Page 68 of In the Same Boat

‘I’ll be in soon,’ Mum tells me.

She’s either not getting it, or willing things to be different.

‘That’s okay,’ I tell her. ‘I’m going to stay in Nico’s cabin tonight – with Nico.’

I add that to the end, in case it isn’t clear.

Honestly, if this were real, I would never in a million years say anything like that to my mum, no matter how old I got, or how little it mattered. Not a chance. I have that feeling, one left over from my teenage years, like I’m surely going to be grounded for this.

‘Oh,’ she says softly.

‘Right,’ Hank replies.

The silence that follows is nothing short of extraordinary. This is already working.

Nico caresses my side as he guides me towards the corridor, and the tiny gesture catches me so off guard that I nearly trip over absolutely nothing.

Thankfully, I’m safe in his arms, and so is my dignity as we disappear down the narrow corridor together, leaving a trail of stunned silence behind us. We did it!

The moment Nico closes the cabin door, the atmosphere changes completely. Like being in a car that has just plunged into a lake, the doors and windows all closed, only a certain amount of oxygen left, certain danger mere seconds away.

The cabin itself is technically bigger than the one I’m sharing with Mum. There’s more storage, slightly wider walkways, enough floor space that two people can move around freely without accidentally getting intimate if the moving boat hits a bit of chop.

And yet somehow it feels much smaller. Maybe it’s because Nico is much bigger than my mum… or maybe it’s simply because it’s Nico.

He lets go of me immediately and exhales hard theatrically enough to remind me to exactly what extent he was faking what just happened. As though there was any doubt in either of our heads. We’re more likely to physically fight than we are to kiss.

‘Soooo…’ he says eventually. ‘That was deeply embarrassing.’

I drop onto the edge of the bed and look at him.

‘Well, you did a pretty convincing job, for someone who was cringing his way through it,’ I point out.

‘You touched my hand with a lot of confidence for someone who was allegedly panicking.’

He sits down on the bed next to me. The one bed. The one we’re going to have to share, unless we abandon the plan (or the ship) and I go back to my mum. We’ve come this far though, and it seems like it’s working, so we can’t back down now… can we? There’s a voice in my head, the usual one who overthinks, telling me that maybe we should.

I notice that the bed is neatly made. The pillows are plumped. The lighting is soft. The whole room has the atmosphere of somewhere designed for romance rather than two immature adults conducting social experiments on their parents.

Nico rubs the back of his neck with his hand.

‘Right.’

‘Right,’ I echo. ‘This is wild…?’

‘Yeah, the cocktails definitely emboldened us,’ he reasons. ‘But it did work.’

‘It did…’

‘We could actually get an early night,’ he suggests. ‘Not like that – I mean sleep. I’m shattered.’

‘You reckon we can share?’ I ask.

He turns around and eyeballs the bed for size.

‘You’ve never had someone else in here?’ I can’t help but blurt in disbelief.

‘Not side by side,’ he says cheekily.