Page 93 of Salt Kiss
Lunacy. Torture.
I step away from her door, drag in a breath, and then go down to the gym to burn away the vines already winding their way to my heart.
The next day dawns clear,and I stare at the soft sunrise for a long time before I go into my room and get ready for the day.
I want two people.
I’m not able to have either of them.
How did I get here?I keep asking myself.How did I get here?
I don’t try knocking on Isolde’s door today. I subject myself to a punishing workout in the gym, and then after I shower and change, I pace the small length of the library, trying to gather my thoughts.
Two things become clear amidst the noise in my head.
First, I have to get Isolde to talk to me. I need to know if she’s okay, and I need to apologize for my behavior. There’s no excuse for it, none at all, because as much as this yacht feels like a little vessel of timeless paradise, I’m still on the clock. I’m still working for Mark.
Which leads me to the second thing...
I have to quit this job.
When we get back to Manhattan, I’ll get Isolde to Mark and then I’ll—well, I don’t know how much Isolde will want him to know, but I also don’t know if I can lie.
Either way, I can’t claim to be a good bodyguard when I’m currently two for two on having sex with the people I’m supposed to be protecting.
And I’ve proven myself unable to be trusted in the most egregious way.
Isolde’s not at dinner, and so I’m required to eat suckling pig in peppercorn sauce on my own, and after I finish, I drain a glass of whiskey for courage and go to knock on her hallway door.
There’s a tray by her door, with a metal-lidded plate and a glass filled with ice water and covered with plastic wrap. Dinner that she hasn’t brought inside yet.
Worry scratches at me. I give our shared door another try—locked—and then I go out my balcony door to the balcony itself, and give myself two seconds to accept that I’m about to do something extraordinarily stupid.
I climb onto the balcony railing and jump.
It’s an easy jump, and I make it without issue. I try not to think about how long it would take someone to notice that I wasn’t on the boat if I’d missed.
I’m more worried aboutIsoldehaving gone missing, and sure enough, when I slide open her balcony door, her room is empty. I observe the tightly made bed, the rosary on the table next to it, wrapped in neat coils around the sheathed honeysuckle knife. Everything is in its place, except for the wardrobe and its contents. The doors are hanging open to show several dresses that I’m almost certain she didn’t have room for in her two compact suitcases.
I check the bathroom, also empty, and feel time ripen into a slow, vivid thing, palpable as the deck moving gently beneath my feet.
Ten minutes.
If I can’t find Isolde in ten minutes, I’m raising the alarm. I mentally calculate how long it’s been since she’s been definitively seen, how long in the water that might translate to.
Cold water. Open Atlantic.
Help would have to come from the Azores—planes at first—and another boat would take at least three days—
I bite off the panic, swallow it, move quick as my thoughts move quicker. First the dojo, then the chapel. Then everything else on that level. The library and the spa. After that, I’m alerting the crew to search their quarters, and then it will be time to declare a passenger overboard.
With so many other likelier spots, I almost don’t bother checking the aft deck on the lower level. It’s not a pretty space, and its only purpose is for climbing on and off the moored tender when the ship is in harbor. But I duck back there anyway, the part of my mind that thinks in grids and sectors needing to check it off my mental map.
And then I stop, my ribs frozen midbreath.
She’s here.
She’s okay.
