Page 86 of Crossing the Line
He shut down his laptop and wandered over to Waverly.
“Ready for that swim?” he asked, nudging her bed with his foot.
She dropped the book and smiled. “Let’s go.”
He let her lead the way up the flight to the upper deck and around the port side to the stairs to the sun deck.
While he shed his shoes and his shirt, Waverly studied the small pool pensively. “I don’t think we’re both going to fit in there,” she decided.
“You’ll just have to make do,” Xavier told her. He draped his shirt over a lounger and nearly had a heart attack when he saw her climbing the rail.
He plucked her off and spun her around. “What the hell are you doing?”
“There’s a lot more room in the sea, X.”
“If you want to swim in the sea, we can walk down four flights of stairs and you can jump in from the very nice swim platform on the stern.”
“First of all, there’s an elevator we could use instead of the stairs—”
“Of course there is.”
“Secondly, the swimming isn’t the point. It’s the jumping.”
Xavier peered over the side. In his young and dumb youth, he’d jumped off cliffs with a shorter fall than this.
“You’re not jumping.”
“Jump with me. Come on,” she pleaded when he started to shake his head. “Don’t you want to feel a little self-induced danger for once? I’m tired of feeling afraid. I want to jump off the side and years later still have this memory to pull out and enjoy. I’ll text you wherever we are then when I think about it, ‘Hey, X, remember the time we jumped off a yacht together?’”
He was already going to have to crush her life’s dream about college. Maybe he could give her this. He admitted the idea of being a treasured memory to her stroked his ego. If he couldn’t claim her, he could at least claim a memorable moment in her life.
“I can’t believe I’m considering this.”
“What will metaphorically push you over the edge?”
He grumbled. “Call the captain, find out how deep it is, and if we’re likely to die on impact.”
Waverly squealed and clapped her hands. She danced away to a white phone mounted on the wall.
He looked over the side again. Had the ocean gotten farther away? This was crazy. He was crazy. Crazy about her. She’d talked him into a motorcycle ride careening up the coast. Now, all she had to do was blink those sea witch eyes at him, and he was trussing them both up as shark bait.
Shit. He should have had her ask the captain about shark activity.
She skipped back over to him. “We’re at sixty feet right here. Perfectly safe!”
“I highly doubt he used those words.”
She ignored his sarcasm. “They’re deploying one of those floating trampoline platforms off the stern so we can swim back to it and lay out.”
“If we’re not eaten by sharks first.”
“Don’t be such a baby, Xavier. Get your ass up there on the rail!”
They climbed over together and stood, knees quaking.
Waverly didn’t look scared, she looked energized.His little adrenaline junkie, he thought. So many years without any control over her own life had made her hungry for choice, for action, maybe even for consequence.
She looked at him, eyes glittering with excitement. “Trust me, X?”
