Apocalyptic Pirates 4, page 11
“Aren’t you angry with them?” Shannon asked in curiosity.
“I’d be furious,” Dia muttered.
“I mean, these are people you’d worked with for years,” Shannon persisted. “And they just left you without a thought.”
“They probably thought we were dead,” Valerie pointed out in a gentle voice. “It’s a reasonable enough thought to have, after all. We were the oldest folks there on the staff.”
“Still.” Shannon shook her head. “It’s a crying shame.”
“Now, then.” Valerie reached across the table and patted Shannon’s hand. “There ain’t no call to take on like that.”
“But ain’t you mad at all?” Letty pushed. “Not even a little?”
“What’s the point?” Valerie shrugged. “Ain’t going to help us none, and they won’t know whether we resent them or not. So we might as well make the choice that hurts us least.”
“I’d feel like I was letting them off too easily.” Dia took another mouthful of fish with an angry stab of her fork.
“But they don’t know that, do they?” Valerie pointed out.
Her tone was so gentle but reasonable that for a moment I could see what a great mother she would have been. They hadn’t mentioned children, but with the lifestyle they’d described, I doubted they would have been able to bring children along with them.
“They’re going to carry on doing their thing regardless of how we feel about them,” Ray said. “Life’s too short to hold grudges.”
“That’s very admirable,” I commended. “I can’t think of many people who would be so forgiving.”
“It’s actually pretty self-serving,” Ray said with a slow smile. “I don’t want to live in a way that’s going to fill me with bitterness. So this way, I’m the one who comes out on top.”
“I guess so.” I grinned. “I hadn’t thought of it like that before.”
“You stick around with us, Drew,” Ray chuckled. “We’ve got plenty more pieces of wisdom we can pass down to you.”
After dinner was done, Letty insisted on doing the cleaning up and then making us all tea. The rest of us were too full to complain, although there was of course some resistance from Ray and Valerie.
“No,” Letty scolded them. “You caught dinner, you prepared dinner, and then you cooked dinner. You are not allowed to do anything else tonight.”
“Well, okay,” Ray said as he held up his hands in surrender. “If you insist.”
“I do,” Letty told him. “Now, do you take cream and sugar in your tea?”
“That Letty’s a stubborn one,” Valerie chuckled as Ray came to sit down next to her on the couch.
“Don’t I know it.” He slung his arm around her shoulders and looked with teasing tenderness into her face. “Remind you of anyone?”
“Wellllll,” Valerie drew out the word. “I thought you’d got a little bit better this last decade.”
“I’m talking about you, you saucy stubborn minx,” Ray told her, and he pulled her to him so she leaned against his chest with a sigh of satisfaction.
Meanwhile, I’d been turning over Letty’s advice in my mind, and I dug out the bag of electronics we’d taken from the hotel and found the gaming consoles we’d taken from there.
I plugged both of them in and watched as the battery icons slowly filled to green.
“What’ve you got there?” Dia asked with interest.
“Games,” I explained.
“Oh, cool!” She sat down beside me and picked up one of the consoles. Dia turned it on, and a bright electronic alert noise sounded.
“Do you game?” I asked her.
“Some,” she replied as she pressed various buttons on the console. “I’ve got a PlayStation– Shit, well, I had a PlayStation, it’s probably in pieces somewhere now. I’ve played these things with my friends, though.”
“You can teach me, then,” I said.
I handed her the other console, and our fingers brushed against each other. The fleeting touch was so unexpected that it set my heart thumping. My body heated, and I looked down quickly so Dia wouldn’t be able to tell if I was blushing.
But when I looked up, her face was also red.
“There’s not much to teach,” she said, and her voice was very low and husky.
“I’m sure you’ll find something,” I responded.
“Maybe,” she whispered. “I just hope you’re a good student.”
“I think I am.” My brain was whirling. “I guess we’ll have to find out.”
Dia’s dark eyes searched my face. Her full, rosy lips were a little parted, and I just made out the shining whiteness of her front teeth that seemed startlingly bright against her olive skin.
She licked her lips slowly, and more than anything I wanted to lean forward and capture that tantalizing rosebud mouth with my own.
I cleared my throat and tried to think of something to say that would calm the throb in my twitching cock.
“Your PlayStation,” I said in a voice that was somewhat normal. “Is that at your mom’s house?”
“Yeah.” Dia leaned back and ran her hand through her wild black curls. “My mom has moved around a lot. Her place in Cartagena is just one more place in the Mariana Rojas itinerary.”
“That must have been hard when you were a kid,” I said.
“Yeah, well.” Dia shrugged. “Lots of things are hard when you’re a kid, aren’t they?”
“Like what?” I didn’t want to push the conversation into a place that Dia was uncomfortable sharing with me, but I couldn’t deny that I was curious about her upbringing.
“I don’t know.” Dia sighed, but I knew if she didn’t want to talk any more about this, she would tell me that straight. “Like, I never knew my dad, but every couple of years or so, he would write to my mom and tell her that things were going to be different this time, and if only she would give him another chance and move to Havana, then he’d prove it to her. So we’d pack everything up into cardboard boxes, and I’d change schools, and my mom would quit her job, and we’d find some shitty apartment in Havana and wait for my dad to phone. Only of course he never did. A few years would go by, and then my mom would get a letter saying the same thing, only this time it would be, ‘Come to Miami, Mariana, things will be different here’ or ‘Come to Trinidad’ or ‘Come to Haiti’.”
“Wow,” I said softly. “That must have really sucked.”
“Yeah.” Dia blew out her breath in a long sigh. “You’d think I’d have got really good at making friends because of having moved around so much, but it kinda had the opposite effect. I’d turn up in a place in the middle of the school, wearing the wrong clothes and saying the wrong thing, and I’d think, ‘What’s the point?’ So it got to the point where I only learned anything about the other kids so I could figure out who to sell what stuff to.”
“Stuff?” I raised my eyebrows.
“You know,” she supplied. “Shoplifted makeup, DVDs, a little bit of weed, that kind of thing.”
“Always hustling,” I teased.
I was trying to lighten the mood a little, but my heart ached for Dia. The last thing I’d wanted was for Sammy’s life to be uprooted unexpectedly, and even though I had to travel for my work, I’d done my damnedest to make sure that everything else in her life was as stable as possible. It would have broken my heart to think of her being shuttled back and forth between homes following a woman who didn’t seem to know what was good for her.
“So you see why I’m not totally convinced she’s worth going out of our way for,” Dia said with an edge in her voice that wasn’t quite balanced out by the cheeky twinkle in her eye.
“She’s your mom,” I insisted. “That’s got to count for something. And besides, if you really felt like that, there’s no way you’d be on this boat right now.”
“Yeah.” Dia sighed, and the harsh edges of her face softened. “Damn it, Drew, how come you’ve not known me that long and already you can tell that about me?”
“I guess I’m just good at paying attention,” I told her with a wink that I hoped masked the sudden excited thump of my heart.
“I hope you are,” she murmured.
“Besides,” I added. “You’re worth the extra miles.”
Dia’s eyelashes fluttered. She looked down at the console in her hand, and I couldn’t pull my eyes away from the soft swell of her heavy breasts as they rose and fell with her suddenly ragged breaths.
Then she swallowed hard and flashed me a grin.
“So,” she demanded. “Are we playing this or what?”
The rest of the evening passed in comfortable hours spent dueling Dia on the games we’d found downloaded onto the consoles. They had already been set up with the accounts belonging to the previous owners, and it had been the work of a few minutes to get them ready to play.
Shannon came to sit behind us and watch us play, and she provided a running commentary on everything we did.
“You’re a real backseat gamer,” I told her with a grin.
“Admit it,” Shannon laughed. “You love me in the backseat.”
“Well, I don’t hate it, that’s for sure,” I laughed.
As the sun sank down below the horizon and the evening outside began to darken, Ray and Valerie announced that they were going to call it a night.
“Alright.” I got up from the couch and went through to the bedroom where I’d already got the bed set up and ready. I grabbed the pile of blankets and cushions I’d set aside, and brought them out into the lounge.
“Oh, Drew,” Ray began, but I held up my hand to stop his protests.
“I know exactly what you’re going to say,” I interrupted. “And the answer is yes, you can take the bed, and yes, you are going to take the bed. There is absolutely no way I’m letting the two of you sleep out here, and the rich asshole who used to own this boat customized it beyond reason, so there aren’t as many beds as there should be. That means you’re sleeping in the one bed we have, and that’s that.”
“I was just going to ask if you had a spare toothbrush,” Ray deadpanned.
I laughed and got them settled with everything that they might need, and when I came back into the lounge, I found that the women were already busy making a kind of pillow fort with the cushions from the couch and the spare pillows and blankets that I’d found.
“Well,” I chuckled. “This looks cozy.”
“Come in and join us!” Ally called.
I crawled onto the makeshift mattress that they’d assembled out of cushions and laid back.
“Hmm,” I noted. “It’s not the most comfortable bed I’ve ever slept in.”
“It’s like a sleepover!” Letty declared. “Oh, my god, we should paint our nails and do face masks.”
“I’m too tired,” Dia announced, and she flopped down with a huge sigh. “I exhausted myself beating Drew at Grand Turismo.”
“You did not beat me!” I gasped.
“Sounds like the loser talking to me, Drew.” Dia grinned, and she gave a little squeal and wriggled away from me when I tried to tickle her.
“This reminds me of stayin’ in motels during my pageant days,” Letty reminisced. “My aunty would try to make it fun for me so I wouldn’t get nervous, and the night before the pageant, we’d make a little nest in the motel blankets and watch whatever crappy soaps were on TV. It became this whole tradition of ours.”
“That sounds so nice,” Shannon sighed. “I never really had sleepovers, but I used to go camping with my brothers a lot. Believe me, this is way more comfortable than sleeping in a tent where there’s nothing between you and the rocky ground except a thin sleeping bag and even thinner ground sheet.”
“That sounds like the least amount of fun,” Ally told her.
“It was fun, though!” Shannon smiled softly at the memory of it. “We’d wrap bananas in foil and roast them in the fire. Potatoes too, and they’d always be burnt black on the outside with a little raw hard lump in the middle.”
“Why are you smiling like that’s a good thing?” Ally said with a giggle. “That sounds like a terrible time.”
“It was a good time because it was so terrible.” Shannon shook her head. “The things you do when you’re a kid. I’m not sure I’d be so excited about sleeping in a tent and eating raw potatoes now, but it was the best time when I was nine years old. I got to spend all weekend with my dad and my brothers.”
“That would be the nice part of it,” Ally agreed.
“I bet you never went camping, did you?” Dia said with a grin pulling at the corners of her mouth.
“No,” Ally admitted. “But I did have a tent that I would sometimes sleep in when the nights were warm enough.”
“Ally in a tent?” I shook my head in wonderment. “Wonders will never cease.”
“It was a pretty tent,” Ally explained with a faint blush tinging her cheeks. “I’d seen a picture in a book of these children who made a tent from an old bedsheet, a clothesline, and some rocks. Did any of you ever read The Boxcar Children growing up?”
“I did,” I said in surprise. “Four orphans live in an old, abandoned train car? I’d forgotten all about that until now.”
“I was obsessed with The Boxcar Children.” Ally smiled fondly. “And with this tent I’d seen in a separate book, so I got one of my nannies to help me make it.”
“I bet she loved that,” Shannon said with a grin.
“She did, actually,” Ally told her with dignity. “We had many fun afternoons in that tent.”
“Come on, then, Dia.” Letty propped herself up on one elbow. “Did you ever have sleepovers as a kid?”
Dia hesitated, and I wondered if she was thinking about everything that she’d just told me and whether she wanted to go through it all again.
“I didn’t have many friends growing up,” Dia said finally. “We moved around so much, I never really got the chance to put down roots. But I do remember my twelfth birthday. We’d just moved to Havana, and I didn’t know anyone there, so there was no point having a party or anything. So I was just moping around and feeling sorry for myself, when my mom comes in and switches off the TV and tells me that we’re going to have a slumber party.”
“That’s really cute,” Letty said.
“Yeah, it was.” Dia smiled quietly to herself. “She made this huge blanket fort out of all the sheets and blankets we had in the house, and we ordered pizza, and we watched Pretty Woman. She painted my nails and braided my hair, and we ate so much damn ice cream. It was one of the best days of my life.”
“That’s just perfect,” Ally sighed. “That’s like something out of a book.”
“Yeah,” Dia said in a soft voice, and I knew she must be thinking about her mom. Their relationship must be complicated, but I’d had a hunch that it couldn’t have been bad blood all round. Dia wasn’t the sort of person to travel hundreds of miles for someone she had no feelings for.
“What about you, Drew?” Shannon asked. “I suppose guys don’t do slumber parties, do they? But what about Sammy?”
“Oh, yeah,” I replied. “Sammy’s had a few sleepovers. But to be honest, I’m not the greatest at organizing them, so I usually opt for a bowling party or something where someone else has to think about it all. I’m just there for the cake.”
The women laughed softly.
In the following silence, I felt sure that we were all thinking about our separate families and the distance that separated us from our loved ones.
Soon, Sammy, I silently promised my baby girl. I’ll see you very soon.
It was almost entirely dark now, and as the women’s breathing deepened and slowed, I carefully crawled out of the blanket nest and went up on deck to take the first watch.
The sky was a deep rich navy, and the first stars were pricking their way through the heavy blue night.
I sucked down a deep breath of fresh sea air. I began to pace up and down on the deck, and as I did so, my phone buzzed in my pocket.
I pulled it out and stared at the notification on the screen.
ATTENTION, it read. EMERGENCY GOVERNMENT BROADCAST SOON TO COMMENCE.
Chapter 8
I spent the rest of my time on watch pacing up and down the deck and refreshing my phone in the hope of getting more updates. The connection was patchy but no worse than usual. Still, my phone remained stubbornly empty of any more information beyond that initial alert.
What the hell did “soon to commence” mean? It might mean that the broadcast would start in five minutes’ time or in five hours’ time.
The YouTube notification had arrived in my inbox because I’d subscribed to a bunch of official government news channels a while back in case they ever uploaded anything useful. To be honest, I’d kind of given up hope that they ever would, but it looked like I was about to be proven wrong.
I briefly considered waking the others but quickly realized there wouldn’t be much point to that because it would only make them anxious. If the broadcast began, I would wake them, but for now, them getting enough sleep was more important.
I walked back and forth on the deck and gazed up at the heavy canvas of stars hanging overhead. It was crazy to think that not so long ago this same sky had seemed innocent and pure. It was the thing that pop stars wrote schmaltzy love songs about, and George Lucas had built an empire on. The stars were things for stories and songs, not for real life.
Maybe this was where humans’ fear of the dark came from. Maybe once upon a time, long ago, we’d gazed up at these same stars, seen meteorites falling and dragons hatching, and quickly learned to be scared of the places we didn’t know anything about.
I tried to distract myself with thoughts of Sammy and my parents. It had been too long since I’d last called them, and I needed to check in and make sure everything was still okay with them. I was sure my mom would have some choice words once she discovered that Dia was still a fixture on the yacht, and I smiled up at the sky even as I cringed a little at the thought of what embarrassments my mom would surely have in store for me.
I couldn’t help but wonder what effect this was all having on Sam. It must be so hard for her to have her entire life turned upside down like this. It was hard for everyone, of course, but my daughter was having the last part of her childhood snatched away from her.
