me a kiss as she left, calling back, “I plan on using several!”

Lemon wedges complete, I dried my hands and worked my way down the bar, checking on customers. Introducing myself. Pouring fresh beers. Finally I reached map guy. “Ready for another drink?”

“I’m good, thanks,” he said, his concentration fixed on the chart book in front of him. But he glanced up, and our eyes met. His were dark brown and soft, like you could tumble into them and land safely. “Oh, uh, yeah. I guess I’m having another Red Stripe.”

“Okay, then.”

“Please,” he added as I turned toward the cooler, and that one polite word did me in. It sounds ridiculous, improbable, and so patently absurd that I could fall in love with someone at first sight. But when I returned to him with a fresh bottle of beer, he gave me my very first Ben Braithwaite fuck-me grin—completely oblivious to its knee-weakening effect—and I knew right then he was going to be part of my world.

“I’m Anna, by the way.”

“Ben.” He reached across the bar to shake my hand. Carla was not wrong. He was cute in a boyish surfer-dude way. Definitely my type. His caramel-colored hair hung almost to his shoulders and looked so soft that I wanted to run my fingers through it.

Instead I gestured at the chart, which had a pencil line running from Florida to one of the islands in the Bahamas. “Whatcha working on there, Ben?”

“I just bought an old boat, an Alberg,” he said, and his face lit up like a kid on Christmas morning. “It needs a bunch of work, but my plan is to fix it up and sail around the— Um, someone down the bar is trying to get your attention.”

“Oops. I work here, don’t I? Hold that thought. I’ll be back.”

He smiled, but those dark eyes were serious. “I’m not going anywhere.”

That was the thing about Ben. He had no guile, no game. He was always earnest and sweet, and from the very beginning he offered me his whole heart.



* * *



The sky is dark when I reach Bimini, the pink-and-gold sunset long gone below the horizon. I hate sailing into an unfamiliar harbor in the dark, but I have no one to blame but myself. Nosing the boat to the wind, I roll up the jib and lower the mainsail. After thirteen hours at sea, my body is sore. My face feels as if it’s been stretched, burned by both sun and wind. And after taking down my shorts twice in the middle of the ocean to pee into the scupper drain, I’m ready for a hot shower.

Using Ben’s spotlight, I scan the water for navigational markers as I approach the channel that cuts between North and South Bimini. It’s hard to see anything in the dark and there is very little ambient light coming off the islands. The Alberg stutters when the keel drags along the bottom and my heart stutters along with it.

“No!” I throw the tiller over, trying to steer in the direction of what I hope is the middle of the channel, but the boat comes to a complete stop. “I am not running aground right now!”

I shift the engine into reverse, hoping to back myself out of this mess, but nothing happens. The sound that escapes me is a cross between hysterical laughter and sobbing. I am so close to land that I could jump out of the boat and wade ashore.