“No sunburn,” Greta calls out as they pass her.
Ben looks at her with amusement. “Another fan of yours?”
“Something like that,” she says.
There’s a large crowd waiting for the elevators, everyone talking excitedly about the sea lions. Without discussing it, Greta and Ben turn and start climbing the red-carpeted staircase.
“So can I ask…” he says, looking sideways at her. “What was that back there?”
Greta sighs. “You know that game Taboo, where you try to avoid saying a certain word or phrase?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, you said it.”
“Me?” he asks, surprised. “What was it?”
“Told you so.”
He frowns. “You told me…not to say it?”
“No, that’s it. That’s the phrase.”
“I’m confused.”
“It’s the title of one of my songs,” she says, breathing harder as they round another flight of stairs. “My first big hit.”
“Ah,” he says, understanding passing over his face. “And it’s about your dad.”
“Yes.”
“I gather it’s not a love song.”
“Not exactly.”
He nods. “How bad was it?”
“The song or the fallout?”
“The fallout,” he says. “I assume the song is great.”
“It is,” she says with a smile, and decides to leave it at that.
She stops walking when they reach the seventh-floor landing. Ben does too.
“This is me,” she says, nodding down the endless hall of doors.
When they turn to face each other, she realizes how tall he is, and without quite meaning to, she thinks about the logistics of kissing him, whether standing on her toes would be enough, or whether he’d have to meet her partway. It’s true he’s gotten more attractive with each drink—the easy smile, the warmth in his eyes, the way he sits forward when she talks, like he’s not only listening but absorbing everything she says—but it makes no sense because he’s still technically married and she’s still technically a mess, and the only reason this is even crossing her mind is because they’re both drunk and alone in the middle of nowhere. In the real world, on dry land, in the light of day, they’d be completely wrong for each other.
As she stares at his lips, she finds herself thinking of Jason, then of Luke, then of Ben’s wife back home with his two daughters. The boat is tilting beneath her feet, and it’s hard to tell what’s alcohol and what’s the ocean, what’s real and what’s not. She puts a hand on the wall to steady herself, and Ben looks startled by the movement. Something flickers in his eyes, but she’s not sure what it is. He clears his throat.
“I think,” he says slowly, “that Future Ben would be really mad at Current Ben if he didn’t ask if we could hang out again.”
Greta feels a wave of relief, and then, before she can fully examine this, a rush of pleasure. She gives him a bleary nod. “I’ll be around.”
“Good,” he says, taking a few steps backward. “Then I’ll find you.”
“Thanks,” she says, already heading down the hall, and though she knows this is the wrong thing to say, the response not quite matching up to the statement, it’s also true. She’d like very much to be found.
Chapter Ten
Sometime after midnight, the cabin phone rings. Greta’s muddled brain is so convinced it’s the alarm clock that by the time she knocks that to the floor—the red numbers blinking off, the windowless room going inky black—the ringing has stopped.
It starts again a few seconds later, and she picks up this time.
“I’ve been quarantined,” says the voice on the other end, and it takes Greta a few seconds to formulate a question.
“What?”
“Quarantined,” he repeats. “In my room.”
“Why? What happened? Are you okay?”
Her dad sighs heavily. “My stomach has been funny, so I called to see if I could get a refund on the cannery tour tomorrow, and apparently the cruise ship people panic when passengers don’t feel well so—”
“The cannery…？”
“In Juneau,” he says impatiently. “We’re supposed to— You know what? Never mind. The point is that I’ve been quarantined.”
The ship rocks steeply from side to side, and Greta squeezes her eyes shut, thinking that she shouldn’t have had so much to drink yesterday.