Uncharted Waters (Getaway collection), page 4
Ella could barely reply. Luckily, Chloe helped her out.
“It’s only fair to give Meera a shot at it,” Chloe said. “Maybe you should skip this one, head to bed?”
“I am quite tired,” Ella agreed. She stood and walked with Chloe to the top of the spiral staircase, where she paused. “But for what it’s worth, my money’s on Magnus.”
This time, Ella kissed Chloe. As their bodies strained against each other, Ella felt desperate with arousal, faint with it. There was no hesitation, no pausing. No shadow of a doubt as to what they both wanted. Ella ached to be touched in a way that she couldn’t remember aching. They fell onto the bed as one, removing their clothes between kisses. Ella’s hips rose as Chloe peeled off her underwear and rose again at the first touch of her mouth. She opened to her—the ultimate soul connection—soothing and intense, comforting and euphoric. Intimate and otherworldly. Never ending but over in seconds.
Afterward, as she lay on Chloe’s bare chest, Ella thought of today’s quote.
The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes . . .
It occurred to Ella that she disagreed with this. Seeking new landscapes was important too. After all, without new landscapes, she thought, what was the point of journeying at all?
“A sailor is an artist whose medium is the wind. Live passionately, even if it kills you, because something is going to kill you anyway.”
—Webb Chiles
Today’s Challenge: Let Go of What Is No Longer Serving You
It was day four of the charter, and as usual, the guests had relaxed into the routine of things. They had also, as usual, broken into smaller unofficial groups. This time, Karl and Magnus had buddied up with Stephanie and Vanessa, Jonathan and Meera had stuck close to the staff, and Ella and Chloe had become an inseparable unit of two.
They spent the day snorkelling and kayaking at the Pinnacle and Lighthouse Bommie, stopping only to eat lobster rolls served with lemon and dill. The energy between the two of them was electric—the current that charged through Ella whenever their bodies touched, the feeling she got when she’d steal a look at Chloe and find her already looking. Every so often Ella found herself wondering if Mac had felt this way.
“What are you going to let go of?” Chloe asked that evening. She was referencing the day’s challenge: to let go of something that was no longer serving her. It was very late, well after midnight, and they were tangled in their sheets, eating the Doritos that had been left in the room with the bottled water. Ella could feel a Dorito crumb digging into her hip.
“Hmm,” Ella said. “Something that is no longer serving me . . .”
“Fidelity?” Chloe suggested, rolling to face her.
Ella laughed.
“I’m serious.” Chloe propped her chin in her palm. “Are you going to tell your husband about . . . this?”
Ella had no idea. She’d kept this relationship entirely separate from him in her mind. Now she imagined it. I had an affair, Mac. With Chloe. The woman you had an affair with.
“I’m not saying you should,” Chloe said. “You don’t just want to blow up your marriage after ten years together. I guess I just . . . wanted to get a read on where your head is at.”
“Honestly,” Ella said, “my head is here, on this boat. I haven’t given much thought to what happens when we get off. I guess I should start thinking about it.”
She paused. “Did I tell you we’d been together for ten years?”
A couple of beats passed.
“You must have,” Chloe said. “How else would I know?”
For a split second, Ella’s mind drifted back to the moment she found out about the affair, and her suspicion that Chloe knew something. She tried the idea out in her mind again, to see how it felt. But it was too ridiculous. If she did know, what was her plan here? To get the ultimate revenge on Mac by sleeping with his wife? To break up his marriage so she could get him back? To sleep with everyone with the last name McAllister? It was too far-fetched. It couldn’t be real.
Besides, she’d told Chloe everything else about herself. She must have also told her this.
“Yes,” Ella said finally. “Yes, I must have told you.”
The next few days should have been the saddest, most confusing of Ella’s life. Instead, they were some of the best. She swam and snorkelled during the day, and her nights were spent cushioned in her little bubble of euphoria with Chloe. She felt completely safe and held—free from the need to make any decisions. It was a little vacation from her life. Ella hadn’t realised how much she needed it.
“A man is never lost at sea.”
—Ernest Hemingway
Today’s Challenge: Count the Blessings in Your Life
On the seventh day, the crew set up a makeshift beach club on a private beach. The group swam and snorkelled and kayaked, laughing at Meera falling off the Jet Ski before deciding she wasn’t the kind of person to ride Jet Skis. They’d delighted in Joyce’s food and had attempted to avoid Captain’s challenges.
In the evening, Ella and Chloe lay together, rocking gently with the waves. It had become part of Ella, this sway, the past few days. Now, she moved her body to allow for it, to accommodate it. In the morning, when they got off the boat, the still earth would feel strange under her feet. The solidness of it. But before long it would feel normal again, and the sway of the ocean, foreign. Funny how that happened.
“After tomorrow, we won’t see each other again,” Chloe said. She smiled, but her expression was sad.
Ella felt a stab of guilt, which of course was madness. She felt guilty for sleeping with her husband’s mistress. The funny thing was, suddenly she felt a closeness to Mac that was even more profound than before. Was it possible that by hurting someone in the exact way they’d hurt you, you could become even closer to them?
“I’m sorry.”
“Please don’t apologise. This time, I knew what I was getting myself into.”
Ella didn’t know what to say to that. Luckily, after a few seconds, Chloe continued. “So you’re happy with your husband then?”
“I thought I was.” Ella paused for a moment. “I mean . . . our relationship isn’t perfect. But there are a lot of good things about it.”
Chloe rolled to face her. “Like what?”
“I don’t know. Just . . . the way we are together, I guess. The way Mac knows what I want before I ask for it. The way I know he’ll be kind to people and treat them with respect. The history we share. The way we know each other so well and still like each other.”
Chloe nodded silently.
“Sorry, is that awful of me to say while I’m lying here with you?”
“No. It was honest. Thank you for that.”
It wasn’t, perhaps, the best way to end the conversation, but it was late, and Ella found herself getting sleepy. When Chloe yawned, Ella decided to give in to it and let her eyes close. Tomorrow, she was going back to the real world. To her life. She was sad for the vacation to end. But something about it ending felt right too. That was, after all, what vacations were meant to do. It was in those few seconds before sleep overcame her that Ella heard it. A tiny, faint click, like someone taking a photo. Ella registered it, then immediately lost interest, assuming it had come from another cabin.
“All right,” Captain said. “Let’s go around the table and talk about what you’ve learned on this charter.”
It was their last group breakfast, and as was customary, it was time to share what they’d learned.
“I called this a YOLO trip when I introduced myself,” Stephanie said. “But it occurred to me over the past few days that we don’t actually only live once. I’ve lived many times. Before children, and after. Before marriage, and after. Before cancer, and after. Before this charter, and after. I hope I live many more times and take advantage of every one.”
“I learned that new friends are as good as old friends,” Vanessa said.
Karl learned that the Great Barrier Reef had the best snorkelling in the world. Magnus learned that the word thong meant “sandal” in Australia. Jonathan learned that he liked oysters. Captain didn’t seem particularly pleased with those answers, but he let it slide.
“I learned that things aren’t always right and wrong,” Meera said. The scrunchie, Ella noticed, was back in the steward’s hair, but Meera had the good grace to look shamefaced. “Sometimes there are more shades of grey to situations than you might initially think.”
“I learned to be changeable,” Chloe said. “To let go of things that aren’t serving me and appreciate what is right in front of me.” She smiled shyly.
Finally, it was Ella’s turn. In the past, Ella had always felt anxious about this part of the charter and agonised over what she’d say. But this time, she didn’t even give it a moment’s thought.
“I learned that I disagree with you, Captain,” she said. “You said this charter was a voyage. I think that life is the voyage. This is the vacation.”
Captain opened his mouth.
“It’s not a criticism,” she said. “Quite the opposite, actually. Frankly, I had no idea how much I needed a vacation.” She looked at Chloe. “And I’ll go home forever changed by it.”
An hour before they got off the boat, Ella and Chloe sat in the cabin together.
“Would you have wanted to see me, after we got off the boat?” Chloe asked. “Had you not been married?”
“What do you think?” Ella said.
As she hugged Chloe goodbye, Ella was flooded by feelings about another life she may have shared with Chloe, had things been different. Had Mac had similar feelings when he said goodbye to her? Was it as real for him as it was for her?
A little while later, when Ella stepped off the boat and felt the solid ground under her feet, it didn’t feel strange. She was back where she was meant to be.
Chloe’s plane sat on the tarmac, waiting for its turn to taxi to the runway. As the attendants walked up and down the aisle handing out bottles of water, she alternated between looking out the window and looking at the phone on her lap.
A week ago, she’d boarded the Lady Emerald with the intention of seeing Tom. Mac. Confronting him, with his wife by his side, perhaps, or maybe just making him suffer through seven days of having her watch them, not knowing when or if she was going to drop the bombshell. It was a stupid idea, she could see now, but in the middle of her pain and heartbreak, it had made sense. It didn’t make sense now. Captain would be pleased to know that she was no longer the same person who had stepped on that yacht seven days earlier.
She wasn’t a stalker. Mac had told her about the yacht charter. He had told her the name of it and that they went in the first week of September every year. The fact that he hadn’t thought to hide this information was another indication that she was an aberration. If he was the type to have affairs with reckless abandon, he’d have been better at hiding things. Over the past few days, she’d come to realise that he was probably the nice guy she’d fallen for, rather than the evil philanderer she’d built him up to be in her mind. He’d made a mistake, that was all. Everyone did sometimes.
When he didn’t get on the boat, she’d assumed neither of them had come. Perhaps they didn’t come every year, as he’d said. Or perhaps they’d rescheduled?
Then Ella introduced herself.
Chloe wished she could remember her feelings for Ella before the moment she found out who she was. It was evident immediately, of course, that she was a beautiful woman. A smart, interesting, funny woman. There was no denying that the chemistry she felt with Ella was palpable and the feelings she developed were real. But were those feelings tangled up in the fact that Ella was Mac’s wife? Was that chemistry fuelled by a desire to hurt, destroy, or even continue her connection to him a little longer? She didn’t know. Probably, she never would.
The plane started taxiing toward the runway.
Whatever it was, when it became clear that Ella didn’t know about the affair, Chloe knew she couldn’t tell her. She had tried once, had even started to slide a note under her door on the first evening, but then she withdrew it. It was clear from the beginning that she was never going to leave Mac. Ella loved him. Chloe understood because she loved him too. She also knew the relationship with Ella would never make it off the boat, and that by ending up with neither of them, she’d be the loser in this scenario. At the same time, maybe, by taking a small piece of each of them, she’d manage to leave an indelible mark on both of them, making sure she’d never be erased.
As the plane picked up speed, she looked down at her lap again, at the photo of them, in bed, wrapped around each other. She’d taken it last night after Ella had fallen asleep. As a keepsake, she’d told herself at the time, even though it wasn’t entirely true. While she’d been lying there, it had occurred to Chloe that there was a way to hurt Mac. Chloe may have become a different woman than she was seven days ago, but she was still human. She hovered her thumb over the photo, then pressed “Send.”
A few seconds later, the plane took off. Back to the real world.
Mac was standing beside his car in the five-minute zone outside the double doors at the airport. He waved to her. Mac always waved with such enthusiasm. A real wave rather than a gesture to catch her attention. But this wave was tentative, almost nervous.
“Welcome home,” he said as she dragged her bag over to him. “How was it?”
Mac had always been terrified of upsetting the traffic controllers at the airport. In the past, when he’d picked her up at the airport, he barely greeted her before loading her luggage into the boot of their station wagon and shouting for her to get in.
Today he didn’t so much as reach for her bag.
“Intense,” Ella said finally.
“Oh yeah?” he said. “How so?”
Ella tried to read his expression. It was curiously blank.
“Oh, you know, Captain’s hippie stuff,” she said, dragging her own bag to the back of the car. Finally, Mac took the hint and opened the boot, putting it inside as Ella walked around to the passenger side.
“I jumped off the top deck,” she said when they were sitting side by side in the car.
The surprise on his face was rather rewarding. “No way.”
She shrugged. “Faced my fear.”
“Wow. I’m impressed.” He put on his indicator and glanced over his shoulder. “So . . . what else? Eye-gazing? Mantras? Affirmations?”
His voice was casual, but he kept stealing glances at her. It was as if he knew something.
“More like . . . self-expression,” she said carefully. “Self-compassion. Cultivating empathy.”
“Oh.” Mac moved into the next lane and merged onto the highway. “Was that as awful as it sounds?”
“No, actually. It was exactly what I needed.”
Suddenly Ella noticed that a takeaway coffee cup sat in the cup holder.
“Chai latte from Augustus,” Mac said. “I thought you’d need your fix after a week away.”
He stole another glance at her, and this time she got a different feeling. She felt something move in her chest.
“Well.” Mac was quiet for a moment. “Sounds like Captain’s mumbo jumbo did its job.”
“Yes,” Ella said, picking up the latte. “I think it did.”
Mac was quiet for a moment. “Does this mean you’ll be taking the charter without me again?”
“No. Once is enough for me.”
They came to a traffic light, and Mac turned to look at her.
“And you too, I hope?” she added.
Ella may have been imagining it, but it felt like understanding travelled between them.
“Yes,” he said. “Once was definitely enough for me.”
“Good,” Ella said. “Then let’s go home.”
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Photo © 2021 Mrs Smart Photography
Sally Hepworth is the New York Times bestselling author of seven novels, most recently The Younger Wife. Sally writes incisively about family, relationships, and identity. Her novels have been translated into twenty languages.
Sally Hepworth, Uncharted Waters (Getaway collection)
