Page 47 of The Sailor in Polynesia
He tweaked my nose. “Sorry. What can we do to put you to sleep?”
I sat up and stretched my back, twisting and turning, popping my spine. “Nothing, I’ll stay up for a little while until I feel like sleeping again. We get in tomorrow; it’s not a big deal.”
“Does your back hurt?”
I rolled my neck. “I get stiff from sitting up here and hunching over my book. I had some better pillows out here, but they got moldy while the boat was stored in Apataki. I need to go shopping.”
Jonas put a strong hand on my neck and rubbed the muscles on both sides of my spine. I rolled my head forward, stretching the muscles while he kneaded. We were both silent for a few minutes.
I broke the quiet. “How were you so calm today?”
“With the leak?”
“Yes.”
He shifted behind me. “These things will only be better with calmness and thought. There is no reason to panic.”
“But that wasan emergency. We were sinking. I can’t get over how calm you were.”
“The more important to stay calm.”
We were quiet again, and Jonas added another hand, moving to rub his thumbs further under my harness. I could feel my body relaxing more, and I took some deep breaths, trying to feel heavy and tired so I could sleep.
“What was Liam like, when you had an emergency?”
Jonas’s question took me off guard, and I didn’t want to answer. I didn’t answer for a moment, trying to gather my thoughts and figure out what to tell him. He didn’t push me, at least metaphorically. His hands were awesome, though.
“There was a lot of yelling. Liam, well, he hated when things went wrong. And things were a lot worse when I made a mistake.”
He gave my neck an extra squeeze. “We all make mistakes.”
A wave of relief rushed through me that he didn’t comment any more than that. He could have jumped to defend Liam, or he could have brushed it off, but instead he stayed quiet.
“Did he call you names?”
I sat up, only just realizing that I’d been slumped back against Jonas. I spun around to face him. “How did you know that?”
Jonas ran a hand through his hair, tugging it slightly and looking off into the distance. “I have watched all your videos, you know this?”
I nodded in the dark.
He hesitated. “There were a few times where I thought maybe he was joking, or maybe he was not.” I swallowed thickly, my eyes wide. “And there was that time where you did a live video. Just once.”
“You watched that?”
“Ja.”
Jonas was talking about the one and only live session we did. It was supposed to be a Q and A about our refit, and our channel had just had a big surge in subscribers. We had had about five hundred people watch live. The fact that Jonas was one of them shouldn’t have surprised me: it was a smaller community than you’d think, and when Liam and I separated, several people had referenced the video while theorizing about our split.
I’d had to take the video down immediately. People were too unpredictable—Liam was too unpredictable. Some troll had made a crude comment, and Liam had swiftly spiraled into name-calling and yelling. It was humiliating and the moment when I stopped reading comments. From that day on, Liam had pulled further away from the filming aspect of our life. That quickly led to resentment, since it was our best source of income.
I didn’t know what to say to that, but Jonas pulled me back closer to him and thankfully dropped the subject.
We talked for hours. He told me about growing up with only Eivind and his mom, and I told him about my big, loud family. He spoke fondly of his brother, and I told him about all the family drama. I stayed up way past the end of my shift, but I didn’t mind. I could sleep when we got to Tahiti.
Around two thirty, Jonas kissed my forehead and sent me downstairs. I didn’t want to leave him.
I lay in bed, smiling, rethinking the entire day and running it through my head. My mind kept replaying my favorite parts of Jonas, and combined with the restlessness of being on a small boat for a few days, I was fidgeting too much to fall asleep.
