Page 4 of Sail Away
Which, they were.
Sort of.
She’d known Kim on and off for years. She’d actually recommended Kim for this crew when, about two weeks before the start of the season, they were still looking for someone to round out the interior, and Kim had just finished working on a vessel in Southern California. They weren’t best friends, but they were colleagues and they got along well enough. And Kim had known how Darcie felt about Jim and her concerns about his wandering eye.
Well, it wandered right to Kim.
“She’d like to talk to you but says you won’t respond to her texts.” Milia stood by the stairs leading down to the main salon.
“I have nothing left to say to her.”
“She has things she’d like you to hear.” Milia fiddled with her ponytail.
“I’ve heard them all,” Darcie said, taking a step to the right.
Milia followed. “You can’t help who you fall in love with.”
Oh, for fuck’s sake. Not this lame excuse for why his dick just happened to fall out of his pants and land inside her crotch.
“It’s not like she wanted this to happen. She actually tried to stop it. She asked him to back off more than once.”
Darcie inhaled through her nose and let the breath out slowly through her mouth. She’d learned this little anger management trick from her sister-in-law. “Since you enjoy being in the middle of shit, why don’t you go run down there and remind Kim that Jim, her boyfriend, the man she proclaims to love, was slipping between my sheets and hers for at least a good two weeks. And I’m sure Jim said he wasn’t doing the nasty with me anymore, but I bet if we pulled out our calendars, we’d find some crossover fucking going on.” Darcie leaned in. “How do you think Kim is going to take that juicy little piece of information?”
“Why do you have to be so hurtful?”
“I don’t want to be. That’s the point. But if you keep this up, she’s bound to figure out that Jim’s lying about the fact he and I were still fooling around when he started doing it with your bestie.”
“I don’t know that to be true. You said so yourself you and Jim were on the way out.”
Darcie really didn’t want to hear another word of this utter bullshit.
“She just wants to clear the air. And not for nothing, the rest of us have to work with you. Maybe it would make it all a little easier if you had a sit-down with Kim and Jim. Like fucking adults,” Milia said.
“Jesus. Kim and Jim. They sound like a damn candy bar or something,” Darcie said, shaking her head. “No. I’m not doing a sit-down with the cute couple. You forget. Kim knew about me and Jim and she chose to sleep with him anyway. That’s a pretty low thing to do.”
“Darcie, Darcie, Captain Jim. Can you meet me in the bridge before our tip meeting?”
She tapped her earpiece. “On my way,” she said. “You can tell Kim I’ll talk to her once I’m done with Jim. But just her. I’m not talking with the two of them, got it?” She’d lost her fucking mind. Shaking out her hands, she tried to calm her pulse as she made her way to the boat’s cockpit. “You wanted to see me?” She set her radio down on the counter. She’d done her best to ignore Jim for the last month, and he’d done the same with her, but she had to admit the tension on the boat had become unbearable.
“I wanted to talk to you privately about two things. One personal and one about our next charter. Which do you want first?”
“You do like to shoot straight from the hip.” She chuckled. “Let’s get the personal shit out of the way.”
He ran a hand through his hair and leaned back in the captain’s chair. “I’d like to say I’m sorry. However, me apologizing for acting like a child at this point wouldn’t do any of us any good.”
“Oh my. Were you actually considering it?” She blinked a few hundred times and lowered her chin. She could handle working with Jim on a professional level, no problem. But being in the same space with him and shooting the shit?
That would just give her diarrhea of the mouth, which would lead her to saying something stupid, and that might piss him off enough to fire her.
“Why do you have to be like that?” he asked. “It’s not like you and I were having some great big love affair. We were just having some fun. That’s what we both said.”
“I agree, but you should have been a decent human being and—oh, why am I even bothering? Let’s just put this crap aside. I know I can.”
“But you haven’t.”
“Well, neither have you. Or do you want me to give you a laundry list of how you’ve treated me the last month since you and Kim became the king and queen of the Sound?”
“No. I’m perfectly aware. But I could do the same to you and this sarcastic attitude of yours has to be left on the dock. I feed off it, and it’s just bad.”
