Swept Away (4 page)

At boot camp everything is planned for you, when to eat, what to eat, when to wake, and it’s a break from how exhausting the last few years had been. He asks her if she thinks that makes him crazy, actually liking not having to think.

Of course she doesn’t. She knows exactly what he means.

They talk about everything, she tells him about the weather and he says he misses the changing colors of fall, so she takes pictures and mails them to him: her backyard going gold and red, herself lounging by the pool (completely covered in a beach towel because she wasn’t brave enough to show him her one-piece suit) and the way the water shimmers with the afternoon heat.

He finds a disposable camera from somewhere and sends her pictures too, when he can, just never of himself. She misses his face, his arms, his hands.

They write each other almost weekly and it spans a full three years, until suddenly Amber is a senior and he’s almost done with his tour.

Michael’s the first person she tells when she’s accepted into the University of Maine. Maine, Oregon right outside of Portland and he writes that he laughed for a good day and a half when he thought of his little carnivore surrounded by vegans shaking their fingers at her devouring a sausage. She doesn’t know where he’s learned so many trivial facts but he’s right, when she looks it up Portland is one of the biggest vegan hotspots. Inside she warms at the fact he called her ‘his.’

He’s the first person she tells when Stacy and her brats move out. Amber relishes in describing the big blowup that resulted when her grandparents find out. In some convoluted way she still didn’t understand, they’d introduced Dad to Stacy and were really banking on their relationship working out.

They might have succeeded too, if Mom hadn’t finally gotten her crap together and come back for them, begging and crying and telling Dad how much she still needed him.

Almost four years after their divorce, Mom was moving back in.

Michael wrote her a long letter that time, mostly about how he was so happy for her, but how she couldn’t let her parents happiness dictate her own feelings because that was the quickest way to get sucker-punched.

Michael gets leave to go off base but he never comes back and she knows his parents disowning him hurt more than he’ll admit.

Senior year there’s a class trip for the entire debate team and it’s no coincidence she convinces everyone that Sydney Australia is the place to be.

He’ll be there for a few days, he says, maybe. And that maybe is enough. She hasn’t seen him in so long and she misses him like a physical ache. Like an addict jonesing for a drug or a dieter for cake.

She’s changed so much, actually grown boobs along with her hair. Her face is fuller now too, because the full onset of puberty apparently thought she’d do better with a couple extra pounds everywhere not just her chest. She wants him to see her because secretly she thinks he might still be envisioning that same little kid of four years ago and she’s not that. She loves him, completely, totally, and she wants to see where that might take them if he thinks of her as an adult.

She’s eighteen years old, he’s twenty-one.

A month after they’ve confirmed everything he writes her to say he won’t be going to Australia after all, his plans have changed. Just those two lines, curt and abrupt, the shortest thing he’s ever written except for that once when he said “base is killing me, I miss home so much” on wrinkled, crinkled paper shoved haphazardly into an old envelope smeared with her address and name. She still doesn’t know how the mailman read it well enough to get it to her.

She hides her disappointment and responds back with a simple, “okay.” His next missive is equally as terse and brief, one word on a postcard of some place she’ll never be: “thanks.”

His response is longer when she tells him how Mom screws it all up again and gets caught in bed with some man she met at the mall.

But by then Amber’s eyes are blurry with tears and she can barely read what he’s said through the haze.

She’s still going to Australia but it’s not anywhere near as exciting as she’d thought it’d be. Truthfully, if she hadn’t already paid for her ticket, out of her own pocket no less, and reserved a room in one of the most expensive hotels, under the mistaken overly optimistic impressions that she wanted to give her virginity away to Michael on as close to a thousand count sheets as she could, then she wouldn’t have even bothered going at all.

Chapter Three

Amber is drinking at the harbor, staring out over the crystal blue water impassively as she tries to make her body just finally relax. She’s moved further down the dock from the chattering crowd of mingling tourists clicking and clacking away at their digital cameras and camera phones, excitedly saving this moment for posterity.

She doesn’t want to remember this moment for longer than it takes to have it much less for posterity.

Amber sips at her drink and calmly stares at the ocean. She’s not sure if it’s entirely legal to be drinking in public like this, she has the vague sense that it’d at least be frowned upon if she were back in the U.S. but she can’t tell what the rules are in sunny, laid-back Sydney. She’s just turned eighteen years old and this is Australia so she’s legal to drink. So many things don’t apply here that would have been big deals back home.

Amber brushes her dirty blonde hair out of her face uselessly, the wind whips it back up to sting her eyes a moment later. Her martini glass is cold in her palm, a nice solid weight to balance out the muddled feeling she has in her head like if she doesn’t pay attention she just might float away. This trip has been relaxing, yes, but her problems and worries didn’t just ground themselves when she boarded the plane. They’re right there with her in the back of her mind waiting for her guard to drop. She really needed this trip but it’s not enough to file everything away and smooth her life clean.

There’s a tingling under her skin and the slow thump of her heart is deep and reverberates through her veins like an ominous note playing on a B grade horror flick right before the girl is snuck up on from behind and—

Amber jumps and her apple martini splashes over her bare forearm as she’s jostled from behind.

The crowd has found her and people mill around from all sides. Sourly, she transfers her glass to her other hand and shakes off the spill. The woman who’s bumped her has moved across the way and now reclines in the arms of a taller man. Amber glares harder and turns away before his bending down results in a lover’s kiss.

Who would have thought Sydney was such a freaking lover’s retreat?  Like that’s what she needs to be seeing. Amber’s never really liked crowds this large to begin with but especially not now when she hadn’t expected to have to deal with them—wasn’t this dock supposed to have been attached to a military base? What’s so fascinating about that anyway?

The only good thing is their eager chatter overlaps the circles and circles of thought going around in her head. Excepting the happy couples, it’s almost better than this self-solitude thing she was trying out. In all the movies, the poor young girl always travels to a far off place to re-center herself. But maybe in her case it was a bad idea to try and escape. She’d thought she’d needed different. Different accents, different side of the world, different plane of existence. But maybe it would have been better if she’d stayed and just thrown herself into the distraction busy work brings. Silence certainly hasn’t been working. Not really. But then there’s not a manual for what to do after your Dad catches your Mom in bed with another man, again.

And after four years of acceptance was swept away in the vain hope that maybe her family could actually be fixed, everything is turned upside down and shattered. Again.

More people push in close, a little boy jumps up and down on the balls of his feet shrieking excitedly out at the ocean and instead of settling him down his mother looks equally beside herself as well. There are dots on the horizon, little gray blobs that aren’t close enough for her to make out but other than that just the same clear blue lapping waves.

Curiosity overcomes her.

“What’s going on?” She has to raise her voice above all the noise to be heard. Amber turns to the young mother but she’s already engaged in conversation with some other acquaintance, a man to Amber’s left answers instead. He points to the boats and shouts something that’s lost in the wind and the screams of happy gatherers. She follows the gesturing finger anyway. Slowly the blobs glide on in, gaining shape and mass as they do and she realizes they’re ships. Writing appears on their metallic gray sides she can make out after a few more minutes. The big one in the center has bold white letters that identify it as “USS Bonhomme Richard.”

The name sounds vaguely familiar but Amber is just as lost. It’s not until a sailor in full uniform fades into view as the distance between them is steadily shrunk that she realizes what’s going on. Oh, the sailors.

She leaves soon after on a ferry out of Garden Island and back to the main land; the crowds are too thick and the tenuous peace she’s gained is lost despite her earlier thoughts that loud, raucous activity does better for her broken heart.

She doesn’t entirely bury the whole theory though. Instead she lets it take form in a different way. She’s staying at some fancy hotel resort she paid for with the money she’s saved up for school but it’s so filthy, stinking upscale she’s afraid of every tiny little thing she touches. She’s a country girl at heart and she wants to
relax
tonight. Amber finds herself alone at a local dive bar—though she wonders if it’s called a pub like she’s read they do in England—and the dim lights and wooden floors that have seen better days before scratching boots and heels had the chance to scuff them up, it eases something inside.

There are sailors at the bar, all decked out in uniform bright eye-blinding whites trimmed with deep navy blues.

It makes her think of Michael and she pushes the thought away. She’s never seen him in uniform. So it’s really just the general fact she’s always liked a man in uniform and nothing to do with him.

It’s the thought of strength tempered by trained force, the idea of shouldered weight and responsibility on proud backs and the authority with which they command. It’s attractive in a way that sets her pulse fluttering and makes her stomach heavy with arousal warm and liquid.

She sidles up to the youngish guy furthest away from the rest of the pack. She’s never had to pick up someone, she hasn’t even dated, and it’s more nerve wrecking surrounded by a crowd.

She’s already drunk. Stupidly, sloppily, out of character off her ass drunk when she sees him. He reminds her of Michael. Just a little. But then every attractive man reminds her of Michael. Especially when they’re not her normal type of reedy and thin, with a penchant for comic books and super-heroes who wear their underpants on the outside of their pants.

Her best female friend, Ashley, has a theory about that. She thinks Amber only lets herself get attracted to geeks because subconsciously she knows she’ll never fall in love with them, they’re not Michael, so how could she? Maybe she’s right. It doesn’t matter.

Something draws her to the sailor at the bar though and she lets herself be swept away.

His blond hair is wild and ruffled like he’s run his hands through it a few times too many and he’s nursing a beverage the same shade as her name. He looks young and troubled and more than anything she wants to wipe that expression away because she sees it too often in the mirror on her own face.

Amber takes a deep breath and adjusts her dress—short, to the point, with every inch hugging her generous curves, especially the ones provided by her push-up bra. “Hi,” she says in her sexiest, breathiest voice.

He glances up briefly with a small smile that doesn’t reach his eyes, “Hi yourself.”

She stops trying to be sexy when she’s startled by the lack of an accent. “You’re American,” she says. “I thought I was the only one.”

He shrugs a little and takes a drink from his glass. “We’re finishing up training with the Australian defense. We’ll be gone again in a couple of days.”

She feels as if the game’s been lost before she even began playing it, and awkwardly crosses her arms underneath her breasts.

“Oh,” she mutters sullenly down into her folded arms.

The bartender comes around and she waves and orders “whatever” the sailor is having. The burning sting as it rolls down her throat and sears at her intestinal lining reveals it to be Jack. Amber blinks her eyes rapidly and swallows it back anyway. She’s been drinking nonstop for most of the day and she feels a little lightheaded with both the alcohol and the bitter disappointment. Was it really so much for someone to want her, just for a little bit?

On the bartender’s second rotation her sailor drains his glass, clears his throat and stares at her thoughtfully.

“You here with someone,” he asks her, and she wonders if it’s safe to answer truthfully. There’s not a soul in the world that would miss her for the next 48 hours, maybe even longer than that. She’s on her senior year class trip and the chaperones are more concerned about boning each other than performing an accurate head count. Especially since she’s gotten Mom to sign off on her being able to stay at a different hotel, separate from where her classmates reside. Amber suspects she only did it because she’s still miserably, pathetically, apologetic. But whatever works, right?

Besides the sailor’s military, that’s just like being a cop, right? And an officer of the law is the safest person for a dedicatedly single and all alone young woman to admit things to, right? She swallows back a giggle, adding on the thought ‘or do’ like it’s that fortune cookie game where every fortune was concluded with the words “in bed.”

“I mean romantically,” he modifies when it takes her too long to think of an acceptable answer.

Amber orders another glass and shakes her head. “No,” she admits after she’s downed her second round. “I’m not with anyone.”

She bites down when the ridiculous
“how about you”
wants to press its way free. He’d arrived on a freakin’ ship of course he’s not there with anyone ‘romantically.’

Her sailor nods and his green-gold eyes soften a bit, they’re so very familiar she’s forcing the thought of Michael away.

He doesn’t press her with any of the obvious follow up questions most boys might. Instead he asks “do you want to be?”

A third round arrives and she drinks that too, which she probably shouldn’t since it’s already hard to follow the conversation with her blood practically pickling in all that booze.

It takes her an embarrassingly long time to realize what he means. But it’s okay, he’s patient and she gets it and when she tells him, “yes, I do,” softly firm despite the wobble in her voice and the bright pulse of nerves—she’s never had a one night stand before; she’s never had an any night stand before, Christ, what is she doing? She’s never even had
sex
before.

He takes her back to his room.

* * * *

The sailor lives on the ship she saw earlier that day, rolling in like a big aquatic beast coming to conquer whatever it sees. If she were a little less drunk she might have been able to hide how freaking awesome she thinks that is. But alas, Amber and grace part ways when sobriety takes a nosedive off of the cliff of ‘Stupid Shit I’ve Done While Drunk.’ Luckily he finds her ‘oo’s and ‘ah’s charming, or at least there’s a small smile on his lips that looks fond and placating.

When she falls into him, bobbling on her four inch heels, he automatically steadies her with one arm around her waist. He feels good pressed against her side, his warm body pouring off heat into her thawing nerves. She beams at him and he leans in to place a quick press to her mouth that barely counts as a kiss, nuzzles her cheek with his own and drags stubble across her smooth flesh.

“That’s it, you’re too pretty a girl to look so sad,” he rumbles into her ear whisper soft.

Amber pulls back from him, opening eyes that have fluttered shut. “What do you know about it?” she asks and she’s genuinely curious.

A roughly callused hand cups her jaw, fingers rubbing at her cheek and neck as he keeps her gaze steadily connected to his own intense judgment. Or maybe she’s seeing things, the world is soft and blurry around the edges even with her pounding heart pouring oxygen rich blood back into her soggy veins and clarity of mind along with it.