Float Plan - Trish Doller Page 0,9

when our bare knees make contact beneath the table. Our elbows touch. Arms. Shoulders. As if we’re melting into each other.

At some point, Doug and Mike go down to the beach, leaving us alone. Chris leans over, his lips grazing my neck, my ear, setting off a shower of sparks under my skin.

“You want to get out of here?” he whispers. “I have a room.”

For the first time since he died, I don’t think about what Ben would want. He’s not the little voice inside my head urging me to go, go, go. And he’s definitely not in the warm ache between my thighs. Chris’s callused palm slides under the hem of my sundress, stroking the inside of my knee.

“Anna.” A gentle squeeze.

“Yes. Let’s go.”

The walk from the beach to the resort is a drunken kaleidoscope, scattered bits of need and tumbling shards of shame. My back pressed against the wall of an out-of-business clothing shop with Chris’s mouth on my neck and his fingers inside my bikini bottom, making me gasp. Running. Losing a flip-flop. Tumbling backward onto his bed. The feel of his mouth, his tongue, on all the places that haven’t been touched in months by anyone but me. Hot, sticky, mindless want.

My legs are still trembling when Chris gets out of bed, naked, to get a condom from his carry-on. His phone vibrates on the bedside table as he tears open the foil packet. The screen is alive with a photo of him kissing a pretty blonde dressed in a wedding gown. Shit.

“Anna, wait.”

My name no longer sounds beautiful and, God, I am so gullible. Ben never lied to me or played games. So it never occurred to me that Chris might be married, or that it was even a question I needed to ask. If I had, would he have told me the truth?

I snatch my dress off the hotel room floor and yank it over my head while Chris stands in the bathroom doorway, looking from me to his ringing phone and back, as if he still has a choice. As if there is anything he could say that would convince me to stay. My bikini is lost in the bedding, so I leave it behind with my one remaining flip-flop and an enormous piece of my dignity.

I glance back at Chris as I step through the doorway. “Go fuck yourself.”

I stumble through the resort grounds to the end of the dock where my dinghy is tied. I climb down a ladder to the little boat, where I sit for … I have no idea how long, listening miserably to the happy sounds of an island not ready to sleep. I ran away from Fort Lauderdale because I wasn’t ready to move on, yet threw myself at the first man who asked. I feel dirty. Unfaithful.

I’m so, so sorry, Ben. Please forgive me.

I want to row out to the boat, pull up the anchor, and sail away from this place, but I’m not sober enough for any of that. And Bimini isn’t really the problem. Instead I curl up on the floor of the dinghy and cry.

question mark (4)

I wake in the V-berth of the Alberg as if last night was nothing more than a bad dream, except there’s a spike of pain splitting my skull and I have no recollection of how I ended up in my own bed. Shifting the comforter aside, I discover I’m wearing yesterday’s sundress. The soles of my feet are filthy, my mouth tastes like I might have vomited, and my bikini is completely gone. I can remember my walk of shame and crying in the dinghy, but beyond that, the night ends in a question mark.

I’m relishing the small relief of being safe when I hear the cabin floor creak and catch a whiff of … coffee? I roll over to see a dark-haired man leaning against the galley sink, drinking from Ben’s favorite Captain America mug. Part of me wants to leap from my bed and snatch it away because that mug belongs to Ben, but the bigger, more rational part of me is trying to figure out why there is a stranger on the boat. He’s not riffling through cabinets like a thief searching for valuables. He looks relaxed, comfortable, as though he was invited. Did I invite him?

The scene jumps to the next level of unexpected when I notice that the lower half of his right leg—from his knee down into his black Adidas