Published at 8th of March 2024 7:43 am

Chapter Seven

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In the end it took four hours to be rescued. I am told that is miraculous.

I am also told I am a hero and an idiot in equal measure. I do not like the attention.

Contrary to what I told the kid while we waited to be rescued, the ship did not have a dedicated rescue vessel and the lifeboats had no onboard or off board motors. They had brought the big ass ship all the way around and started searching for us. Luckily I had thought to grab the life jacket with its glow stick or tonight's adventure would have turned out very differently. The small patch of light was enough for the ships lookouts to spot use in the sea of black, maneuver the big ship near and for them to toss us a harness.

The kid and I were sitting in the medical office—cabin? Quarters?—with the kids mother, swaddled in blankets with a middle aged lady in a doctors coat poking and prodding us. Well, poking and prodding the kid. She reached for my head once and I slapped her hand away automatically, a bit hard. I apologized and asked her to ask for permission before touching me. She seemed to understand and from there the examination continued without further incident.

Another enhancement I made to my body is my hearing. It's quite good. I am using it now to eavesdrop on the doc talking to a man whom I assume to be the captain, just outside the room.

“How are they?” A deep male voice asked.

“The boy is exhausted. He can barely swim and would have drowned without the help of Mr. Avery. He'll make a full recovery, though,” a thready, female voice replied.

“And our Hero?” The title was stretched with irony.

“Touchy, but fine. Hale and hearty,” came the reply. “In fact, you couldn't tell he'd been in the water. If I hadn't seen the crew drag them on board I wouldn't have known he had just spent four hours in the Pacific.”

Hmm, maybe I should have pretended to be tired. It's something to think about for the future—

“Thank you,” a small voice said beside me.

I turned from my musings to the kid I rescued. I hadn't really paid attention to him until this moment, and now that his hair is dry and our lives aren't in danger, I recognized him as the teenager I traumatized on the dock. I almost laughed.

“You're welcome,” I said. “Do me a favor and don't stand on the handrails anymore.”

His face became a deep shade of crimson. “Y-yeah.”

His mother stood next to him, torn between wanting to crush him to her chest and smother him for his idiocy. Caught between two extremes, she stood, clasping her hands repeatedly. I took the time to study her. She's a good looking woman, athletic, her age barely showing in her face. Her blonde hair had some gray in it but you mostly couldn't tell, it blended in so well. She wore a blue shirt with the words “Next stop: Hawaii!” on it and a pair of sun shorts.

She decided to put aside her emotions for her son for the moment and turned a grateful gaze on me. “I really have to thank you again, Colm. I don't know what would have happened if you weren't there.”

The kid probably would have died, but I obviously don't say that. “Keep him from the railings for the rest of the trip and we'll call it even,” I say with a smile.

“Oh, you don't have to worry about that,” she says, glancing at her son in a way that informs me the kid will not escape her sight anytime soon.

It took several hours for the uproar to die down. Apparently, and unsurprisingly, a man overboard event is a big deal. The coast guard got involved and apparently being found in under 2 hours is a large outlier in terms of recovered passengers. I wish I had known that before I had recklessly dove in after the kid.

Not that I regret it... Okay maybe a little. I don't know if I would have acted so decisively if I had known just how dangerous it was to fall off a cruise liner. It was a sobering experience and forced me to examine myself and my behavior.

Finally the security officer that had been politely making sure I stayed put until they were done with me gave me the okay to go about my business. It was a little after three am and I was exhausted. I was escorted to the main deck out of the crew deck and found Alice waiting for me, her eyes tired.

“Alice,” I said, surprised. Though I guess I shouldn't be. I looked at her hands and found her holding my wallet and phone, and relief welled up in me. I had forgotten about them in the excitement.

She approached rapidly, her shoulders tight with anger. She lifted her hand as if to hit me but restrained herself to pointing at my face.

“You gave me a heart attack!” She said, shoving my things at me with her other hand. The security guard stepped back with an amused smile, getting ready for a show. I frowned at him as I juggled my phone briefly before getting a grip on it.

“Sorry,” I said. “I uh, uhhhhh...” I fished eloquently for words, shaking my tired brain and hoping something fell out. “I just, kinda, acted without thinking.”

She waved her hand dismissively, suddenly calming down. “I know, and you don't deserve my anger,” she said, crossing her arms. “I was just so worried and I deal with worry by being angry—and they wouldn't let me see you and since I'm not a relative they wouldn't even tell me anything beyond that you were alive and, and—“ she took a deep breath and let it out slowly.

“I'm glad you're okay,” she finally said.

“Thank you,” I said.

We started walking, ignoring the amused gaze of the security guard (I'm sure he had a suitably nautical title but I couldn't be bothered to try and think of it). She told me of the events of the ship, how the man overboard alerts were blasted ship-wide and how everyone who could lend a hand as a lookout do so. I have to give the cruise credit, they took the search seriously.

Conversation slowed to a stop, relief and exhaustion making us laconic. I find her leaning into me, and it takes a rather long period of time to realize I did not have my usual reaction to being touched without permission. It was a feat only a few very good, very old friends can claim. I blame my exhaustion and the fact that I really do like Alice a lot. She has a way to disarming my natural paranoia that in other circumstances would make me wary of her, but here just makes me feel at ease. It is such a seldom felt feeling that the part of me that suspects everyone is drowned out by the part of me that just wants to feel nice for once in my goddamned life.

As we approached the stairway that would lead to our respective decks, my “reflexes” inform me of the flash of light to our left followed by rolling thunder, which startles Alice. I found Alice clutching my arm as we both watched the night, soon lit up by another lightning strike in the distance.

“That scared the shit out of me,” she said, holding a hand to her chest and taking a deep breath. She realized she was clutching my arm and looked up to my rather placid face in alarm.

“Me too,” I lied, trying to show on my face that everything was fine.

She looked down at her arm around mine, then up at my face. “This is okay?”

I smiled tiredly. “I think on any other night I might have freaked out a bit,” I said, putting my other hand over the one she had on my arm. “But right now, after my little adventure, some human contact feels nice.”

Conversation died down a bit as we watched the lightning. It was quite impressive. Every few seconds the night would light up and thunder would roll over the ship. The wind picked up and I felt the ship move for the first time as the waves (Swells? What is the difference between a wave and a swell? Another thing to look up.) grew larger.

I sneaked a look at Alice and saw she had pensive expression on her face, as if debating something mentally. “Penny for your thoughts?”

She blinked and looked up at me, her face a mix of expressions. Maybe guilt? Before I could realize what I was looking at, her face changed and she rubbed at her eyes with the heel of her hand.

“Just… worried, I guess,” she said, unconvincingly. She must have caught the look on my face because she continued. “I’m just—it—watching my date jump off the side of a ship was a lot, okay?”

“You know,” I said after a thoughtful pause, trailing a finger up and down the hand she had on my arm. “We haven’t really quantified anything about our time together. I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t excited to hear that word ‘date’ in there.”

She made a fart noise and rolled her eyes at me. “As if you didn’t know what was going on,” she said as she leaned into me.

“I didn’t,” I said, enjoying the contact.

She leaned away to get a look at my face, her expression clearly dubious.

“I didn’t!” I asserted. “I mean, I HOPED, but my track record with attractive, funny women who can kick my ass at table games and can drink me under the table isn’t something to base anything on.”

“Oh, a track record, hmm?” She asked, clearly amused. “Do I have competition?”

“What, you mean other attractive, funny women who can kick my ass at table games and can drink me under the table? Why yes, there’s a line going around the block. Let’s see,” I lifted my hand and began to count on my fingers. “There’s you, and…” I let myself trail off.

She frowned for a second, waiting for me to continue, and then started laughing. She had a deep, throaty laugh that I found very pleasing.

“Like I told you the other day,” I continued. “I this is the first thing I’ve done that wasn’t work related in years.”

She hummed at me and went back to leaning against me. “Well, if you wanted something definite—then yes, I have been considering our little get-togethers as dates. You’re fun and you make me laugh, which is more than the majority of my past boyfriends.”

I liked where this was heading, if I’m reading things correctly. My experience with the opposite sex isn’t non-existent, but my previous romantic partners can be counted up on one single finger so—like I told Alice—there isn’t a lot of experience for me to pull from.

Whatever relationship we started likely wouldn’t last past the cruise, for a lot of rather obvious reasons. I’m a paranoid warlock who routinely kidnaps people (even if they happen to be murderers)—that’s going to raise some eyebrows no matter how laid back Alice is. We haven’t even asked what each other's last names are. We both gave off the impression of looking for easy, if temporary, companionship. Maybe that’d change as we got to know each other over the remainder of the trip, but right now I was just glad for the company.

Alice frowned, the night seeming more light than not with all the lightning. It was beginning to get difficult to talk over the thunder. She opened her mouth to say something but was cut off as a ship-wide announcement asked all passengers to return to the cabins and berths and to prepare for a storm.

I looked at the approaching lightning and resigned myself—

“Fuck!”

I looked down in mild surprise as Alice let go of my arm as she swore up a storm. “Fuck! Goddammit, AGH!”

She gave me a quick hug and a quick kiss on the cheek, then started trotting to her cabin. “I just remembered something I forgot and now it might be too late and sorry I’ll talk to you tomorrow!”

And then she was gone.

“What the fuck was that,” I muttered to myself, smiling stupidly at the memory of the kiss. With a final glance at the storm I began to make my way up to my room, looking forward to spending the next ten to fourteen hours in bed.

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