“Daisy?” I call out.
I open the door and peer in at her.
The sidelight is on.
She’s sleeping on her back, mouth open, drooling.
I have to stifle a laugh.
On her chest is her phone, rising and falling with each breath.
She’s so not made for this.
“Daisy,” I say louder, reaching over and shaking her shoulder until her phone slides off her.
“Huh, what?” she mumbles, rolling over until she sees me.
Then wipes the drool from her face.
“Shit. Sorry. What time is it?”
“Time to get up.”
“I must have turned off my alarm,” she says, looking embarrassed. She’s cute when she goes red.
“It happens. Come on.”
I wait until I see her reaching for a hoodie, making sure she doesn’t fall back asleep. I could let her keep sleeping. I’m totally fine up there alone for the rest of the night.
But I want to put her through her paces. Just in case Lacey is right and Daisy is used to coasting by, I figure it can’t hurt to put her to work.
While she’s getting ready, I stop by the kitchen, fill up a thermos of coffee and grab some insulated mugs, then head up top. Lacey and Richard are no doubt fast asleep below in their cabin.
I get behind the wheel and put my head back, taking in the night sky.
Being on a boat at night is a view that will never fail to take your breath away. A velvet black sky so dense that you swear you can see just how deep the universe goes. The stars are embedded like white diamonds, some of them fully formed prisms, others just speckles and stardust, like someone threw a bunch of sparkling sugar up into the night sky and it stuck, swirling around in multicolored galaxies.
“Holy bejesus,” Daisy says as she appears on deck, looking extra small in her hoodie. She’s staring open-mouthed at the sky above. “Is this for real?”
I nod. “This is dark sky territory,” I tell her. “No night pollution from anywhere. You’ll never find as many stars anywhere as you do right here.”
“Wow,” she says, breathlessly. There’s something about her wonder I find so refreshing, like she’s looking at the stars for the first time.
“Guess you have a lot of fog in San Francisco,” I comment.
“Yeah, but even on my parent’s farm, the sky never looked anything like this.”
I hold out the cup of coffee for her. “Here. This will help wake you up.”
“I’m already wide awake,” she says and then fixes her big blue eyes at me. Even in the dark they seem to glow. “But thank you.”
She reaches for the mug and our fingers brush against each other.
It shouldn’t mean anything. And it doesn’t.
But it shouldn’t be something that stands out either.
And it does.
The feel of her finger as it brushes against mine shouldn’t take me back to being a child and holding hands with a crush for the first time. But it’s more than that. There’s a buzz, an electricity between our contact that can’t be imaginary.
Get a grip, I tell myself. Eyes on the horizon.
“So this is the night watch,” she says as she sits down to the left of the wheel, cradling the mug between her hands.
“Generally unexciting.”
She gives me a look. “I should hope so. Dare I ask what an exciting episode would be like?”
“I guess it’s something only I’d find interesting. If the winds were in our favor, we could really be skipping along here. Have you ever been on a boat like this, when you’re going downwind, constant breeze, doing five knots at ease so you can just sit back and let it go?”
“Obviously not,” she says, placing her mug between her knees and tucking her hair beneath the back of her hoodie. “But it sounds nice. This is nice.”
“This is a challenge,” I tell her. “The winds keep pushing us in the wrong direction. But in time, it should work out. Maybe add a day to our journey.”
She stiffens at that.
“Don’t worry,” I tell her. “Not all days will be like today.”
I’m kind of lying because it’ll probably just get worse.
“I’m hoping for the best and expecting the worst,” she says wryly, then sighs. “Which is kind of sad, because once upon a time I hoped for the best and expected the best.”
I watch her carefully, the way she is worrying her lip between her teeth. “You know, I think that’s how we all want to operate. You’re lucky to have done so for so long.”
She tilts her head back to look at the stars. “I’ve heard that all my life. That I was lucky. Now I’m not so sure I was.”
“What makes you say that?”
She shrugs. “I don’t know. It’s not that things haven’t been easy for me…I’ve worked hard, contrary to anything Lacey might say.”
“Lacey can say all she wants, but she wasn’t there and has never been in your shoes.”