“Oh my God, that would be awesome!” she responded, clasping her hands together. I was torn between being happy for her because she was happy and pissed off that he, instead of I, had said something that made her so happy. Even after the dressing room fuck, I was on edge. I was seriously fucked up. Once Raine disappeared into the washroom, I went outside to get some air. John Paul apparently noticed.
“Hey, you want one?” he asked quietly. I leaned heavily against the porch railing and moved my eyes from the harbor lights to the pack of Marlboros he had in his hand.
“Fuck, yes,” I said as I took one from the pack and lit up. I drew on it heavily and turned around, leaning my back against the railing.
“You doing all right?” he asked.
“I guess.”
“You’re kind of quiet,” he noted. “Not sure what I expected, but this isn’t it. Or is this just you sober?”
I chuckled.
“Nah, I’m just not sure what to think right now.”
“Been an interesting couple of months?”
“You could say that.” I took another puff, then another. “Fuck, I’m getting an actual nic buzz off this thing.”
John Paul laughed.
I finished the smoke and tossed the butt into the street.
“What happened to The Oblation?” I asked, not completely sure I wanted to know.
“Underwater earthquake,” John Paul said without missing a beat. “We were basically right on top of it. It wasn’t a big one, but it was enough to cause the wave that knocked us over when it first hit. There was a second one about five minutes later, which flipped us back but took the mainsail with it. Combine that with the rainstorm, and we didn’t have much of a chance, especially not at night. I couldn’t see a fucking thing.”
“Did everyone else get to the lifeboats?”
“Most of them,” John Paul said quietly. He looked away for a minute before turning back to me abruptly. “The bodies of two of the passengers were found the day after they picked us up, near the wreckage. They looked for you for a week, figuring you’d drowned, too. It wasn’t until divers finally found the wreckage that we realized the inflatable wasn’t there, and everyone started looking for that.”
John Paul stopped and turned to me, his eyes intense.
“I didn’t know, man. I didn’t know you were on that piece-of-shit emergency raft. We almost didn’t even put that thing on the ship! If I had known, Bastian…fuck…I would have tried to find you that night. I thought you were in one of the other lifeboats. It was a day and a half before the coastguard picked us up, and you weren’t there. Holy shit, I just about had a fucking heart attack.”
He looked like he was going to cry or something.
“John Paul, it’s all right,” I told him. “You couldn’t have known.”
“I should have fucking looked. The radio on my lifeboat wasn’t working, the fucking piece of shit. I just assumed you were on one of the others. I didn’t know…fuck, Bastian…I’m sorry.”
“Don’t fucking apologize,” I said, sounding more harsh than I really meant. “I don’t blame you for any of this shit. Besides, it’s not like it was all bad.”
”Yeah, I got that idea.” John Paul shuffled his feet and stared at the ground for a minute, and then looked back up. “So…you and Raine are a thing, huh?”
I stared at him for a minute, trying to figure out what he thought of the idea, but his expression wasn’t giving anything away.
“We’ve been through a lot.”
“No shit.” John Paul eyed me for a moment. “You told her everything, didn’t you?”
“Why the fuck would I…” I stopped, realizing he already knew. I don’t know how he knew, but he did.
“Did you figure it would help?”
“What would help?”
“Saving the daughter of one of the victims. Did you think it would make the nightmares go away?”