01-12-2021, 06:15 PM
Part 3: CHANGE OF PLANS
We fell asleep after that, and when we woke up it was about 9 pm and Wasim and Neha were in their suite. It was impossible to know if they had guests over or not, so Shweta and I giggled as we tried to figure out how to cook something in the kitchen, which was surprisingly convoluted considering that the boat could almost sail itself. Shweta lay on the couch on the deck while I hopped over to the marina bar and obtained some take-out sandwiches for us.
It was a beautiful night, yet again, and pretty fun lounging around on the deck with Shweta. We found the hammock and giggled some more trying to string it up, found some beers and took a break to drink them, and then figured it out on the next round. Then we swung in the hammock as we watched the stars, which were glorious. We were both asleep again in no time.
I woke up because I was cold as hell. I wrangled myself free of the hammock and looked around for some blankets. I finally had to drag the covers from our room upstairs, but I never got back to sleep after snuggling back in. By then it was dawn and seagulls had begun screeching away for the marina to get busy dispensing their breakfast.
Wasim hopped onto the deck and waved good morning to us, then offered to make us some coffee.
We drank it in the hammock while Wasim hopped around on the boat, performing a weekly check of the automated systems, the winches and the cleats of his boat. I snuggled with Shweta, our feet hanging off the hammock, and thought about how it was the perfect day so far. The vacation couldn’t have been going any better than it was: my wife was aroused and wanted to have sex all the time, she liked the boat, and I was on my way to a better love life, maybe even a sexual fantasy, and at the very least a rekindling of our marriage – which like anyone’s had gotten a little stale. I was almost 100% I was going to have her blessing to get my own boat, and that she would join me enthusiastically in adventures on the –
“FUCK!”
Wasim yelled from the bow, and it was no ordinary yell from a man like Wasim. Not an “I’ve fucked something up” or “something is out of place” yell. This was a “kicked in the balls” yell.
I leaned forward to get out of the hammock, which we were sitting in facing the stern. When I looked back at the bow of the boat, Wasim was nowhere to be seen.
That’s when I started to put together all the seconds before, and remembered the slight movement of the yacht right before he yelled…
I made my way quickly to the bow and looked over the edge.
Wasim was on the dock, and the sight was horrifying. “Shit,” I said.
His leg was clearly broken. The femur. His face had already gone white with shock and another awful yell was building up from behind his anguished features. “God DAMMIT! FUCK!” he screamed.
I looked back at the hammock. “Get Neha!” I yelled at Shweta. My logic had taken several leaps: I didn’t know what the emergency number was here, and I didn’t have a phone. Neha was actually pretty boat-savvy and good in stressful situations, and she surely had some idea.
Just then, someone in a marina uniform came running down the dock. “He needs a doctor!” I said. I climbed over the pulpit, and that’s when I realized what must have happened to him – he either fell or stepped wrong off the bow.
I looked back down at his leg and then paused, taking my time to make sure I didn’t end up with the same fate. His leg was twisted at such a terrible angle – no bone protruding but it was somehow warped and obviously broken. I felt queasy for a second and then I closed my eyes and pulled my shit together.
“Call Ambulance!” I repeated. “He needs an ambulance.”
I dropped onto the deck and crouched by Wasim, who was hyperventilating now.
“Wasim, buddy,” I said, gripping his shoulder. “Look at me. You gotta calm down.”
Wasim just yelled, loudly.
It seemed like forever, while a small crowd grew and I tried to talk Wasim into calming down because I had no idea what kind of first aid to administer to a person with a broken femur. Neha came and held his hand, and then a man pushed through claiming to be a doctor so we all backed off.
He was assessing the injury when the paramedics arrived – in the end, they came quite quickly, even though it seemed like hours as Wasim sat there growing pale and yelling in absolute agony. They gave him some morphine and then they told him they were going to straighten his leg.
They packed him up and the ambulance left with Neha in it. “I’ll call you..” she said vaguely.
We watched them leave.
“What the hell happened?” Shweta said. “Jesus.”
“I think he just… stepped off the boat wrong...” I looked up at the bow. Shweta followed my gaze, and so did the onlookers who remained on the dock.
The small crowd degenerated into tales of medical trauma, and so Shweta and I listened for a bit and then faded away aft to board the boat. We sat down, stunned, on a seat in the navigation area.
“I can’t fucking believe it,” Shweta said.
“Me either.”
“What do we do?” she asked. She looked around. “I mean… I guess we just wait, right? To hear from Neha? Or do we go to the hospital?”
My phone rang some time after that. It was Neha.
She sounded pretty shaken.
“He’s in radiology right now,” she said. “I don’t… no one can tell me anything – excuse me, excuse me, nurse?” Neha interrupted herself to ask the nurse where radiology was. She breathed back into the phone. “I don’t….”
“Do you need us to come down there?” I offered.
Neha paused. She seemed ready to cry. “I don’t… you know, can you get the, I forgot his insurance stuff, can you get it and bring it down here?”
“Can do,” I said, trying to be cheerful. “I’ll just… where is it?”
“It’s, um… gosh, I think it’s in our room under the – sorry? Yeah, just a second – I have to go now, it’s in our room in the brown bag, I think, I’ll… I’ll text you in a bit or, you do that if you don’t find it...”
There was lot of talking on the other end of the phone, and Neha was confused as she was confusing.
“What hospital?” I said.
“There’s...what? There’s only one,” she said. “I have to go.”
“Shit,” I said, pocketing my phone.
Shweta looked worried. “Well… let’s go. She stood up and headed to the deck.
We got dressed quickly – Shweta in a white sundress that looked stunning on her, cutting sharply between her breasts and quite short. I wanted to complement her but it didn’t seem like the right time.
I found Wasim’s insurance cards in the brown bag, exactly as Neha had said.
We walked quickly to the information center at the marina and asked how best to get to the hospital. The attendant called us a cab and we headed into the town in the heat.
The simple beauty of the island near the marina soon gave way to the stark reality of Maldives living: heat swelled up around us as we headed inland, the buildings deteriorated, evidence of hurricanes cropped up in piles in abandoned lots. There was a whole reality in which people had to actually live their lives.
The sight of it was jarring. Luckily it was only about seven minutes to the hospital.
We found Neha in a waiting room, who was relieved to see us but still had no information.
Then we waited for about two hours.
Neha leaned on her knee and let out a sigh. “Guys,” she said. “It’s awesome of you, but you don’t have to wait here. Why don’t you go back, have some lunch, and I’ll call?”
“No,” Shweta said, though her voice betrayed her desire to do exactly that. “We couldn't -”
“No really,” Neha said. “Wasim wouldn’t want you sitting around here. Go – make sure the boat’s okay, and maybe pay up for a few days extra at the marina?”
So we went back at her insistence, and then I decided to take her some lunch. “You should stay here,” I told Shweta. “I think Wasim would feel pretty bad about ruining your vacation. I’ll be right back. There’s nothing you can do, anyway.”
Shweta was torn. Hospitals gave her the willies, but she didn't want to be a jerk.
I smiled. “Wasim wouldn’t sit around waiting for you,” I said. “He’d squeeze in a dive or something.”
Which was true.
This seemed to console her, so she agreed to stay and pay the marina, get some groceries, and tidy up the boat for his return.
When I got to the hospital, Neha was nowhere to be found. I sat down in the waiting room, which had burgeoned with locals in the time we’d been gone, and I sent her text.
After about ten minutes she came down a hallway and scanned the room. I held up my hand and she came over to me, hurrying. She seemed flustered.
“What’s up?” I said. I held the Tupperware contained with a sandwich and salad out to her. “We made you some lunch.”
“Thanks,” she said, pushing her hair from her face. She set it aside and shook her head. “I can’t eat.”
“What’s going on?” I said.
She exhaled and blew her hair from her face. “It’s a really bad break,” she said. Her eyes were getting teary. “He needs surgery. They can’t do it here. They’re getting a med evac going and getting him prepped.”
“What?” I said. “You have to be kidding!”
She shook her head. “I, um… there are so many things to do. I have to -”
“Is he up? Can I talk to him?” I interrupted. Neha shrugged. “Not now. He’s pretty out of it. They can’t set the bone without a vascular surgeon or something.” She took out her phone and answered it.
“Yes. Oh, thank God, thank you for calling me.”
She pushed her hair away from her face as she listened to whoever was on the other line.
“Oh,” she said, finally. “Sahil, Jesus, thank you… what else do I need to -”
Neha looked more relieved with each passing second. She held her hand to her heart. “Thank you. Oh, wow, thank you so much… that’s, above and beyond. We… well, you know we’ll make it good with you in Male. Thank you, Sahil.”
“Who was that?” I asked, when she held the phone silently, staring at the screen.
Neha shook her head. She looked noticeably less tense. “These are some guys we hire sometimes to sail our boat. They called right back, they’re going to do it, and they booked, or, got a flight for me and everything on a cargo plane that will leave whenever I want to go so I can get there at the same time as Wasim.”
Oh yeah. The boat. There were so many details that were falling out of the sky on us.
“What do you need us to do? Should we go back to Male?”
Neha looked at me. “God. You won’t believe this, but just before Wasim got knocked out by the fucking morphine, do you know what he was saying?” She laughed, and wiped a tear from her eye. “Not, ‘I love you baby,’ or anything like that. He said, ‘Make sure Shweta and Piyush stay for the whole trip. Piyush needs to get that boat.”
She employed a deep voice to imitate Wasim.
What a guy.
“That’s… no, we should just go back with -”
Neha held up a finger. “No. I’m serious, this is what he said. Twice. So no doubt you have to do it.”
“But...”
“Look, this crew is just two guys. They can run the boat themselves, if, you know, anything comes up. Actually, Sahil could sail that boat himself...” she got caught up in her own thoughts for a moment. “But, basically, anyway… you guys have fun, stay on the boat while they take it back, and that way you only lose a few days off the trip, and we’ll all have a good laugh about this in Male.”
I frowned. “I don’t know, Neha, it’s seems sort of shitty-”
“Nah,” she said. Then she smiled. “He wouldn’t have cut his trip short for you, you can bet on that,” she said. I smiled. “True enough.”
So I sat down with her while she ate and gave me the details of her arrangements.
Shweta was on the deck in her suit when I got back to the marina. There were quite a few guys on their own boats who were unabashedly admiring the view.
And from the way that Shweta had oiled herself up and spread her hair out like a halo behind her, she knew it, too.
I took a moment to admire my wife. Her skin had acquired a faint golden tan in a few days of sun, and the natural blonde highlights in her hair were brighter, giving her hair a very surfer-girl kind of look. Her stomach was flat when she was lying down, and the line of muscle of her thigh revealed that her workouts were paying off. She had one leg up, and the black fabric was snug against her bare pussy, a soft mound hinting at the shape of her cunt. It barely covered her breasts, and she had taken the straps down – though she was not quite brazen enough to take the whole top off.
Neha would have. She did it all the time.
I looked at an older man who was staring openly at her over the deck of his own boat.
I could see he wished Shweta would take it off.
“Stepping on,” I said loudly, though the boat was so big it barely shifted with my weight.
Shweta didn’t stir, other than to lift a hand above her and give me a faint wave.
I went to the deck and stood next to her, admiring the view, my hand on a shroud.
Shweta stretched out. “Oh, I was having the nicest daydream,” she murmured.
“Bad news,” I said, after letting a few perverse thoughts go through my head. “Wasim’s gotta get flown back to the India for a surgery.”
Shweta sat up. A light scarf she had placed on her face slid off. “What?” she said. “It’s that bad?”
“It’s a bad break,” I said. “Complicated.”
Shweta frowned. “Jeez. It was such a… what a crazy accident.” She frowned. “Poor Wasim. When is he leaving?”
“Soon as they get a med evac ready.”
“God,” Shweta said. She shook her head. Then she squinted up at me. “So… what’s he going to do about the boat?”
“Well, he said he has a temporary crew that can get it back to Male,” I said. I folded my arms over my chest. “Thing is, he’s asked me to go along.”
Shweta shrugged. “Can’t you just sail it back there?”
My wife. Still totally clueless about sailing.
I smiled. “I could. If everything went perfectly. But nothing ever does, and if anything breaks, this is impossible to sail solo.”
She frowned again. “This is really a bummer.”
I sat down next to her and picked up a foot. I started to massaged the high arch. “I don’t know,” I said. “I think we can find a way to have fun.”
She propped herself up on her elbows when she leaned back. Her bikini was peeling away from her nipples, and a thumbnail of her areola was peeking out from the top of the fabric. “Oh you do, do you?”
I pressed hard into the sole of her foot, and her eyelids dropped a little in pleasure.
“I do,” I said.
She reclined and spread her hair out behind her again.
“You better watch out,” I said. “There are a lot of men staring at you.”
Her jaw fell open, and she gave me such a serious look of shock that for a moment I thought she was serious. “There are?” she said. Then she fanned herself. “Well, I’ll be.”
I had no idea how to react to this, so I just sat there looking at her with what felt like a very stupid expression on my face. It was halfway between a smile and a look of concern for someone who has hit her head.
“Don’t you feel a little bad… or, should we feel bad about just… going on without him?” she said.
I shrugged. “Neha herself said he wouldn’t wait for us,” I said. “And apparently it was his last wish before they knocked him out with morphine to set the bone for travel.”
Shweta shook her head and grinned. “What a guy,” she said. Then she lifted her other foot so that I could massage it as well. “Well,” she murmured. “We might as well make the best of it.”
And indeed we would.
We fell asleep after that, and when we woke up it was about 9 pm and Wasim and Neha were in their suite. It was impossible to know if they had guests over or not, so Shweta and I giggled as we tried to figure out how to cook something in the kitchen, which was surprisingly convoluted considering that the boat could almost sail itself. Shweta lay on the couch on the deck while I hopped over to the marina bar and obtained some take-out sandwiches for us.
It was a beautiful night, yet again, and pretty fun lounging around on the deck with Shweta. We found the hammock and giggled some more trying to string it up, found some beers and took a break to drink them, and then figured it out on the next round. Then we swung in the hammock as we watched the stars, which were glorious. We were both asleep again in no time.
I woke up because I was cold as hell. I wrangled myself free of the hammock and looked around for some blankets. I finally had to drag the covers from our room upstairs, but I never got back to sleep after snuggling back in. By then it was dawn and seagulls had begun screeching away for the marina to get busy dispensing their breakfast.
Wasim hopped onto the deck and waved good morning to us, then offered to make us some coffee.
We drank it in the hammock while Wasim hopped around on the boat, performing a weekly check of the automated systems, the winches and the cleats of his boat. I snuggled with Shweta, our feet hanging off the hammock, and thought about how it was the perfect day so far. The vacation couldn’t have been going any better than it was: my wife was aroused and wanted to have sex all the time, she liked the boat, and I was on my way to a better love life, maybe even a sexual fantasy, and at the very least a rekindling of our marriage – which like anyone’s had gotten a little stale. I was almost 100% I was going to have her blessing to get my own boat, and that she would join me enthusiastically in adventures on the –
“FUCK!”
Wasim yelled from the bow, and it was no ordinary yell from a man like Wasim. Not an “I’ve fucked something up” or “something is out of place” yell. This was a “kicked in the balls” yell.
I leaned forward to get out of the hammock, which we were sitting in facing the stern. When I looked back at the bow of the boat, Wasim was nowhere to be seen.
That’s when I started to put together all the seconds before, and remembered the slight movement of the yacht right before he yelled…
I made my way quickly to the bow and looked over the edge.
Wasim was on the dock, and the sight was horrifying. “Shit,” I said.
His leg was clearly broken. The femur. His face had already gone white with shock and another awful yell was building up from behind his anguished features. “God DAMMIT! FUCK!” he screamed.
I looked back at the hammock. “Get Neha!” I yelled at Shweta. My logic had taken several leaps: I didn’t know what the emergency number was here, and I didn’t have a phone. Neha was actually pretty boat-savvy and good in stressful situations, and she surely had some idea.
Just then, someone in a marina uniform came running down the dock. “He needs a doctor!” I said. I climbed over the pulpit, and that’s when I realized what must have happened to him – he either fell or stepped wrong off the bow.
I looked back down at his leg and then paused, taking my time to make sure I didn’t end up with the same fate. His leg was twisted at such a terrible angle – no bone protruding but it was somehow warped and obviously broken. I felt queasy for a second and then I closed my eyes and pulled my shit together.
“Call Ambulance!” I repeated. “He needs an ambulance.”
I dropped onto the deck and crouched by Wasim, who was hyperventilating now.
“Wasim, buddy,” I said, gripping his shoulder. “Look at me. You gotta calm down.”
Wasim just yelled, loudly.
It seemed like forever, while a small crowd grew and I tried to talk Wasim into calming down because I had no idea what kind of first aid to administer to a person with a broken femur. Neha came and held his hand, and then a man pushed through claiming to be a doctor so we all backed off.
He was assessing the injury when the paramedics arrived – in the end, they came quite quickly, even though it seemed like hours as Wasim sat there growing pale and yelling in absolute agony. They gave him some morphine and then they told him they were going to straighten his leg.
They packed him up and the ambulance left with Neha in it. “I’ll call you..” she said vaguely.
We watched them leave.
“What the hell happened?” Shweta said. “Jesus.”
“I think he just… stepped off the boat wrong...” I looked up at the bow. Shweta followed my gaze, and so did the onlookers who remained on the dock.
The small crowd degenerated into tales of medical trauma, and so Shweta and I listened for a bit and then faded away aft to board the boat. We sat down, stunned, on a seat in the navigation area.
“I can’t fucking believe it,” Shweta said.
“Me either.”
“What do we do?” she asked. She looked around. “I mean… I guess we just wait, right? To hear from Neha? Or do we go to the hospital?”
My phone rang some time after that. It was Neha.
She sounded pretty shaken.
“He’s in radiology right now,” she said. “I don’t… no one can tell me anything – excuse me, excuse me, nurse?” Neha interrupted herself to ask the nurse where radiology was. She breathed back into the phone. “I don’t….”
“Do you need us to come down there?” I offered.
Neha paused. She seemed ready to cry. “I don’t… you know, can you get the, I forgot his insurance stuff, can you get it and bring it down here?”
“Can do,” I said, trying to be cheerful. “I’ll just… where is it?”
“It’s, um… gosh, I think it’s in our room under the – sorry? Yeah, just a second – I have to go now, it’s in our room in the brown bag, I think, I’ll… I’ll text you in a bit or, you do that if you don’t find it...”
There was lot of talking on the other end of the phone, and Neha was confused as she was confusing.
“What hospital?” I said.
“There’s...what? There’s only one,” she said. “I have to go.”
“Shit,” I said, pocketing my phone.
Shweta looked worried. “Well… let’s go. She stood up and headed to the deck.
We got dressed quickly – Shweta in a white sundress that looked stunning on her, cutting sharply between her breasts and quite short. I wanted to complement her but it didn’t seem like the right time.
I found Wasim’s insurance cards in the brown bag, exactly as Neha had said.
We walked quickly to the information center at the marina and asked how best to get to the hospital. The attendant called us a cab and we headed into the town in the heat.
The simple beauty of the island near the marina soon gave way to the stark reality of Maldives living: heat swelled up around us as we headed inland, the buildings deteriorated, evidence of hurricanes cropped up in piles in abandoned lots. There was a whole reality in which people had to actually live their lives.
The sight of it was jarring. Luckily it was only about seven minutes to the hospital.
We found Neha in a waiting room, who was relieved to see us but still had no information.
Then we waited for about two hours.
Neha leaned on her knee and let out a sigh. “Guys,” she said. “It’s awesome of you, but you don’t have to wait here. Why don’t you go back, have some lunch, and I’ll call?”
“No,” Shweta said, though her voice betrayed her desire to do exactly that. “We couldn't -”
“No really,” Neha said. “Wasim wouldn’t want you sitting around here. Go – make sure the boat’s okay, and maybe pay up for a few days extra at the marina?”
So we went back at her insistence, and then I decided to take her some lunch. “You should stay here,” I told Shweta. “I think Wasim would feel pretty bad about ruining your vacation. I’ll be right back. There’s nothing you can do, anyway.”
Shweta was torn. Hospitals gave her the willies, but she didn't want to be a jerk.
I smiled. “Wasim wouldn’t sit around waiting for you,” I said. “He’d squeeze in a dive or something.”
Which was true.
This seemed to console her, so she agreed to stay and pay the marina, get some groceries, and tidy up the boat for his return.
When I got to the hospital, Neha was nowhere to be found. I sat down in the waiting room, which had burgeoned with locals in the time we’d been gone, and I sent her text.
After about ten minutes she came down a hallway and scanned the room. I held up my hand and she came over to me, hurrying. She seemed flustered.
“What’s up?” I said. I held the Tupperware contained with a sandwich and salad out to her. “We made you some lunch.”
“Thanks,” she said, pushing her hair from her face. She set it aside and shook her head. “I can’t eat.”
“What’s going on?” I said.
She exhaled and blew her hair from her face. “It’s a really bad break,” she said. Her eyes were getting teary. “He needs surgery. They can’t do it here. They’re getting a med evac going and getting him prepped.”
“What?” I said. “You have to be kidding!”
She shook her head. “I, um… there are so many things to do. I have to -”
“Is he up? Can I talk to him?” I interrupted. Neha shrugged. “Not now. He’s pretty out of it. They can’t set the bone without a vascular surgeon or something.” She took out her phone and answered it.
“Yes. Oh, thank God, thank you for calling me.”
She pushed her hair away from her face as she listened to whoever was on the other line.
“Oh,” she said, finally. “Sahil, Jesus, thank you… what else do I need to -”
Neha looked more relieved with each passing second. She held her hand to her heart. “Thank you. Oh, wow, thank you so much… that’s, above and beyond. We… well, you know we’ll make it good with you in Male. Thank you, Sahil.”
“Who was that?” I asked, when she held the phone silently, staring at the screen.
Neha shook her head. She looked noticeably less tense. “These are some guys we hire sometimes to sail our boat. They called right back, they’re going to do it, and they booked, or, got a flight for me and everything on a cargo plane that will leave whenever I want to go so I can get there at the same time as Wasim.”
Oh yeah. The boat. There were so many details that were falling out of the sky on us.
“What do you need us to do? Should we go back to Male?”
Neha looked at me. “God. You won’t believe this, but just before Wasim got knocked out by the fucking morphine, do you know what he was saying?” She laughed, and wiped a tear from her eye. “Not, ‘I love you baby,’ or anything like that. He said, ‘Make sure Shweta and Piyush stay for the whole trip. Piyush needs to get that boat.”
She employed a deep voice to imitate Wasim.
What a guy.
“That’s… no, we should just go back with -”
Neha held up a finger. “No. I’m serious, this is what he said. Twice. So no doubt you have to do it.”
“But...”
“Look, this crew is just two guys. They can run the boat themselves, if, you know, anything comes up. Actually, Sahil could sail that boat himself...” she got caught up in her own thoughts for a moment. “But, basically, anyway… you guys have fun, stay on the boat while they take it back, and that way you only lose a few days off the trip, and we’ll all have a good laugh about this in Male.”
I frowned. “I don’t know, Neha, it’s seems sort of shitty-”
“Nah,” she said. Then she smiled. “He wouldn’t have cut his trip short for you, you can bet on that,” she said. I smiled. “True enough.”
So I sat down with her while she ate and gave me the details of her arrangements.
Shweta was on the deck in her suit when I got back to the marina. There were quite a few guys on their own boats who were unabashedly admiring the view.
And from the way that Shweta had oiled herself up and spread her hair out like a halo behind her, she knew it, too.
I took a moment to admire my wife. Her skin had acquired a faint golden tan in a few days of sun, and the natural blonde highlights in her hair were brighter, giving her hair a very surfer-girl kind of look. Her stomach was flat when she was lying down, and the line of muscle of her thigh revealed that her workouts were paying off. She had one leg up, and the black fabric was snug against her bare pussy, a soft mound hinting at the shape of her cunt. It barely covered her breasts, and she had taken the straps down – though she was not quite brazen enough to take the whole top off.
Neha would have. She did it all the time.
I looked at an older man who was staring openly at her over the deck of his own boat.
I could see he wished Shweta would take it off.
“Stepping on,” I said loudly, though the boat was so big it barely shifted with my weight.
Shweta didn’t stir, other than to lift a hand above her and give me a faint wave.
I went to the deck and stood next to her, admiring the view, my hand on a shroud.
Shweta stretched out. “Oh, I was having the nicest daydream,” she murmured.
“Bad news,” I said, after letting a few perverse thoughts go through my head. “Wasim’s gotta get flown back to the India for a surgery.”
Shweta sat up. A light scarf she had placed on her face slid off. “What?” she said. “It’s that bad?”
“It’s a bad break,” I said. “Complicated.”
Shweta frowned. “Jeez. It was such a… what a crazy accident.” She frowned. “Poor Wasim. When is he leaving?”
“Soon as they get a med evac ready.”
“God,” Shweta said. She shook her head. Then she squinted up at me. “So… what’s he going to do about the boat?”
“Well, he said he has a temporary crew that can get it back to Male,” I said. I folded my arms over my chest. “Thing is, he’s asked me to go along.”
Shweta shrugged. “Can’t you just sail it back there?”
My wife. Still totally clueless about sailing.
I smiled. “I could. If everything went perfectly. But nothing ever does, and if anything breaks, this is impossible to sail solo.”
She frowned again. “This is really a bummer.”
I sat down next to her and picked up a foot. I started to massaged the high arch. “I don’t know,” I said. “I think we can find a way to have fun.”
She propped herself up on her elbows when she leaned back. Her bikini was peeling away from her nipples, and a thumbnail of her areola was peeking out from the top of the fabric. “Oh you do, do you?”
I pressed hard into the sole of her foot, and her eyelids dropped a little in pleasure.
“I do,” I said.
She reclined and spread her hair out behind her again.
“You better watch out,” I said. “There are a lot of men staring at you.”
Her jaw fell open, and she gave me such a serious look of shock that for a moment I thought she was serious. “There are?” she said. Then she fanned herself. “Well, I’ll be.”
I had no idea how to react to this, so I just sat there looking at her with what felt like a very stupid expression on my face. It was halfway between a smile and a look of concern for someone who has hit her head.
“Don’t you feel a little bad… or, should we feel bad about just… going on without him?” she said.
I shrugged. “Neha herself said he wouldn’t wait for us,” I said. “And apparently it was his last wish before they knocked him out with morphine to set the bone for travel.”
Shweta shook her head and grinned. “What a guy,” she said. Then she lifted her other foot so that I could massage it as well. “Well,” she murmured. “We might as well make the best of it.”
And indeed we would.