Float Plan(8)

“Anna.” A gentle squeeze.

“Yes. Let’s go.”

The walk from the beach to the resort is a drunken kaleidoscope, scattered bits of need and tumbling shards of shame. My back pressed against the wall of an out-of-business clothing shop with Chris’s mouth on my neck and his fingers inside my bikini bottom, making me gasp. Running. Losing a flip-flop. Tumbling backward onto his bed. The feel of his mouth, his tongue, on all the places that haven’t been touched in months by anyone but me. Hot, sticky, mindless want.

My legs are still trembling when Chris gets out of bed, naked, to get a condom from his carry-on. His phone vibrates on the bedside table as he tears open the foil packet. The screen is alive with a photo of him kissing a pretty blonde dressed in a wedding gown. Shit.

“Anna, wait.”

My name no longer sounds beautiful and, God, I am so gullible. Ben never lied to me or played games. So it never occurred to me that Chris might be married, or that it was even a question I needed to ask. If I had, would he have told me the truth?

I snatch my dress off the hotel room floor and yank it over my head while Chris stands in the bathroom doorway, looking from me to his ringing phone and back, as if he still has a choice. As if there is anything he could say that would convince me to stay. My bikini is lost in the bedding, so I leave it behind with my one remaining flip-flop and an enormous piece of my dignity.

I glance back at Chris as I step through the doorway. “Go fuck yourself.”

I stumble through the resort grounds to the end of the dock where my dinghy is tied. I climb down a ladder to the little boat, where I sit for … I have no idea how long, listening miserably to the happy sounds of an island not ready to sleep. I ran away from Fort Lauderdale because I wasn’t ready to move on, yet threw myself at the first man who asked. I feel dirty. Unfaithful.

I’m so, so sorry, Ben. Please forgive me.

I want to row out to the boat, pull up the anchor, and sail away from this place, but I’m not sober enough for any of that. And Bimini isn’t really the problem. Instead I curl up on the floor of the dinghy and cry.





question mark (4)





I wake in the V-berth of the Alberg as if last night was nothing more than a bad dream, except there’s a spike of pain splitting my skull and I have no recollection of how I ended up in my own bed. Shifting the comforter aside, I discover I’m wearing yesterday’s sundress. The soles of my feet are filthy, my mouth tastes like I might have vomited, and my bikini is completely gone. I can remember my walk of shame and crying in the dinghy, but beyond that, the night ends in a question mark.

I’m relishing the small relief of being safe when I hear the cabin floor creak and catch a whiff of … coffee? I roll over to see a dark-haired man leaning against the galley sink, drinking from Ben’s favorite Captain America mug. Part of me wants to leap from my bed and snatch it away because that mug belongs to Ben, but the bigger, more rational part of me is trying to figure out why there is a stranger on the boat. He’s not riffling through cabinets like a thief searching for valuables. He looks relaxed, comfortable, as though he was invited. Did I invite him?

The scene jumps to the next level of unexpected when I notice that the lower half of his right leg—from his knee down into his black Adidas sneaker—is bionic and complicated-looking. Not flesh and bone.

I have no idea what’s happening.

“Um … hello?”

He turns in my direction and, under any other circumstances, waking up to this man’s face would probably be a religious experience. He looks like he should be playing guitar and singing in pubs, with dark just-fucked hair and a scruffy jawline. “Oh good,” he says. “You’re awake.”

“Who are you?”

“You don’t remember?” He touches his hand to his heart, covering up the crackled gold letters that spell CIARRAí across the chest of his faded green T-shirt. He’s older than I am by a handful of years, but his grin is pure ten-year-old boy with a frog behind his back. And his accent sounds Irish. “Now you’ve gone and shattered my heart.”

I sit up and swing my legs over the edge of my bed. After my narrow miss with a married man, there’s no way I would’ve had sex with a different stranger. I think. “Did we…?”

“Christ, no.” He pours a second mug of coffee. Mine, with flowers and the pink A for Anna. “You were drunker than a monkey, but I did appreciate the offer.”

“Oh my God.”

“I’m joking.” He closes the space between us and offers me the mug. Accepting a drink—even a caffeinated one—from a strange man is not a mistake I should make twice, but the coffee smells good, and I desperately need it. I take it.

“The long and short of it is this—I found you passed out in your dinghy and it wouldn’t have been right to leave you there with your bare arse for God and all of Bimini to see.” His accent grows more pronounced as he picks up speed. “So, I rowed you out here to your boat and helped you to bed, then realized I was stranded unless I took your dinghy, in which case you’d be stranded. I slept on deck. I hope you don’t mind that I borrowed a sleeping bag.”

As if everything about last night wasn’t already deeply embarrassing, this man has seen my ass. He also saved me from … well, who knows what could have happened while I was unconscious and half-naked. Someone else, someone less honorable, could have found me first. He rescued me from that possibility—and my own stupidity.