Float Plan(7)

After lunch I buy a second beer and step down from the deck onto the sand. All around me, people are together. Families. Couples. Groups of college students who probably came over on the fast ferry. I wade out into the water and pretend it’s totally fine that I’m alone on a tropical island in the middle of a sparkling ocean.

As waves wash against my shins, a brown-skinned boy no older than eight or nine, wearing dripping brown cutoffs that hang around his narrow hips, approaches me with a fistful of plastic dive sticks. “Will you throw these for us?”

Behind him, other kids watch me with expectant faces. One little girl in a bright pink bathing suit hops on one foot, trying to keep her balance on the shifting sand. Another boy bobs his head, as if willing me to say yes.

“Sure.” I take the sticks, step a little deeper into the water, and fling them as hard as I can. The whole pack of children shriek and race into the water. They dive under, their feet churning the surface. One boy comes up with two. A girl with one. The first boy has the remaining three, held high above his head like a trophy. It reminds me of when my sister and I would dive for pennies at the bottom of motel pools when we went on vacation. The winner was the one who collected the most and Rachel almost always won.

“Again, please?” the boy asks.

“Ellis!” a woman calls from a nearby blanket. “Don’t be bothering the lady. She doesn’t need to entertain you.”

“I don’t mind,” I say, accepting the sticks from Ellis. I throw them again, and while the kids are thrashing around in the surf, I head back up to CJ’s for another beer.

At the order counter there are three white men dressed in pastel fishing shirts, swim trunks, and visors. The light-blue-shirted one sees me take a beer from the cooler. Of the three, he is closest to my age. He flashes a wide grin and says, “Let me get that for you.”

And suddenly I’m incredibly angry at Ben. I know he tried to manage his depression. When we met, he’d been struggling most of his life to find a mix of medications that worked. But if he was suicidal, why didn’t he get help? Why didn’t he tell me? This was supposed to be us, together, not me on my own.

Fuck you, Ben Braithwaite.

I haven’t picked up a guy in a long time, but it’s ridiculously easy. All I have to do is hand him the bottle of beer, smile, and say, “Thank you so much. I’m Anna.”

“Nice to meet you, Anna. I’m Chris.” His nose is peeling, freckled, and really fucking adorable. In fact, he’s covered in pale brown freckles. “This is Doug.” He gestures toward the guy in the pink shirt. Oldest. Mid-to-late thirties. Wedding band. “And Mike.” Yellow shirt. Thinning hair. Hot in a generic dumb guy sort of way.

ChrisDougMike. They’re pretty interchangeable, like most of the guys who used to come into the pirate bar. But I like the soft, knee-wobbling way Chris says my name. And there’s a freckle on the bottom edge of his lower lip that dangles like tempting fruit. Also, I’m a little tipsy. He sees me staring at his mouth and gives me a cocky grin.

“So, what brings you to Bimini?” he asks as we move to a picnic table on the deck. He sits beside me.

“Sailboat.”

He laughs. “Just you?”

I nod. “Yep. I left Fort Lauderdale on Thursday.”

“Wait.” His blue eyes narrow as he studies me. “Were you on a blue boat on the river?”

“Yep.”

“I knew I’d seen that blond hair before.” He runs his fingers down the length of one of my braids and gives the end a gentle tug. The gesture is prematurely intimate, but we’re already on a collision course. “I waved when we passed you.”

“Oh, right,” I say, smiling. “You were the reason I had to wait ten minutes at the Third Avenue Bridge so they could let some traffic pass.”

“Sorry.” His twisty little smirk says he’s not sorry at all. “I hope it doesn’t change your opinion of me.”

“What do you think my opinion is?”

“Well.” He takes a long pull from his bottle and I watch his Adam’s apple move as he swallows. “You were interested enough to let me buy you a beer. You’ve already contemplated kissing me.” My face gets warm and the smirk reappears. “You think I have potential, so I don’t want to mess up my chances.”

“At what?”

“Whatever you’ll let me get away with.”

The afternoon slips away as we take turns buying rounds of beer. ChrisDougMike are all Canadians who have jobs in sales—car dealership, liquor distributor, insurance company—and came to Bimini to catch wahoo. They talk about rods and reels, retelling fishing stories I won’t remember tomorrow, and Chris inches closer and closer. I stop caring about talking when our bare knees make contact beneath the table. Our elbows touch. Arms. Shoulders. As if we’re melting into each other.

At some point, Doug and Mike go down to the beach, leaving us alone. Chris leans over, his lips grazing my neck, my ear, setting off a shower of sparks under my skin.

“You want to get out of here?” he whispers. “I have a room.”

For the first time since he died, I don’t think about what Ben would want. He’s not the little voice inside my head urging me to go, go, go. And he’s definitely not in the warm ache between my thighs. Chris’s callused palm slides under the hem of my sundress, stroking the inside of my knee.