Secrets of the Sea

Chapter 15

I used to dream about waking up to Peter kissing me. He’d be leaning over me, his light brown hair hanging messily around his face, his lips gently, softly pressing against mine. But that dream was long gone. Unfortunately for me, though, when I woke up from my second near drowning experience, I didn’t remember that. So after gasped in all the air that I possibly could, so much that I thought I would explode with oxygen, I kissed him back with passion.

            He hesitated at first, surprised, then kissed me back fiercely.

            Then I remembered and broke his nose, causing blood to freely flow out of his nose and my shoulder wound, where I took the dagger that was meant to cut the binds off of Nat’aniel’s hands.

            Peter had yelled and fallen backwards, gripping his face. Then he smiled at me.

            “I’d have my nose broken again and again just to get another kiss like that,” he said. I would have been livid, but his nasally voice made me laugh. Plus, the pain he went through sort of made up for it.

            Now we were seated next to each other in rowboat painted black, with a black tarp stretched over it so we would be practically invisible even though we had a lantern lit under the roof.  Peter and I were swaddled in blankets. Peter had stripped off his outer layers of clothing but I couldn’t, especially not with the four other young men, two in the front and two in the back, who were rowing the boat and kept stealing glances at me.

            Another young man sat on the other side of Peter, repeatedly dousing his bullet wound with alcohol.

            “For heaven’s sakes, quit it!” Peter snapped at him.

            “I have to do this to make sure all the parasites are gone!”

            “They are!”

            “How do you know?”

            “Because I don’t feel any little bugs gnawing on me from the inside out anymore.” And with that, Peter grabbed the bottle of rum that the man was pouring on him and chugged the rest of it down his throat, wrapping a protective arm around me, which I shrugged off.

            I tried to ignore them and pretended to be mesmerized with the lantern in front of me. Its glow looked so warm and so soft. It was as if I could just reach out and hug it to make me warm. Then I tried to make myself warm by imagining I was warm like the lantern, which sort of worked.

            I could feel Peter staring at me. We hadn’t really spoken since the…what shall I call it? The incident? Yes. The incident. I must talk to him privately, tell him that that was just a really big mistake and I was delirious from almost dying.  It was believable.

            “You’re cold,” he said.

            I shrugged. “So are you.”

            He shifted closer to me. Then he wrapped an arm around my shoulders again and hugged me close to him. I didn’t fight back this time.

            “How’s your shoulder?”

            “It stings.”

            “Here, let me see.” Peter peeled my shirt down me shoulder and took the bandage that he wrapped on earlier off. It was filled with salty water, and kept the saltiness pressed against my shoulder, keeping it stinging. Peter poured some fresh water on it and the relief was instant. I glanced down at my shoulder then winced and looked away. The skin around was pale and bloated around the wound, which wasn’t bleeding anymore because of the water.