Cabin Buddies

The waiting area outside the cruise terminal was abuzz with bright new outfits and happy chatter. It was enough to make even the most reserved introvert start to feel a bit of excitement.

I was standing with Jack and Ciara, two regulars of the social group. Jack was tall and rugged, something to do with landscaping; Ciara tall and willowy, worked in an office of some sort. They weren’t an official couple, as far as I knew, but they seemed to have hooked up for the cruise. That was sort of the way the group worked. Thirty somethings, mostly divorced, intent on maintaining the hard playing lifestyle of their twenties, looking for like-minded dating partners to do it with.

Jack was explaining the different cruise drink payment plans. I smiled politely and nodded, thinking how different from theirs my life would be when I got to be their age.

Denise bustled up in a pretty pastel pantsuit with her clipboard in her hand. She was the mother hen of the group, forty-something and no longer trying so hard to pretend she was any younger.

“Hector,” she said, ushering me a step aside, “I’m afraid there’s been a mix up with your reservation. Somehow your single cabin didn’t show up on the final printout.” She gave me a concerned look. “They’re working on it,… but we may have to double you up with someone.”

This came as a bit of a rude surprise. One of the only reasons I’d finally agreed to come on the cruise in the first place had been her assurance that I’d be able to have a single. It wasn’t that I was antisocial really, but I had my limits.

“You know Mrs. Pendergast, don’t you?”

Mrs. Pendergast was an older woman, well into her sixties. She wasn’t a regular member of the group, but it amused her sometimes to hang with a younger crowd. The group let her tag along to some of their events. I was going to have to share a room with Mrs. Pendergast?

“Apparently she got sick and had to cancel at the last minute. So we have an opening. She was sharing a room with”–Denise consulted her clipboard–“a Ms. Crenshaw. I don’t know her, but I’m sure she’s very nice. It’s a double room, and you know how it is on a cruise. You don’t spend that much time in your room anyway.”

I didn’t even try to return her smile.

“They’re still working on your single, of course. I just wanted to let you know the fallback plan.”

Not only losing my single, but having to spend the cruise being polite to an old lady? In Denise’s mind, that was what the social group was all about.

—

People were already starting to go into the terminal building when Denise came back, this time with an attractive young woman at her side. I wondered if it was Denise’s daughter, there to see us off.

“Hector,” she said, peering at me over the top of her glasses, “this is Molly Crenshaw. I’ve been explaining our predicament.”

The girl gave me a weak smile. She was pretty, with shortish brown hair swept back behind her ears, wearing white shorts and a light blue top. She didn’t look like she could be a day over twenty-one. Not at all what I had pictured as a travelling companion for Mrs. Pendergast.

“It’s a double room,” Denise was explaining. “I’m sure they’ll be able to rig up a partition if need be. But this will be the first cruise for both of you. It will be nice to have a buddy to help you find your way around. I’m sure the two of you will hit it off.”

Molly was still looking at me rather uncertainly. This apparently wasn’t exactly what she had signed up for either. She looked back at Denise. “Well… if his other room got cancelled…”

Denise was delighted. The registration mixup had been solved in an efficient and social-group-positive way. I couldn’t believe she was being so cavalier about putting a guy and a girl who didn’t even know each other into the same room together.

“They’re still working on my single though, right?”

“As far as I know. You’ll be able to check with the Bursar once we get on board.”

Denise had more than enough smile for the three of us. They called our area for boarding.

“See you on board,” she said, bustling off with her clipboard.

—

Going up the gangway onto the ship itself kind of blew me away. You entered onto the mezzanine level of what looked like the fanciest mall I’d ever seen. There was an atrium that rose several stories high with glass elevators gliding up and down and fancy shops and glittering lights on every different level. On the floor below us a fellow in a tuxedo was playing a grand piano. All of this right in the middle of the ship. Molly’s eyes were as wide as mine.

They’d told us to have lunch while the luggage was being brought on. Molly and I had come aboard with a bunch of other social groupers, but they’d all buzzed off one way or another leaving the two of us by ourselves. We found a little sandwich and salad buffet.

“So, your first cruise?” I asked. I was pretty sure I’d be able to get the room situation straightened out, but there was no harm in being polite.

She assembled a forkful of salad. “Mrs. Pendergast is a patient at the clinic where I work. She’s pretty chatty, you know. She kept talking about this fantastic cruise she was going on. But she needed a travelling companion to come along and sort of look after her.” She shrugged. “I don’t know, she has a way of getting what she wants.”

“Is she all right?”

“Denise says she’s afraid she might be coming down with something. She’s a bit of a hypochondriac. But the tickets are already paid for, and I’m already here, so Denise said I should just come along on the cruise without her.” She gave her little shrug again and took a sip of iced tea. “Your first cruise too?”

“I’m not really a member of the social group, actually. I went on a nature hike with them one time and ended up on Denise’s list. So now she sends me emails every time she has some big event. She was kind of persistent this time. I think they needed to sign up a certain number of people in order to get a discount or something.”

Molly nodded and stabbed a crouton. “Well, it is a cruise. It should be fun. And it’ll be nice not to have to keep tabs on Mrs. Pendergast all the time. There’s gambling, you know. When we get far enough out to sea.”

“You gamble?”

“Of course. Poker, black jack. Machines mostly, but sometimes at the tables. I have a system. It’s a lot of fun.”

—

After lunch I asked my way up to the Bursar’s office. Molly came along to make sure that everything worked out. The Bursar looked me up in his computer. Apparently, when Mrs. Pendergast had cancelled, they’d looked to fill the vacancy with someone from our same group. I was the only one in a single, so they moved me in to fill her spot and gave my room to someone else. He double checked, but there weren’t any other singles available. He apologized for the inconvenience and gave me my key card.

I was flabbergasted.

“Well,” said Molly, “we might as well go check it out at least.”

We found our way down to the deck where the cabin was located. The room itself was not much bigger than a walk-in closet. A chair, a little night stand, a mirror on the bathroom door, a bed against the wall. That was it. We looked at each other.

“Kind of smaller than I would have thought,” I said.

“Yeah,” she agreed.

I corralled a passing steward.

“Um, we were supposed to be getting a double room?” I showed him the printout.

“Yes, yes,” he said in his helpful foreign accent. “Very nice double cabin.”

“But there’s only one bed.”

“Double bed,” he explained. Then he gestured toward the porthole on the wall. “Ocean view!” He smiled, happy to have been of service, and went on about his way.

Molly didn’t look altogether convinced.

I sighed. “Let me go talk to the Bursar again…”

But she was sizing things up. Sunshine was streaming in through the porthole. Our two suitcases had been placed in a little niche beside the bathroom door, side by side.

“All the other rooms are probably just as small,” she said. “On this level anyway. And they seem to have already given your other room away.” She looked at me. “Do you snore?”

It wasn’t a question I was expecting. “I don’t think so. No one’s ever complained.”

“Well, Mrs Pendergast does, apparently. That’s the one thing I’ve been dreading the most.” She looked back at the room. “I guess this is just what double rooms are like on cruise ships. Maybe it’s not so bad. At least you don’t snore. We’re kind of on an adventure anyway. Maybe we should just try and make the best of it.”

She made it sound as if sharing a room with a complete stranger of the opposite sex was no bigger a deal than sharing a table with him at lunch. She sat down on the edge of the bed and picked up the schedule of the day’s activities as if the issue had already been decided.

“Shuffleboard lessons at three o’clock,” she noted. “Bingo at four thirty.”

I sat down on the chair. So instead of getting a room of my own I was going to have to share this one? Surely there must be some other alternative. What if… what if I asked Denise to ask Ciara to move in here with Molly and let me bunk with Jack? Ugh! I cringed at the thought.

“A magic show tonight in the forward theatre.”

I looked around. How would it even work? The room was so tiny. There was only the one bed.

Molly was studying a map of the ship. “What do you think we should do first?” She’d not only accepted the fact that we’d be rooming together, she was ready to head out and start exploring.

“Um… why don’t you just go ahead on your own? I’ve still got a couple things I need to take care of first.”

I couldn’t tell if she was a bit hurt that I didn’t want to join her. But she shrugged it off. “Well, OK. Then I guess we can just meet back up here later.”

—

I didn’t really have anything I needed to take care of, I just wanted a little time to sort things out. I was pretty bummed that they’d given away my single. And I wasn’t sure how I felt about Molly’s matter-of-fact-ness. Was she really so used to sharing rooms with random guys?

Still, if I did have to share a room with someone, Molly was probably no more objectionable than Jack or Mrs. Pendergast. She was more my age, she seemed pretty easy going. If we’d been thrown together as partners at a workshop breakout session, I wouldn’t have objected.

But sharing insights at a breakout session wasn’t exactly the same as sharing a cabin on a cruise ship. I’d had to share rooms with strangers before, but they’d always been guys. What you did was you put on your blinders, you put up your shields, you went about your business, you let them go about theirs. You tried to be polite. At least that’s the way it worked with guys. Did it work that way with girls too?

I guess I’d find out.

—

The ship must have cast off soon after we came on board, but so smoothly that we hadn’t even noticed. By the time I found my way up on deck we’d already cleared the harbor and were quite a ways out from land. I stood at the railing and watched the waves roll by. I wondered whether I might get seasick, but the deck was as firm and steady as any sidewalk on the mainland.

The ship turned out to be a whole little city unto itself. There was a miniature golf course at one end and a climbing wall at the other. The top deck held two full-sized swimming pools, each already surrounded by sun bathers glistening in cocoa butter. The lower decks held lounges and theaters and eateries and nightclubs. There were shops and kiosks on every level; a sports bar, a wine bar, two piano bars, a margarita bar (“Hi, Jack! Hi, Ciara!”); and any number of different ways to get from any one place to any other: by stairs, by elevator, by main passageway, by side passageway.

Later in the afternoon I sat down at a little coffee shop toward the stern of the ship and nursed a cup of lapsang souchong. Seagulls were gliding along in our tailwind. I’d been making good progress on a couple algorithms at work, and I went over some of the key steps in my mind. It was nice being out of the cubicle for a change, sitting in the sunshine, daydreaming instead of coding, watching the seagulls hover and veer.

My thoughts eventually wandered back to my room situation. I still couldn’t understand why Molly was being so agreeable about sharing the cabin. It dawned on me that maybe she didn’t think she had any other choice. Maybe she thought that since she was only here as Mrs. Pendergast’s guest, she had to do whatever Denise asked.

And so maybe she wasn’t really all that used to sharing rooms with random guys either. Maybe she was just doing what she thought was expected. A fellow shipmate–a sort-of member of the same social group she was sort of a member of–needed a place to bunk. She had an empty spot. Didn’t shipboard etiquette kind of dictate that she offer to share? But then, by the same token, what did shipboard etiquette expect of me?

I finished my tea and ambled back toward the front of the ship. A raucous game of volleyball was taking place in one of the pools. Someone called my name.

“Are you going back to the room? I forgot my card.”

It was Molly. She gave her little shrug. She was wearing a bright yellow bikini. It was fairly conservative, the kind she could wear to the gym, but it called your attention to her shapely legs and her slender tummy. We made our way down the labyrinth of passageways toward our lower deck. The people we passed would have naturally assumed that we were together.

“I figured out about dinner,” she said. “Everybody has an assigned time and an assigned table. Ours is in about an hour. We can go together if you want.”

After a couple of wrong turns we finally found our corridor and our little room. It hadn’t gotten any bigger in the time we’d been away. But there was a fresh bath towel sitting on the bed, folded into a sort of soft-origami swan.

“Look how cute,” Molly said. “The housekeepers must have been in.”

She put her things on the nightstand and fiddled in her suitcase for some clothes. “I’m just going to take a quick shower first.” She went into the bathroom, taking the swan along with her. I sat on the foot of the bed and took a look at the schedule. The walls were thin enough that I could hear the water splashing.

She came out wrapped in the towel. “It’s too cramped to get dressed in there,” she said, trying to sound matter-of-fact. She looked around the room, a bit awkwardly.

So this was one of the guys-and-girls-sharing-a-cabin rules that I wasn’t really familiar with. What was I supposed to do while she got dressed? Step into the bathroom to give her some privacy? Or just ignore her, the way I would if I was sharing the room with a guy?

She wasn’t completely sure how to play it either. She turned to face the mirror, but that only put her sideways to me. So she turned all the way around, facing the outer door. She tried to give the impression that changing clothes in front of a cabin mate wasn’t that big a deal. So I tried to follow her lead.

I didn’t stare, and she had her back to me, but it was hard not to notice what she was doing. She started by putting on her bra, but as she was pulling it up, her towel slipped, revealing the two round, pretty cheeks of her bottom. She quickly pulled the towel back into place, and I quickly forced my eyes back to the schedule. So it was only with my peripheral vision that I was able to see her stepping into her panties and skirt and buttoning up her blouse.

Finally she sat on the chair to fasten her sandals. Our eyes met again. “Dinner is supposed to be smart casual.” she remarked.

I took that to mean that my polo shirt didn’t quite cut it. I’d brought a couple button-down shirts, and so I went over and got one from my suitcase. She nodded approvingly and turned to the mirror, fiddling with her hair. I took off my polo shirt and put on the button one.

—

The dining room was immense, with big round tables like in a reception hall. Molly and I were assigned to a table with some of the other people from our group. I let Molly sit next to Ciara. There was nobody on my other side, which was fine with me. Molly and Ciara found some girl stuff to talk about. The general conversation at the table seemed to be about motorcycles. Denise stopped by to see how everyone was doing.

Molly had the chicken and I had the fish. We resisted the aperitifs, but we both had a glass of wine with our meal. Valentin, our engaging Bulgarian waiter, brought us the chit. We had both just assumed that wine was included in the meal, but he explained that it would be added to our room bill.

“Will they charge it to Mrs. Pendergast?” Molly whispered, afraid they might.

“We’ll figure it out,” I whispered back, signing for both of us.

The magic show didn’t start until eight o’clock, so after dinner Molly suggested we just wander around. She showed me the little art gallery she’d discovered on deck six where it met the central atrium. Photographs of interesting doorways on old, rustic buildings. Just past the art gallery was a little gift shop. We went in, and Molly looked at the jewelry counter. She asked the lady to bring out a necklace that caught her eye. I leafed through the post cards, but I didn’t really have anyone to send one to.

We still had forty-five minutes until the show, so I took Molly up to the miniature golf course. We didn’t bother keeping score. I made a couple lucky shots. Then, on the next-to-the-last hole, Molly’s shot went wild and bounced onto the next green over. It ricocheted off a bumper and coasted down, curving gently, right into the cup. A perfect hole in one into the wrong hole!

“Whoa!” I said. “Remind me never to play you for money.”

She raised her putter and blew on the end as if it were a smoking rifle barrel. “You should see me at pinball.”

The magic show was a lot of fun. The magician wore a black hat and cape and his pretty assistant wore a slinky black dress. They did all the traditional tricks with rings and scarves and giant cards.

Then, for the grand finale, the magician announced that he was going to make his assistant disappear right before our very eyes. He had her stand at the front of the stage with her arms up and out to the crowd. He waved his wand and–Presto!–she didn’t disappear, but her dress did! It was just gone! She kept standing there for a second with her breasts completely exposed and nothing covering her at all except a tiny g-string thong. Finally she realized what had happened. She shrieked, covered herself with her hands, and ran offstage, letting us see that her backside was just as shapely as her front.

The magician was shocked that his trick had backfired. Shocked! But the audience was applauding wildly, and so he turned and bowed. And as he swept off his hat, what should fall out but the assistant’s little black dress. He picked it up and gave us a sly grin.

The assistant came out to take her bow, wrapped in a white ship’s towel just like the one Molly had been wearing. When she saw what the magician had in his hand, she snatched it back from him with a nasty glare. The crowd ate it up. Molly was laughing as much as I was.

—

After the show we went back up on deck and strolled a while in the cool night air. The ship was plowing along through moonlit waves, stars twinkling in the sky. Toward the stern, lively dance music was thumping up from the nightclubs below. We found our way down to check it out. We spotted Jack and Ciara in the hip-hop club amidst the flashing strobe lights and pulsing lasers. Jack raised his glass and Ciara called something we didn’t quite catch.

Further on was the salsa club, throbbing with its own level of intensity. Then came the golden oldies club, somewhat more subdued. And finally a relatively quiet lounge where we sat down and shared a bottle of sparkling water.

“It’s pretty amazing, isn’t it?” Molly said. “I never thought there would be so many different things going on. A whole resort on a single ship! And they can just hoist up the anchor and sail us away to wherever they want to take us.”

I had to agree. “And the way it’s so completely self-contained. I mean, what could we possibly want that they aren’t already completely stocked up on? The whole rest of the world could just go ahead and blow itself up and we wouldn’t even notice.”

—

It had been a pleasant evening. And Denise had been right: it had been fun to have a buddy to share it with. But now we were heading back to our little room, and we had to turn our attention to the more mundane aspects of cabin sharing. Molly went to the bathroom first, and then I did, and then neither of us was quite sure how to proceed. It was becoming pretty clear that she wasn’t any more familiar with cabin sharing than I was.

Both of us kept looking at the bed. It was up against the outer wall, and almost as long as the cabin was wide. It was going to be awkward getting to the side against the wall without disturbing the other person. Presumably the cabin-sharing etiquette book would have had something to say.

I decided that one of us should at least try to pretend that they knew what they were doing.

“Would you mind if I took the side with the ocean view?” That seemed like the most gentlemanly arrangement.

She didn’t argue, and in fact I think she was relieved to have the issue resolved. She opened her suitcase and brought out a pair of frilly, sky-blue pajamas. She looked around again and then turned her back like she had before.

I sat down at the foot of the bed. I hadn’t even thought to bring any pajamas myself. Well, there wasn’t much I could do about it now. I took off my shoes and socks and tried not to pay any undue attention to what she was doing.

She stepped into her pajama bottoms and pulled them up under her skirt before taking it off. Then she pulled off her blouse and put on her pajama top so quickly that I caught only the briefest glimpse of her bra strap. Then she reached in under the top, unhooked her bra, and fished it out.

Meanwhile, I’d taken off my shirt and pants. I figured I could slip under the covers without her seeing me in my underwear. But then I realized that she’d had a perfect view in the bathroom-door mirror all along. She didn’t let on, though. That seemed to be the universal rule of cabin sharing, for girls as well as for guys. Just go about your business and let your cabin mate go about theirs.

I crawled up onto the far side of the bed, trying not to notice if she was paying any attention. She turned off the light and got in on her side.

I’d had to share beds with other guys before on occasion. What you do is turn your back, keep yourself perfectly still, and imagine that there is an invisible force field that insulates your half of the bed from the entire rest of the universe. I quickly discovered, however, that this technique is not that effective when the person lying beside you is a pretty girl in frilly pajamas. I got such a hard-on that I was sure she could sense it, even though we had our backs turned.

So I thought about my algorithms. I rehearsed an upcoming seminar presentation of their salient features. And then I rehearsed it again. And then I rehearsed it again.

—

Sunlight was shining in through the porthole again when I woke up the next morning. Molly was still asleep, but I needed to pee. I edged out of bed, trying my best not to disturb her. I went to the bathroom, then quietly got dressed and slipped out of the room.

There were only a few people up on deck at this hour. We’d sailed during the night and were now anchored at the entrance to the harbor at Catalina Island. It was a beautiful morning, the water a rich cerulean blue, the harbor dotted with rows of pretty boats. I came back down and found a dining room that served breakfast. I had a bite and brought back coffee and a roll for Molly.

She was up, but still in her pajamas. I told her about the island and tried to show her through the porthole. The way the ship was facing, though, we were only able to see the rugged hills of the island and not the harbor itself.

By mid morning she had talked me into going in to shore with her. It was like being transported back in time to the sunny southern California you see in old-time newsreels: palm trees, cute bungalows, handsome, sun-tanned people sitting at outdoor cafes or lounging under colorful beach umbrellas. We walked all the way along the beachfront to the palatial ballroom at the end, admiring its lovely art-deco mosaics of naked mermaids cavorting amidst swirling kelp forests and playful schools of fish.

The huge round floor of the ballroom itself was dark and empty on this weekday morning, but photos along the walls showed elegantly dressed couples waltzing at the annual New Year’s Eve ball. Molly was enchanted.

“Let’s come back for it, want to?”

“I’m afraid my ballroom dancing is a little rusty.”

“Well, you’ll have to brush up then.”

We strolled back along the main boulevard amidst tourists and tradesmen and shopping housewives. We looked in the windows of the boutiques and souvenir shops and had lunch at one of the sidewalk cafes. Molly filled me in on all the latest gossip about the interns and nurses at her clinic. I told her a bit about my algorithms. I may have gotten a little carried away, actually, but she did her best to follow along.

Our map showed a botanical garden a couple miles out of town. Molly was game, so after lunch we rented a tourist cart and headed off to look for it. I drove and Molly navigated, and after a few wrong turns we found ourselves bumping along into the dusty interior of the island.

It was a warm, sunny afternoon, and we had the place pretty much to ourselves. It had never even occurred to me that there were botanical gardens devoted almost entirely to cactus. I’d certainly never imagined there were so many different varieties: towering suaros like in the cowboy movies; rough organ pipes that shimmered like coral formations on the floor of some strange alien sea; fuzzy white phalluses that tried to lure you into thinking they were cuddly enough to pet; plump barrel cactus with swirling patterns of pristine spikes as geometrically perfect as Faberge eggs.

Molly discovered a sprawling specimen that must have taken up a half a city block. It was covered with prickly green Mickey Mouse ears, and on the whole rugged plant there was one lone ear that held a single tiny delicate yellow flower. “That’s what I want for my corsage,” she said. “When we come back for New Years Eve.”

We eventually bumped our way back into town and dropped off the cart. The tender back to the ship was pretty full, and Molly and I had to press up shoulder-to-shoulder on the bench. She closed her eyes in the afternoon sunshine.

“A perfect day,” she murmured. “And tonight’s the gala dinner. And gambling!”

“Gala dinner?”

She opened one eye just enough to give me a look. “You were supposed to bring a sports coat. It was in the brochure.”

—

When we got back to the room we found our towel on the nightstand, folded into the shape of a jungle cat, ready to pounce. I had brought my sports coat, but it was pretty creased from being crammed in my suitcase. Molly hung it in the bathroom when she went in to take her shower. Then when she was done I took my own, making sure to give her plenty of time to get dressed.

I cracked the door to see if the coast was clear. She was making her final adjustments in the mirror and stepped aside to let me out. She was wearing a lilac gown with a sequined top and a long swishy skirt.

“I got it on sale,” she shrugged. But I could tell from the way she kept looking at herself in the mirror that she was pretty pleased with it.

Now I was the one who had to get dressed in front of her. I just went at it cabin-buddy style, turning my back and pulling things up under my towel like she had done. When I fetched my sports coat from the bathroom, the creases were a little less noticeable.

We made our way up to the dining room. It was nice, actually, being a little dressed up. I found myself walking a little taller, standing a little straighter. Molly took my arm as we made our way to the table, and everyone paused to look.

Molly and Ciara chatted about shopping on the island. It turned out that Jack knew something about cacti from his landscaping work and was interested to hear about the botanical garden. The appetizers were oysters on the half shell. It was my first time eating them, and Molly showed me what to do.

By the time that dinner was over, the ship had gotten far enough out to sea that the casino was open. Molly walked right in as if she knew what she was doing. She got ten dollars worth of quarters, and I pitched in another ten, trying my best to match her air of confident sophistication.

She went to one of the poker machines, and I drew up a stool beside her. “So what’s this system of yours? Or is it a secret?”

“I only play until I run out of quarters. That way I never lose more than I’m willing to spend.”

I didn’t think that that was what people meant by a “system,” but I didn’t say anything. I watched her play a few hands. The machine would deal out five cards. She would select which ones she wanted to keep, and the machine would replace the others.

“I usually just bet a quarter. But if we’re going to pool our money, we can bet two at a time, OK?”

I finally figured out how it worked. If we got anything less than a pair of jacks, the machine would keep our money. If we got jacks or better, it would give us our money back. If we got an even better hand, like two pairs or three of a kind, it would pay out according to a table posted on the screen. All the way up to a hundred bucks for a royal flush. We lost our first few quarters, but then we got three aces, and the machine clunked us six shiny new quarters back out.

Molly would study each hand carefully before making her selection. She pretty much chose the same cards that I would have chosen, except she was a little over-optimistic about our chances of getting a straight or a flush.

On one hand the machine dealt us the jack and king of diamonds, along with a pair of eights. She eagerly selected to keep the jack and the king.

“No, no,” I told her. “Keep the eights.”

“But we have a chance for a royal flush.”

“But the odds are better for getting another eight.”

She gave me her look of patient exasperation.

“Because look…”

But she wasn’t particularly interested in my analysis. “OK, Mr. Algorithm.” She changed the selection. The machine dealt us a queen, a three, and a six and beeped the forlorn tone that meant “better luck next time.”

Molly flashed me her told-you-so eyebrows.

“Well, we wouldn’t have gotten the royal flush either.”

“Not if we didn’t even try!”

There was one moment of genuine excitement when we got a full house, sixes and queens. The machine clanged like crazy and quarters came pouring out. But eventually every one of them got re-deposited, never to be seen again. It wasn’t really gambling so much as just playing a video game. An enjoyable one, though. There was the dress-up aspect, the battle of wits, the allure of the hundred-dollar jackpot. Molly certainly enjoyed playing, and I enjoyed watching her.

—

I noticed that it was almost time for the show.

“Juggling?” Molly wasn’t so sure. She rattled our cup. “We still have a few quarters left.”

“Yes, juggling! I’ll have you know that I minored in juggling in college. Come on. It’ll be fun.”

The show was in the forward theatre again, right next to the casino. The Flying Garbanzo Brothers! Hup! Hup! Four strapping guys with streaming hair and Frank Zappa mustaches, dressed in colorful gypsy blouses and billowing pantaloons. They juggled everything from tennis balls to bowling pins to pineapples to power tools.

One of the brothers, Yakov, had a rakish, devil-may-care attitude and was always grinning at the ladies in the audience. In one of the acts, as balls were whizzing back and forth across the stage, he started making eyes at a blonde in the front row. He began paying less and less attention to his juggling, occasionally letting a ball fly past him, which one of the other brothers would then have to lurch out of formation to keep in play.

Finally he just gave up on the juggling altogether and sat down on the edge of the stage, chatting the lady up. The other brothers were flailing frantically to keep all the balls in the air. They began to retire them, one by one, but somehow the very last ball went out of control and arched way up high toward the front of the stage. Yakov casually reached his hand out to the side and caught it without even looking.

“Ladies and gentlemen!” announced Ripov, the black brother with dreads, “For our grand finale, a feat of blistering dexterity so flagrantly dangerous that it has never before been attempted within the enclosed confines of a luxury liner!” The brothers proceeded to arrange a panoply of torches and hoops and bales of combustible material all around the stage. Yakov came out sporting a mischievous grin and lugging a big red can labeled ‘gasoline.’ Just as he was about to douse the first bale, the stagehand stormed in, a short oriental fellow in a white lab coat and thick black glasses, squawking in a barely intelligible accent and waving the ubiquitous ship safety placard–the one with the picture of the lifesaver on it.

Yakov’s grin collapsed into a sneer, but he put down the can. “Still never attempted,” he muttered under his breath. The brothers juggled the torches anyway, unlit but unwieldy, back and forth through the hoops and over the bales. Suddenly red and orange crepe-paper streamers unfurled and rose up, flickering like flames and giving the impression, at least, of a roaring inferno. All in all, it was enough to get your blood pumping.

When the show was over there was a bit of a traffic jam getting out of the theater. I grabbed Molly’s hand and dragged her toward a less crowded side exit. Hup, hup! We found ourselves in a stateroom passageway, and I kept dragging her along at a rapid pace.

“Where are we going?” she asked.

“C’mon,” I replied. The fact is, I didn’t really know. At the end of the passage was a short stairway up to a bulkhead door. We went through and found ourselves outside on a little deck by the lifeboats. The sun had set, but you could still see the frothy wave caps.

At the end of the deck was another stairway, and at the top was the entrance to the miniature golf. I still didn’t know exactly what I was looking for, but it wasn’t miniature golf. There was another way to go, though, even further forward, right along the edge of the bow.

Molly was panting from our frantic pace, but she was keeping up. We’d reached the very front of the ship. The image of Leonardo DeCaprio holding Kate Winslet on the bow of the Titanic flashed into my mind. That’s what I wanted! Moonlight! Sea spray! Violins!

But the forward view was all walled off. The only thing you could see, if you turned around, was the bridge, looming up above us, ominously dark except for the eerie glow from the radar screens. There was a stairway leading up to it, but the sign said “Authorized personnel only.”

“Kind of not what I was expecting,” I said.

“Oh, well,” she said. She pulled us across to the other side where another deckway led back aft. The wall there was not so high, and we stood for a while, watching the foamy caps and the unbounded emptiness. We had engine noises instead of violins and a stinging wind instead of an enchanted spray.

“Do you think they’d even bother to tell us?” she wondered.

“Tell us?”

“If the world blew itself up.”

But the wind was just too fierce. We retreated back to the more sheltered parts of the ship.

—

This time Jack and Ciara were in the Salsa Club. They waved us in.

“What are you having?” Jack yelled over the music, heading for the bar. Ciara and Molly had to half shout to hear each other. Jack came back with something tall and fruity for Molly and something short and amber colored for me.

The music was catchy and persistent. Jack held out his hand and led Molly onto the dance floor. They made a handsome couple: Jack rugged and manly, Molly fresh and pretty. I felt a twinge of jealousy. Molly knew a lot of steps, and she was clearly enjoying herself. I gave Ciara an awkward smile and we walked out to join them.

It turned out that Ciara was quite a dancer too. She would lose herself in the music, letting her willowy body become an instrument of its expression. I felt kind of bad that she was stuck having me as her partner, but the dance floor was crowded and she didn’t seem to mind.

When the song ended, she smiled and put her hand on my arm as she caught her breath. She was attractive, with long, honey-blonde hair and a captivating smile. A bit older than me, but not that much. I tried to picture the two of us going out after we got back home.

By the third song it was no longer really clear any more who was dancing with whom. Ciara and Molly were dancing next to each other and laughing together at something one of them had said. Then Ciara turned her attention to Jack, and he gave her a few of the moves that her dancing so richly deserved. They made a striking couple too, in a different way than Jack and Molly. They seemed more appropriate for each other, somehow, a better fit. And there was a genuine cozy affection between them that I could imagine outlasting the cruise.

Meanwhile, Molly was dancing beside me now, her freshness and joyful enthusiasm now beamed my way. That seemed more appropriate too.

—

Molly and I finally called it a night. It had been a long, eventful day: mermaids, cacti, sea spray, dancing. We made our way down the corridor to the little room that was beginning to feel more and more like home.

I took off my coat. Molly’s hair was a bit mussed, but she looked happy, as if her day had been as full and eventful as mine had been.

I brought my arms up to give her a little hug. I figured that the rules of cabin etiquette wouldn’t begrudge us one little hug. But she stepped into it, and before I knew it we were kissing, a kiss that continued as we shuffled our way toward the bed.

We sat down. I put my hand on her shoulder and ran it over her sequined back. She touched my face and let her tongue brush my lips. I stroked her side and whispily brushed her breast. She drew in her breath, then reached behind herself and undid her clasp. Her bodice slipped down like a sequined snake skin, revealing the more luminous, more tender skin beneath.

Her breasts were perfect, pale and shy, each one frankly punctuated by a bashful, yearning nipple. I couldn’t help but lean in and encircle one of them with my lips, tasting it gently with my own tongue. She held me softly there. The rules of cabin etiquette, it seemed, had been suspended by mutual consent.

She lifted herself just enough to slip her gown off the rest of the way. She draped it over the chair and gave me the bashful version of her shrug. We had to get ready for bed after all. I undressed too, placing my clothes on top of hers. She lay down, wearing only her panties. I took off everything and lay down beside her.

We glided our hands over each other’s arms, over each other’s sides, over each other’s hips. My penis was sticking out like a sore thumb, but I just let it. I caressed her firm bottom and hitched her closer so that our thighs touched, so that her nipples grazed my chest. I slipped my hand down inside her panties to be even closer to the smooth, cool touch of her skin.

Always before, one part of my brain would already have been working out the logistics of getting us back where we would need to go when we were finished. But tonight those concerns were blissfully absent. We were both already right where we needed to be, right in the very bed where we would be spending the night.

But there was one concern I couldn’t put aside. “I’m afraid I didn’t think to bring any protection. Do you think the gift shop might still be open?”

“It’s OK,” she murmured. “I’m protected.”

We kissed again. She reached down and slipped off her last remaining piece of clothing. So now we both were naked, lying together in each other’s arms, in the very bed where we were going to spend the night.

It wasn’t that I didn’t know what to do next, it was just that I was a little bashful to be the one to initiate it. And, truth be told, I was more than happy just to be doing what we were doing, lying together so intimately, so completely within each other’s personal space, so fully accepting, so fully accepted. If that was going to be enough for her, it was certainly plenty enough for me.

But I didn’t object when she knelt up, and straddled my thighs, and took my rigid penis in her hand, and glided her moist vagina down upon it.

Neither of us said a word. Partly it was shyness, but partly it was just because there was no need to muddle up with words what our entwined bodies were already saying so well without them.

—

The next morning’s sun found its way in through our porthole once again. We had sorted ourselves out somewhat during the night. I was on my side, tangled in a bit of sheet. She was on her side, tangled in a bit of blanket. I could just make out the pale tan lines on her bottom and her back.

We’d become cabin buddies of a different order. At the Jack-and-Ciara level. That’s probably what most people would have assumed all along, but I certainly hadn’t, and I didn’t think that she had either.

And yet here we were.

I waited a while for her to wake up, but she didn’t. So I finally got up myself.

We’d just passed though the entrance in the seawall at Ensenada and were coming up to our docking site. The pilot, or maybe it was the captain himself, was standing on a little deck that jutted out from the side of the ship to joy-stick our massive vessel precisely up to the pier.

Molly was still in bed when I got back. She smiled and went to the bathroom, a little embarrassed to be still naked while I was already dressed. Her pubic hair, I noticed, was trim and attractive.

She came out wearing a towel and had her coffee. We checked the day’s schedule. She was delighted to discover that they’d transferred Mrs. Pendergast’s excursion ticket to me.

A little later that morning we went ashore. It was a strange sensation, stepping off the gangway into a foreign country. Somehow I expected every little thing to be different and exotic, but the first thing we encountered, sprouting up through a crack in the pavement, was a little tuft of grass. Nothing exotic at all, just plain old grass.

Our excursion van was heralded by a woman with a clipboard–a younger, more boisterous, Mexican Denise. There were three other couples in our group and a single unaccompanied woman about Ciara’s age. I took a seat next to the window with Molly beside me with the unaccompanied woman next to her. Her name was Meryl. This was her first real vacation since her divorce. She was really excited to be having such an adventure.

We drove through the streets of Ensenda, our guide giving us a bit of local color in her prettily accented English. The scene was at once familiar and strange: traffic and lane markings and stop lights just exactly like at home, but unintelligible store signs in unlikely colors painted directly on pastel stucco walls. Beyond the city were dusty, cactus-strewn hills not unlike the Catalina hinterland.

Our destination was a site called the Bufadora, a cleft in the rocky sea cliff where

ocean waves sent up enormous geyser-like sprays. The sprays were so high that we got wet even at our vantage point fifty feet above the water.

The path back from the observation point was lined with gaudy souvenir shops, like the midway of a county fair. Meryl had tagged along with Molly and me. We stopped at one of the taco stands for lunch.

“So how did you guys meet?”

Molly didn’t volunteer an answer. “Just here on the cruise, actually,” I said.

“Really? See, aren’t cruises great?”

After lunch we went into one of the souvenir shops and Meryl asked our opinion about all the little knick knacks she wanted to buy. When we got back to the van, I ended up sitting in the middle.

“The nicest thing.” she said. “is that every day you make new friends.”

We drove back through town, then out into the desert in a different direction to a picturesque winery. We sat around a table on a palm-shaded patio and sampled the different vintages. Meryl chatted on about Simi Valley and the cruise and her ex and the weather and the ship and the people she’d met. She got me to go into the little gift shop with her to help pick out a couple bottles.

—

Molly was quiet at dinner. I had to remind her that we’d made plans to see the comedy show with Meryl.

“I’ve got a bit of a headache,” she said. “I think I’ll go back to the room.”

Meryl was waiting in the forward theatre. She was sorry to hear about Molly’s headache and put her hand on my arm to convey her concern. The show turned out to be pretty adult-rated, pretty raunchy in fact. Meryl yucked it up

After the show she suggested we take a spin about the deck. The ship had set sail again and we were just passing the exposed wreck that lies up against the sea wall. Somehow Meryl managed to tuck herself inside my arm.

“Wouldn’t you just love to go dancing?” she cooed.

“I… uh… Actually, I’ve kind of got to go now.”

“But the night is still young. Let’s at least stop by my room first.”

“I’ve got to check on Molly.”

“We can open one of the tequilas.”

“Thanks, but…”

“It’s just that… I was kind of hoping to get lucky tonight.”

Christ Almighty. A guy tries to be a gentleman. I didn’t need an etiquette book for this one. I finally managed to pry myself away,

—

When I got back to the room, Molly was in her pajamas, watching TV.

“Is your headache any better?” I asked.

She didn’t look up from the screen.

I sat on the chair and twisted around to see what she was watching. A travelogue of some sort.

“You didn’t miss much,” I said. “The show was kind of…”

But she leaned in closer to the screen to make it clear that I was interrupting her program. Something about the way the locals made their tortillas.

OK. I got the message. She didn’t like the fact that I’d gone to the show with Meryl. I went into the bathroom. I’d only been trying to be polite to a fellow cruise member. Was that a crime? Molly had been there when we’d made the plans. I thought that she’d been trying to be friendly too. That we’d sort of taken Meryl under our wing.

I came out of the bathroom and sat down on the chair again. The secret to the tortillas, apparently, had something to do with lime juice.

“I didn’t expect to see you back here tonight,” Molly said. In a sarcastic tone of voice. As if my presence was an imposition. As if she was sorry she’d ever offered to share the room in the first place.

I didn’t even bother to answer. I got undressed. I crawled up onto my side of the bed. Where else was I supposed to go? I got under the blanket and turned toward the bulkhead. A guy tries to be a gentleman. And this is what he gets.

—

I woke up first again the next morning. I went up on deck. Did she really think that I’d found Meryl even the least bit attractive? She was a fellow shipmate, nothing more. I’d thought that we’d both been trying to be polite to her. Was that a crime?

I brought back coffee and a croissant, but Molly was still asleep. Or pretending to be. I banged around a little, but she didn’t budge. Finally I got fed up and left.

So here I was again, back to my usual routine, wandering down empty corridors, drifting up little-used gangways, poking around lonely corners where nobody else much ever cared to go. Doing what I probably would have been doing if I’d gotten my single in the first place.

I came back to the room around lunch time, but Molly wasn’t there. I wandered up to the pool. Denise was there, chatting with some people. She waved. Meryl was there, stalking about, but I managed to slip away before she saw me. But no Molly.

It was a long day. The ship had parked itself out in the middle of the ocean somewhere. Or maybe the rest of the world really had blown itself up and they just hadn’t told us. I eventually ended up back in the little coffee shop at the tail end of the ship. The sky seemed a lot flatter though, the seagulls a lot more listless, my algorithms a lot less interesting. Finally I got up again and trudged back down into the labyrinth.

The casino was practically empty. The lower piano bar was closed. The little art gallery was still showing the same old photographs.

The gift shop was open. The same lady was behind the counter. What was it that Molly had asked to see? A necklace. It must have been… that one. The lady brought it out. A pair of crystalline dolphins on a slender silver chain. They sparkled in the light.

Molly still wasn’t in the room when I got back. This time our towel had been folded into a seal, sunning itself on the bedspread. I moved it a little closer to her pillow and arranged the necklace around its neck.

There were still a couple hours until dinner. I thought it might be better if I wasn’t there when she got back.

—

I got to dinner right on time. It was our last night on board, and the room was even more boisterous than usual.

“Where’s Molly?” asked Ciara.

“She had a little headache. She might not be joining us.”

Valentin our waiter was really joshing it up, angling for a big end-of-trip tip. He was just taking the drink orders when Molly appeared. She was wearing a pink skirt, a whitish blouse,… and the necklace. Her eye caught mine as she made her way around the table, but quickly shot away again.

Ciara asked her how she was doing. The couple on my other side were there for once. Tom and somebody. He was in air conditioning and gave me the full rundown. It was too noisy for Molly and me to talk, but every time I looked, she was still wearing the necklace.

It being our last night, the waiters were going to put on a little show. Just after they passed out the dessert plates they went into a huddle near the service entrance. Molly leaned over.

“Do you want to go back to the room?”

We got up.

“Oh, are you guys going to the revue?” asked Ciara.

Molly replied in the louder voice you had to use to make yourself heard. But the room was beginning to quiet down as the waiters were taking their places, and so the whole table heard what she said.

“Make-up sex.”

The table burst into laughter. Molly continued her way out of the room, and I just followed sheepishly behind her.

“Can you forgive me?” she asked as we got out into the hallway.

“For letting everybody know where we’re going?”

“For last night. I’m so sorry for the way I acted.”

“It was my fault. It was all my fault.”

“The worst part is, we wasted a whole day.”

“We still have tonight.”

“Yeah. We still have tonight.”

As soon as we got into the room we fell into each other’s arms.

“I love the necklace,” she murmured.

“It looks really nice on you.”

We kissed and shuffled toward the bed.

But my blood was pumping. I was thinking about our wasted day.

“Let’s do something first, want to? It’s our last night. Let’s get our money’s worth. Let’s go to the show! Let’s go dancing! Let’s shoot for that royal flush!

“The bed will still be here when we get back. But let’s make up for some of the things we didn’t do today. Let’s paint the ship red. OK? Want to? C’mon! Hup! Hup!”

—

Jack and Ciara were surprised to see us at the theatre.

“That was quick,” Ciara said with a look of astonishment.

Molly blushed. I put my arm around her and pulled her tight. “You ain’t seen nothing yet.”

The revue was Motown classics, the Supremes, the Four Tops. “You can’t hurry love, no you’ll just have to wait…” The whole auditorium was singing along. The girls pulled Jack and me up from our seats to dance in the aisle. “Sugarpie, honeybunch, you know that I love you…”

Afterwards, the night was balmy, perfect for a stroll on deck. We could see lights off in the distance–the rest of the world was still there after all! We ran into Meryl, wrapped in the arm of a dapper, middle-aged gentleman whose smile was just as smug as hers was. We exchanged pleasantries. She gave us a little wink.

The nightclubs were hopping. We wound our way from one to the other, dancing one dance in each. But then we decided to forgo the casino and just head back to the cabin. And sure enough, the bed was still there, right where we’d left it.

—

We kissed. I ran my hands up along her sides, up inside her blouse. She undid my buttons and pulled open my shirt. I fiddled with her skirt and managed to slip it down over the swell of her hips. She unfastened my belt buckle and my button and my zipper. I slid my hands down inside her panties. She slid hers down inside my underpants. We pawed and shucked and kicked off everything that remained. And then she took off the very last thing that she was wearing, the crystalline necklace, and placed it carefully on the nightstand.

I backed her down onto the bed. I kissed the pretty spot where the necklace had been, and the spot next to that, and the spot next to that. She lay back and closed her eyes and let herself be kissed.

I settled myself down on top of her, stroking her full lovely body with my own, savoring her softness and her excitement, trying to fuse our unfortunate separateness into something more fulfilling. And somehow, in the midst of our kissing and our stroking, my penis must have slid up at just the right angle, and her hips must have been open to just the right degree, and we coupled, as adroitly as if that had been our conscious intention, as naturally as if we were two jungle cats whose lithe jungle bodies just instinctively knew how to fuck.

And somewhere in the midst of our coupling we sweetly came, but it was not so much a climax as just a sweet vista point along the way. For just as we hadn’t consciously willed our engagement, neither did we ever willfully disengage, but just eventually nestled more comfortably down beside each other, still caressing, still softly kissing, still sweetly fused.

—

The loudspeaker blasted us awake early the next morning. Our luggage needed to be out in the hallway for pickup by eight o’clock sharp!

Molly wriggled a bit deeper under the blanket. “Uuunh,” she groaned. “Just five more minutes.”

I remembered the look on her face–when had it been? just four days ago–when we first learned we might have to share the cabin together. She’d been just as uncertain as I had. But now it was hard to imagine any other arrangement. Her lying in bed beside me, trying to squeeze in a few more minutes of sleep, leaving it up to me to keep track of the time, I wouldn’t have had it any other way.

We hadn’t begun to pack yet, but we’d kept things fairly organized. I gave her a generous five minutes, and then I gave her a little nudge. “C’mon, sleepyhead. Up and at ’em.”

She groaned, but she dragged herself out of bed. We were both still naked. I slipped on a pair of boxers, and she put on a T-shirt. It rode up in back, though, so that her pretty bottom kept peeking out as she went around collecting her things and tucking them into her suitcase.

“Do you kinda wish that the rest of the world really had blown itself up?” I asked.

She was folding one of her bras. “Oh, I don’t know. We’d probably get tired of eating cheesecake eventually.”

“They’d run out. Then we’d have to eat whatever it is that Valentin eats.”

“He gets cheesecake sometimes, don’t you think? When they have some left over?”

“I don’t know. He’s pretty skinny.”

“I wonder why Meryl didn’t think of him.”

“Yeah. Good question. Wrong table, I suppose.”

“I suppose.”

I crammed my sports coat in between my shirts and my underwear bag. She gave the zipper of her suitcase a final tug. “Besides,” she said. “Your algorithms would miss you.”

I slipped on my trousers and rolled the bags out into the corridor. There were a surprising number of people walking by, and every single one of them gawked into the room as they passed. Nothing is more titillating to a person walking down a stateroom corridor than an open doorway.

When I got the door closed again, Molly was sitting up on the bed with the sheet pulled up in front of her and a rather indignant look on her face. What a lot of nerve some people had!

I couldn’t help but smile. “I wonder what they thought you were hiding back there.”

She rolled her eyebrows.

But I was feeling a little playful. The final day’s schedule was lying on the floor. I picked it up and pretended it was an official form.

“Customs inspection, Miss. May I see what you’ve got behind that sheet?”

She wasn’t so sure she wanted to show me. She coyly raised the sheet a little higher.

“That shirt you’re wearing, Miss. Did you purchase it abroad?”

She looked down behind the sheet. This old thing?.

“Regulations, Miss. It may contain contraband fibers.” I held out my hand. “May I see it please?”

She huffed. Bureaucrats! Without letting go of the sheet she wriggled one arm out of its sleeve and then the other one. Then she pulled the shirt off over her head and handed it to me, all the while keeping herself demurely shielded from any and all prying eyes.

I inspected the shirt, inside and out. White cotton, picture of a bamboo stalk, slightly warm. I brought it up to my nose. Girl smell, subtle but intriguing. I turned it over. No detectable contraband fibers. I made a mark on my customs form.

“And what else do you have behind the sheet, Miss?”

“Why nothing, Officer. Nothing at all.” Couldn’t I tell that she was just an innocent traveler trying to get back home?

I took the edge of the sheet from her hand and gently pulled it back to see for myself. She’d been telling the truth. Nothing at all! She blushed. I made another mark on my customs form.

“I’m afraid our machine is down today, Miss. The rest of the inspection will have to be performed manually. Would you please lie down here on the conveyor belt for me?”

She huffed again. The things one had to put up with! But regulations were regulations. She stretched herself out on the bed, arms to her sides, completely nude, presenting herself for inspection, just the slightest hint of coy anticipation in her expression.

I proceeded to administer a thorough frisking. I ran my hands up her calf, feeling for any irregularities. I ran them up her thigh, letting one hand brush her soft pubic hair as the other swept over the full round swell of her hip.

I looked up and our eyes met. Looking back at me was the same pretty girl I’d had lunch with at the salad buffet, lying now before me, utterly nude, lips slightly parted, nipples blushing, letting me see and touch and pet and feel every square inch of her lovely body. I can only imagine what she might have read in my eyes, but I didn’t read anything in hers that told me not to continue what I was doing.

I ran my hands up over her tummy, letting my fingers probe her belly button. I cupped her breasts and gently frisked her hardening nipples.

“Ooh, Officer.”

But there was one part of her that needed to be inspected more thoroughly. I had her scoot down so that her bottom was still on the bed but her feet were on the floor. This brought her pretty vagina out of the shadows and onto center stage. The outer lips were flushed and slightly parted, revealing the swirly pink frills within. These were her most secret, private parts, and she was letting me see them, letting me run my thumb along their oystery ruffles, letting me daub my fingers with their musky secretion.