I turn from the throttle and sit down next to her. The boat’s moving straight for a while and the monitors will beep if anything appears within a thousand nautical miles. Right now, aside from some shipping containers, we’re utterly alone.
“Careful. You ask me about mine and I’ll ask you about yours.”
“I don’t have any bad scars like that.”
“I don’t mean scars on your skin.”
She smiles slightly and shakes her head. “Those scars stay hidden.”
“You keep a lot hidden, don’t you?”
She looks at me and I want to admit it. I want to tell her that I know who she is, and on some level, I think she already understands why I’ve been keeping her so close. I want to admit everything to her, but that isn’t the life I get to live. My world is built on lies and half-truths, and if I want to survive, especially with this new threat growing back on Saint Parras, I need to be extremely careful.
“I had a hard childhood,” she says finally and I wait for her to elaborate. She stares thoughtfully at the waves for a minute. Finally, she continues. “I bounced around a lot. I didn’t have much, just my sister.” She doesn’t look at me as she sayssisterand I try not to show my surprise. That’s a slip, a mistake, but she keeps going, committed now. “We were really close when we were young. I think she was the only person that ever loved me. My father was distant, almost cold, and my mother tried really hard to make everyone happy, but I don’t know if it was ever enough. We struggled a lot, my sister and I, but we weren’t, you know—”
“Abused?”
“No, nothing like that. We weren’t hit or whatever. It was subtler than that. My dad wasn’t good at showing his emotions, if he had any, and sometimes I wondered if he really loved anyone at all or if he was good at faking it.”
“That must’ve been difficult.”
“I know it sounds lame, like, oh, daddy didn’t love me, but it was more than that. It was neglect.”
“Love is important, pet. Attention is important. You need to feel like your parents care about you, otherwise—” I shrug like there are no words for it.
But I know what happens. I met what happens first-hand.
Lucy is what happens.
And now, maybe, Kaye.
“Anyway, I survived. Maybe not without scars, but I hold myself together with spit and duct tape and luck. I escaped as soon as I could and came out here, and now here I am, on a boat with you.”
I laugh and nudge against her and she grins back. There’s more she’s not saying, but sometimes it’s better if those things are left unspoken. Pain can stay buried under the skin for years and years only to resurface with the right words, the right moment, and ruin all the hard work that went into burying it in the first place.
I change the subject. It’s easy getting lost in conversation with her. We talk about other things, safe things, like movies and TV. We have similar tastes in shows and stuff like that, and the hours flow past easily. “I didn’t peg you for a reader,” she says after I admit that I like fantasy novels.
“I have a lot of time out here,” I say and pat the side of the boat. “This part gets pretty boring.”
“How much longer do we have?”
“A few hours. We’re around halfway now. We’ll reach the coast around midnight, load up, and head back. Ideally, we’ll tie off around five in the morning.”
She groans. “We left too late.”
“I do normally like to get out a bit earlier, but sometimes it’s not always possible.”
Time passes. It’s strange how quickly it goes with her on board. Usually I only have the ocean and the wind and the motor to keep me company, and I get a little stir-crazy watching the endless, formless water all around. The ocean’s beautiful, but after a few hours, it’s all the same.
Just after the midpoint of the trip, I get up and check the screens. We’re a few miles off course, but not too bad. I get us back into position. There aren’t any ships nearby, none that matter anyway, and our heading is good once we’re adjusted.
But heavy, dark clouds are gathering in the sky, and I didn’t notice because it was already so dark and I wasn’t paying attention to the weather radar. Normally, I plan these trips better, but this was spontaneous. I fucked up and forgot to check the forecast.
I frown at the storm front moving through. It’s a big one, one of the biggest I’ve ever seen, and it’s going to overtake us in the next half-hour. Another freak fucking storm, but this one far from Saint Parras. They might not even notice that it’s raining. There’s nothing nearby, no islands, no ports, nowhere to shelter from what’s coming, and Kaye’s a novice out on a boat.
Hell, I’m a novice when it comes to a storm like this.
Normally, I would’ve seen it hours in advance and adjusted course or turned back to make sure I didn’t get caught out in the open sea. Instead, I was too busy chatting with Kaye and enjoying myself.