Page 9 of Bewitched By the Sea Monster
“Oh c’mon, babe. It’s thehottestvacation destination.Everyone’sbeen talking about it for the last few years.Youhadto have heard of it.” His smile drooped.
Niverwick Isle.
Ihadheardof it. Sure, I had. Like he said, everyone was yapping about it. It took my brain a while to register it because it was so far down on the list of places we’d talked about visiting that it wasn’t evenonthe list.
Niverwick was an island—aremoteisland—so shrouded in magic, nothing workedthere. No cars, TVs, cell phones…nada. Zilch. Anything made after the year 1900 or so would fail to operate.
That included boats. Visitors had to take a big ole fashioned sail ship to get to the island.
Here was where there was a tiny—teeny—smidgeon of a problem.
Ships sailed on the ocean. And this ship would drop people off at a slab of rocksurroundedby ocean.
And y’know who wasterrifiedof the ocean. Like, staring-at-waves-on-TV-too-long-caused-palpitations kind of terrified?
This girl.
And you know what made the oceaneven scarier?
The star attraction of Niverwick Isle.
“Supposedly spring is the best time to go too,” Jackson prattled on. “Nessie’s supposed to be more active. A few of the guys at work reckon the beast gets horny come spring.” He chuckled. “Suns out, dicks out. Y’know? Probably true, I guess. There is only one Loch Ness Monster, so my man probably does start hankering for some pussy after pounding off to his own hand—er—claw—er—finall winter.”
Nessie.
The Loch Ness Monster.
The big, phallic-shaped sea dino who’d once been lobbed off as a prank. A hoax, staged by a bunch of drunk Standie Scotsmen trying to splash themselves on the front page, or fabricated by a drunk sailor who’d peeped Free Willy’s willy bobbing atop the sea and thought he’d discovered a new monster.
Either way, Nessie was always called the whiskey monster—that onlyreallyexisted at the bottom of a bottle. Until it’d been found—for real—a few years ago, chilling by a small hunk of land in the North Sea—a place that emanated so much magic, it killed any scrap of technology that came near it. A jumble of rocks and trees now known as Niverwick Isle.
Nessie was the reason the isle became the talk of the town. The reason people siphoned more than $10Kfrom their bank accountsfor a week’s stay.
Nearly every person in my life wanted to go to the isle, but not a single one could afford it. Jessa lamented at least once a month that the Niverwick experience would be forever out of her reach.
If the price was all-inclusive, maybe it wouldn’t have been so terrible. But no. That $10K price tag got you aroomfor a week.If you wanted food or drinks, you could pick from one of the two overpriced restaurants on the isle. Activities and tours were extra. And there was zero option to stay for less than a week to cut down on costs because the ship only sailed on Sundays. So you had to book from Sunday to Sunday. No exceptions.
And if someone had a medical emergency while on the island? Lucky for them, there was a health clinic on site. Most insurances wouldn’t cover the stay though, since it was run by Sorcerer Healers instead of Standie doctors.
This was anexorbitantlypriced vacation destination. No bones about it. The kind only rich folk could enjoy.
And here was Jackson, telling me all we had to pay was the air fare. And a fewextras.
“Babe?” Jackson huffed. “Did you space out on me?”
I blinked, realizing I’d been staring at our fridge, and tilted my chin back to him, plastering a smile on my face. “A little. I think I’m just…”
Confused.
Disappointed.
“Overwhelmed,” I said.
Jackson beamed and drank the last of his wine. “Weren’t expecting to come home to this, were ya?”
“No…” I dragged theoout slightly.Nooooo.“This is?—”
“Huge. Right?” He jittered.
