For a long time, resting on one elbow he stared down at her.
“Hey,” he finally said. “My name is Neil. I’m in bed with you.”
Tears welled up in her eyes, then she closed them and a grin appeared on her face.
“I guessed as much,” she said.
“The least you can do is say hello,” he continued, loving her smile and bending to kiss the tears in the corners of her eyes.
“Go away,” she said, reaching up to put her arms around his neck and hold him close.
“Never,” he replied, coming over on top of her. “Never,” he whispered.
From the moment Jeanne drew Neil down on top of her and opened her mouth to his kiss, their desire, so long restrained, exploded in a series of passionate caresses and couplings that followed one another without words, thought, or conscious intent. The necessity of silence imposed by their unspoken concern for the sleeping Skip and the more distant Frank seemed to add to their sensual intensity. Occasionally they would emerge from their sexual universe to find themselves nose to nose staring at each other as if each had awakened from some unbelievably joyous dream. Their eyes would speak a brief acknowledgment of their jointly created miracle, but their mouths, as if afraid to break the spell, remained wordless. Then they would lose themselves again in fierce intertwining.
“Living God, Jeanne…” Neil finally whispered when exhaustion finally left them sated but still joined, back in a more normal world.
Jeanne, again beneath him, simply smiled up at him.
“Yes…” she said.
Up in the wheelhouse Tony and Macklin sat by themselves in the dim light falling from the kerosene lamp, Macklin smoking, Tony sipping at some rum he’d bartered for earlier. Frank and Olly were below, sleeping. Although Katya had returned, Jim and Lisa were still ashore. Tony and Macklin had seen Neil follow Jeanne down into her cabin, but for the last fifteen minutes they had been talking about Neil’s plans for the raid.
“The trouble is,” Tony complained, “even if we raid the pirates and get some decent food, it just means more endless sailing.” In the month since the war Tony had lost all his fat and was now muscular and slender. His boisterousness had given way to almost constant irritability. He and Katya had quarreled again a few minutes before, and it didn’t help matters that she had compared him unfavorably with Neil. To give Jeanne and Neil privacy, Katya had gone aft to sleep in Neil’s cabin.
“That’s all there is, Tony,” said Macklin quietly. “We’ll never be safe until we’re in the Southern Hemisphere. Vagabond’s the only way for outcasts like you and me to get there.”
“Maybe,” said Tony, “but I’m not sure I want to spend the rest of my life as a cabin boy.”
“Oh, yeah, that,” said Macklin, grinning. “That we can probably change.”
“I’m getting a little tired of waiting,” said Tony, starting to pace back and forth.
“As long as Neil and Frank are together you and I will be cabin boys,” Macklin went on. “Let’s face it, right now no one needs us. They have Neil. He’s hardass enough to get them to save themselves. Without him they’d flounder.”
“Without him they’d need me… us,” said Tony.
“Yes, without him.”
Tony stopped in front of Macklin, who was sitting with his accustomed heavy composure.
“I don’t notice us doing much about it,” Tony said.
“They’ll do it for us,” Macklin replied quietly, “if we give them enough time.”
“Do what?”
“Split the boat apart. Send Neil packing. You don’t think Frank is going to let Neil stay on board once he finds out he’s balling Jeanne, do you?”
Tony looked uncertain.
“I don’t know,” he said. “Frank likes Neil, and if Jeanne went with him…” He paused. “He’d sure enough be pissed though.”
“Unfortunately,” said Macklin, “Frank seems determined not to see what’s going on.”
“Why don’t we tell him?” asked Tony.
Macklin sat very still. Then he took out a cigarette, lit it, and took a long toke.
“Beats me,” he replied.
Frank, bone-weary, nevertheless staggered out of his berth when Tony told him there was some trouble between Neil and “a woman.” Confused, half-asleep, he had felt an instant flash of anger, convinced that Neil was hitting on Jeanne, but before he could ask for further clarification, Tony had disappeared.
Slipping on a pair of shorts and taking a flashlight, he stumbled up out of his cabin and went aft to Neil’s cabin. He knocked on the hatch, then slid it open. Flashing his light down the ladder, he was startled to see Katya’s bare legs and then her questioning face. She pulled a cover over the rest of her body.
Frank’s first take was relief: so Neil was balling Katya, he thought. He was glad. But when he saw that the man in the berth was Olly, snoring peacefully, Frank blinked uncertainly.
“I’m… ah… looking for Neil,” he said.
Katya blinked up at him. “He… went topside to check on… the anchor,” she replied.
“Oh.”
Frank closed the hatch and walked into the wheelhouse.
“Have you seen Neil?” he asked Macklin, who was sitting against the mizzenmast with his feet stretched out on the settee. “Tony said something about some… problem.”
“He’s in bed,” said Macklin.
“No, I just checked there,” Frank said.
“In bed with Jeanne,” said Macklin indifferently.
Frank stayed where he was, turning the light off to leave himself in relative darkness. He felt fear. Unexpected and powerful fear. He walked reluctantly to the port cabin, hesitated, and then banged his fist down three times on the sliding hatch, like a judge gaveling for order. There was no response from inside. In a small burst of breeze Vagabond swung slowly off to port in the darkness, swinging on her anchor. Frank hammered three more times on the hatch.
“What is it?” he heard Jeanne finally say.
“I’m looking for Neil,” Frank said harshly, even as he entertained a strong momentary hope that Macklin was wrong. Then he heard the sound of someone landing with a thump on the cabin floor.
He waited.
In another few seconds the hatch slid forward and away from him, a figure came quickly up the ladder and stopped on the top step, three feet away. It was Neil. After a pause he came out into the cockpit and confronted Frank. In the wheelhouse behind them Macklin was turning up the kerosene lantern, and its dim glow fell across Neil’s bare chest. He was wearing only his swim trunks. Frank stared at him, Neil returning his gaze steadily. Then Frank saw on his shoulder a long black strand of Jeanne’s hair.
“You goddamn son-of-a-bitch,” he said automatically.
“No, Frank,” said Neil. “I’m… sorry…”
Frank swung his fist with the same instinctive rage that had brought out the curse. The blow struck Neil solidly in the side of the head, sending him reeling to his. right and tumbling into the cockpit seat. There he sat for a moment, stunned, his body turned sideways to Frank, touching the left side of his face.
“You heartless, selfish son-of-a-bitch,” Frank said, his fists clenched at his side. Neil looked up at him, anger in his eyes too.
“Selfish, Frank, not heartless,” he said.
“How dare you take advantage of that woman when she… she…” Frank wanted to say “she’s mine,” but the words stuck in his throat and he felt an urge to cry.
“I’m sorry,” Neil said. “But sometimes something becomes more important than loyalty to a friend.”
“A goddamn fuck!?” he shouted at Neil.