“When you’re making fun of me?” I joke.
He frowns. “Oh, I take making fun of you very seriously.”
I pinch his nipple and he yelps. “I mean it.”
“I mean it too,” he says, wincing.
“Who’s going to run your business?”
“My manager can handle it. He’s been running it all this time I’ve been gone, and it’s the end of the season now anyway.”
I’m having a hard time believing this. “You would actually do that?”
He nods. “Won’t even go home, Gingersnap. I’ve started to realize what home feels like is wherever you are.” He smiles at me, his eyes crinkling. “Tomorrow I’ll call the airlines, change my flight.”
“Ohhh, maybe we can get a Skycouch!” I say excitedly. Put that other couple to shame.
“Whatever you want,” he says. “As long as we’re together.”
I lay my head down on his chest, listening to his heart beat steadily, grinning against his skin.
The future still seems a little hazy, but at least I know to not be afraid of it. To rise up to the challenges ahead, no matter how difficult, to let myself smile through the good, and cry through the bad.
I just know I won’t be alone in it.
We’ll face the future together, whatever it holds for us, one sunrise at a time.
Epilogue
Tai
Three years later
“Are you ready?”
Daisy sits on the pontoon opposite me, all shapely in her wetsuit. Combined with the scuba mask on her face, she looks like a hot frog. Actually, hot-frog Daisy is one of my favorites. She’s in her element, which means she’s in her scuba gear and about to plunge into the ocean.
“I’m ready,” I tell her, sticking the regulator in my mouth.
I’ve been ready for this for a long time. Three years, to be exact.
It’s dusk, and the sun is going down. I had suggested to Daisy that we do a night dive, since I’ve never done one of those before, least not here at the Leigh Marine Reserve. This is where the University of Auckland has their marine campus, overlooking Goat Island (a place that Wilson would enjoy). Daisy is in her second year of marine sciences at the university and is absolutely thriving in the program.
It’s a Friday night. Usually the two of us are curled up on the couch at the beach house we’re renting on Bream Bay, our dogs snoozing at our feet. It’s about half-way between Russell and Leigh, where the campus is. Since the program she got into was north of Auckland, we figured the easiest thing to do was to rent a place together between the yacht charter and her school, so that I could still work and she could attend her studies.
When she graduates, then we’ll move into my place back in Russell. Or perhaps we’ll go elsewhere. We’ve got a big enough nest egg now to have a lot of options. Even though I had to sell a few boats to pay for Daisy’s tuition, the boat business is booming. After our shipwreck made the news, Deep Blue Yacht Charters became a household name. I had assumed that the event would have soured people on sailing, but I guess any publicity is good publicity.
Daisy says it’s because I’ve been on TV a lot, talking about it, something to do with my movie star good looks, blah blah blah. Regardless, there’s even some sailing reality show that our local Channel 2 wants to do with us. Daisy is completely comfortable with the spotlight, but I’m not. We’ll have to see.
Either way, we’ve decided to let our future be as fluid as possible, planning the bare minimum and going with the flow. Any bumps or setbacks in our way, and we know we’ll get around them together.
I guess you could say it’s one of the good things that came out of the whole shipwrecked ordeal. Actually, after all was said and done, only good things did come out of it.
Yes, losing my ship hurt. I’m not going to lie. I loved that boat, spent a lot of years taking care of it. But she didn’t go down without a fight, and in the end she protected us when it mattered. I can take pride in having had that ship, and I have hundreds of memories to draw upon.
A lot of those memories were some of the last I would have with her.
A lot of them involved Daisy.
I remember her trying to make eggs during a particularly rough morning, the waves slamming into the boat just as she was flipping them, and they landed right on her head.
Then there was the way she gasped when she first saw the night sky.
How she’d talk, talk, talk during those long night shifts, waiting for the dawn, and how I pretended to hate it. But I didn’t.
The way she’d try and do her yoga when she thought I wasn’t looking.