When she looked away, I wanted to go over to her and turn her back so she was looking at me again. I didn’t do it or anything; it was just weird that I wanted to.
She started to say something, but her voice was all scratchy when she tried to talk. She raised her hand up to her throat and coughed a couple of times before she tried again.
“What happened?”
“My ship sank,” I said, completely unnecessarily.
“How did I get here?” she asked. “The last thing I remember is trying to get up on the deck, but when I did, there was a big wave. I fell in the water.”
“Yeah,” I said, nodding. “I pulled you out.”
“I don’t remember that,” she said.
“You were half-drowned and unconscious,” I told her.
“Where’s everyone else?”
I shrugged.
“Are they…?” Her eyes got all wide again.
“I don’t have any idea,” I told her. “I’m going to see if I can spot any of the other lifeboats.”
“Did everyone else get in one?”
“I just told you, I have no fucking idea!” I snapped. I hadn’t really meant to, but I felt like absolute shit. I really needed a drink, and I really didn’t want to be talking about this. I tried to calm my voice down a bit. “Now stop with the twenty questions.”
She pulled back and just stared at me again with her mouth hanging open. Fucking high society bitch. She had probably never heard a real f-bomb before. She had better get used to it.
I pulled the canopy back a bit more and got hit with a decent sized trickle of rainwater overflowing from the gutter system.
“Damnit!”
I yanked off my waterlogged shirt and tossed it off to the side. I would need to remember to hang it up, or it would never be dry. It was bad enough my shirt was wet, but wasting the water was going to come back and haunt me later. Landon would have fucking killed me for wasting water under these conditions. I wondered if I could somehow get it out of the shirt.
I heard a gasp behind me and immediately regretted not just keeping the soggy shirt on.
“Wow, your arms are…um…” the girl stammered at me. “And your back…”
I felt my whole body go rigid and my hands clench into fists.
“What?” I snarled, glaring back at her over my shoulder. If the prissy bitch had a problem with my body, she could fucking keep it to herself or go overboard.
“You just…um…look really strong.”
“Oh.” I didn’t know how to respond to that. I thought she was talking about the scars. Sailing takes strength, but I was built up long before I started sailing. John Paul made sure I still worked out a lot to keep me in shape and make up for the poison I drank. Our professional lives might not require it anymore, but John Paul’s favorite saying was still “Strong people live longer.”
I lifted the canopy up the rest of the way and squinted out over the sea. I wondered if a pair of Ray Bans was included in the survival kits. I shaded my eyes with my hand and scanned the horizon again.
Nothing.
I turned around quickly, making the raft rock a little. The girl scurried to the other side as I approached the sealed pouches near her. I continued on like she wasn’t even there. I found what I wanted – a pair of binoculars and one of three flares. They would show up better at night, that was for sure, but chances were the other lifeboats would be closer now than twelve hours later. They had outboard motors, where the raft only had a pair of oars which were almost totally fucking useless.
I moved out towards the opening again and launched the first one. It was incredibly bright, even in the daylight, and I watched it rocket up three hundred meters before it started back down, glowing all the way. It went out right before it hit the water.
I used the binoculars to see if I could see any sign of…well, of anything.
Nothing.
There weren’t even any cumulus clouds on the horizon, which would give me at least some sort of direction to head since clouds would normally form over land. The wind was sending the current south-southwest, which was not ideal. From where we were last on The Oblation, the closest land was southeast.
“Fuck.”
“What is it?”
I felt all my muscles tense. This chick and all her stupid ass questions were going to drive me insane.
“Well, let’s see,” I snarled, “I just realized I left my best pair of shoes in the closet back at home, and I really needed them for the mixer tonight. What the fuck do you think it is? Maybe a whole shitload of ocean and maybe a whole shitload of no land? You think that might be it?”
“Why are you yelling at me?” she screamed and sobbed all at the same time.
The girl just pulled up her legs and practically curled up into a ball. I hadn’t really meant to jump down her throat, but I had a problem with my temper. Once it got started, it was a while before it managed to run its course.
“I’m a little fucking tense, all right?” I shouted at her. “My home just fucking sank, it’s about a hundred and ten degrees in here, and I’m fucking annoyed and wondering why I ever bothered pulling you out of the fucking water! Okay?”
She raised her hand and ran it under one eye.