see how much blood I’ve lost. It’s only sticky.
“You aren’t real,” I tell him.
He removes the cap and passes his hand over his buzzed head. He cocks a sly eyebrow. “No?” He draws out the single syllable, molten. “What am I, then?”
I go to say magic, but I don’t believe that anymore. Ben was the opposite of magic. He was all smoke and mirrors. “My hallucination.”
He scratches the back of his head and says, mock gravely, “I see. Do you hallucinate me often?”
“Lately, yes.” I am not ashamed admitting it. “For a while I was sure you were a ghost and on the island.”
He flashes that flirtatious smile that I was never on the receiving end of. “You want to come aboard and tell me what I was doing in all those hallucinations of yours?”
I frown. This wasn’t our way. We didn’t flirt. He didn’t use that self-assured smirk, calibrated perfectly to get out of trouble, on me. If I were dreaming, projecting Ben on the sky, it wouldn’t be this version. It would be my Ben. It would be Ben whose stories and ideas connected with the darkest and lightest places in me; who smiled a conspirator’s grin; and who I beat at most Scrabble games and diving contests. This Ben is delivering a line and a wink. He’s an imposter, a con artist.
He’s supposed to be dead, but this Ben is alive.
I catapult over the bow. I collide with his chest and throw my arms around his shoulders. My feet shuffle between his shoes to get closer. I attach myself like June and the Grim Reaper are coming to drag him back to death if I don’t. Ben’s arms move around my waist, and I hide my face between his shoulder and collar. A rough sob disappears into his chest. He absorbs it. He turns it into a smile. He smells of wind and salt, and he’s impossibly solid.
“It will be over soon. Shhh.” He rocks back on his heels and lifts me to my tiptoes. “It’s okay. I’ve got you.” His hand curves at the base of my neck. My heart knocks louder and faster.
I pull back. Ben’s gray eyes are quick to mine. Clouds pass over the moon and a stormy cast of light flickers on his cheeks. I want to be that light. I want to be bright and liquid slipping over his skin. I want this to be cosmic intervention. Ben was brought back to life or only half murdered, and he was sent to the Mira to wait for me. Out of nowhere, completely unbidden, I hear my mother’s words in my head, Perception is nine-tenths of everything, even the truth, Lana. She never acknowledged that things are rarely what they seem.
Ben’s palms cup my face. He thumbs away a tear. “I read about Winnie in the paper. ‘Suspected Environmental Activists Free Eagle from Captivity.’ Jesus, you freed that fucking eagle for me just like I always wanted to do, didn’t you?”
I nod. Ben recognized it as a message. “You’re here,” I say, testing it out. I brush his light-touched cheek.
He holds my hand in place as his eyes dart up the dock. “I have an explanation for everything,” he says, suddenly urgent. “I have a story to tell you.” A hint of a smile on his lips at those words—the ones that used to fill me with anticipation but now only bring on dread. “We need to leave before someone spots us.”
He takes my hand from his cheek and we walk to the controls of the inboard engine in the cockpit. He flips the switch, and the gentle puttering joins the crickets. The mainsail and the jib-stay remain tied down, and the engine revs as we accelerate backward. I dig my fingers into the cockpit seat. My eyes are glued to Ben. I am a bursting heart and an unbound smile. I don’t trust that he won’t disappear.
Ben shifts gears and we taxi in the direction of the sound. This is my golden, opinionated, storytelling Ben, and he’s carrying us away. I can’t stop thinking, though. Here he is, on the Mira, two days after Fitzgerald Moore was arrested. Two days after I visited Calm Coast to learn about his hateful grandfather.
Ben is dead. Bled out. Splattered all over the highway. Yet here he is. I used to be so careful touching him. What would he think? Who might be watching? I resisted, and then Ben vanished—dead, I thought. I lace my