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Ugh.
“Almost,” I called back. I wound a towel around myself and looked about for a hair dryer. No bloody hair dryer. Not even the kind that was wired into the wall. And I hadn’t brought one. Great. “You go up, I’ll find you.”
There was a murmur of voices and then Nico called back, “Okay. Apparently it’s two flights up, then head towards the stern. See you there.”
IT TOOK ME ten minutes to wrangle my long dark hair into something that looked slightly less like I’d been pulled through a hedge backwards and get into one of the new dresses I’d bought for the trip. As I made my way along the narrow corridor to the stairs Nico had mentioned, it was plain that this was no cross-channel ferry, but a much smaller boat without stabilizers. I held on to the banister with both hands as I began the climb, feeling an answering drop in my stomach every time the boat heaved itself up a wave and slapped down the other side.
At the top of the second flight, I had to take a minute to orientate myself and figure out which way was the front of the boat. Stern, Nico had said. That meant the front, right? No. The back. There was another juddering slap as the boat crested a wave and I felt nausea rise inside me, and took a long, deliberate breath through my nose, looking out of the window at the horizon as I did. The sea was the same bright blue as the sky, just a shade darker, and the sun was beating down with an enthusiasm that felt almost insulting. Look! it seemed to be saying. It’s not even stormy!
Swallowing, I turned and groped my way along the corridor against the direction of the boat, following the faint sound of voices, barely audible above the noise of the waves and the hum of the engine, but growing louder the farther I went. At last, when I was almost at the very back of the boat, I got to a glass door leading onto a sort of patio filled with sun loungers, beanbags, and deck chairs, and shaded by an awning that was rippling in the brisk breeze. The seats were occupied by what I assumed must be the other contestants, all holding a glass in their hand and staring up at a woman in the middle of the circle, who had her back to me and appeared to be speaking.
Before I opened the door, I stood for a moment, taking in the scene, trying to assess the people who would be the competition for the duration of our stay on the island. On paper they probably looked like a fairly diverse crowd—different ages, different ethnicities, different body shapes—the men ranging from slim to stacked, the women from voluptuously curvy to model thin. The main thing that struck me, however, even from the other side of the glass, was that they were all, without exception, extremely good-looking, and most of them were beautifully turned out. Across the room was a woman, a girl really, with hair a lot like mine—long and dark, falling below her shoulder blades—but hers shone with a rich mahogany luster that mine had never achieved even on a good day. I felt another lurch in my stomach, but this one had nothing to do with the movement of the boat.
Then, from the other side of the glass, Nico turned and saw me, and his face lit up.
“Lyla!” I heard him say. “Come on out!”
Taking a deep breath, I pushed the door open and stepped outside.
After the air-conditioned chill of the boat, the heat was like a hug from a sweaty man, even with the brisk breeze, and I felt the perspiration under my arms prickle in response.
“Lyla!” The woman in the middle of the circle turned, and I saw she was Camille. She looked fresh as a daisy and completely unbothered by either the heat or the waves. As I approached, trying to keep my balance on the shifting deck, she picked up a glass from the nearby table and held it out to me. It was pink and fizzy—some kind of cocktail, I assumed, though it seemed a little early for that.
“Sorry I’m late,” I said, taking the glass. Camille shook her head.
“Don’t worry! We’d barely started. We were just raising a toast to… One Perfect Couple!”
“One Perfect Couple!” chorused the group, and there was a little cascade of melodic chings! as people tapped glasses, and the sound of laughter. A tall man with dark, slicked-back hair sitting opposite me threw his head back and downed his glass, the muscles in his throat working.
“Oh mon Dieu, c’est fort,” said the woman sitting next to him, and I realized that I recognized her. She was the smoker I’d seen blowing rings over the prow when we’d first arrived, and now she made a face as she put down her glass. I took a cautious sip of mine. It tasted like prosecco… and something else that was probably aiming for crème de cassis but landing closer to grape juice.
“Right, first things first,” Camille was saying, raising her voice above the chatter that had broken out. “Now Lyla is here, perhaps we could do a little getting-to-know-you exercise? Your name, something about your partner, and something fun about you. I’ll go first—I’m actually single, so I’ll make Baz my work boyfriend!” She laughed. “Um, so I’m Camille, I’m twenty-five, and I’ve been working for Baz for just over six months. Um… something about him is that he’s an insomniac, which can make him a touch hard to work for when you wake up to sixteen emails in your inbox!” She gave another laugh, this one slightly tinkling and forced. “And… um… a fun thing about me… I’m allergic to watermelon.” She smiled around the group as if waiting for a response, and then, when she didn’t get one beyond polite smiles, she said, “Um… okay, Angel, shoot!”
Angel turned out to be the French woman who had commented on the strength of the cocktails. She was willowy thin with long silver-blond hair that streamed down her back, jutting cheekbones, and dark eyes—something like a blond Zoë Kravitz. She was wearing a kind of billowy silk kaftan that would have been hard for someone less stunning than her to pull off—on me I was fairly sure it would have looked like a sack—but on her it somehow only emphasized her angular collarbones and slender wrists. Now she leaned back in her deck chair and spoke.
“My name is Angel, short for Angelique. I am—shockingly—French, you may not have guessed.” There was a little ripple of laughter from around the circle. “A fact about me, I wanted to be a Formula One racer when I was a little girl.” More laughter, this time a little uncertain, as if no one was quite sure whether she was joking or not. “I have been with my boyfriend, Bayer, for two years, a fun fact about him… he detests wasps.”
There was another round of laughter, this time more confidently. The big dark-haired man sitting beside her spread his hands and raised his eyebrows, making the piercing in his right brow wink in the sunshine.
“What?” He looked Italian maybe, or perhaps Turkish, but his accent was pure Vinnie Jones—the kind of guy you could have met working out in a gym in Hackney any day of the week. I could smell his aftershave from across the circle, and his T-shirt looked to be at least two sizes too small, presumably aimed at making his impressive biceps look even more pumped. But there was a self-deprecating twist to his grin that made me like him. He looked like he would be quick to take offense, but quick to laugh at himself too, if the joke was against him. “Am I wrong? Little bastards never met a pint of beer they didn’t want to fucking drown themselves in. Anyway, I’m Bayer, been with my girl for two years, like she said. I’m twenty-eight. Fact about me, I can bench-press four hundred pounds.” There was no laughter this time, only an impressed murmur from around the listeners, though the stat meant nothing to me. Was four hundred pounds a lot? I guessed it must be from the way he’d trotted it out. “Fact about Angel…” He paused, thinking. “She can get her ankles behind her head in yoga. Ain’t as fun as it sounds, lads, trust me.”
There was more laughter this time, a proper guffaw from some of the men, and Angel shot Bayer a look that was one part you disgust me to two parts ha, ha very funny, but I could sense the affection beneath. They felt like a good couple—like the kind of people who would be sending each other up in public but would have each other’s backs if it came down to it.
We continued slowly around the circle, introducing ourselves, although the names and facts of each couple quickly began to blur into each other. There was Romi, who looked like she was going to fill the “bubbly blonde” casting niche. She did a lot of giggling and hair twirling during her brief intro, and she seemed like an odd match with her boyfriend, Joel. He was skinny and serious-looking with thick, angular glasses, and he forgot to give a fun fact at all—in fact, his introduction was very brief, as if he wanted to get it over with. Romi’s fun fact was that she had 150,000 subscribers on YouTube, which seemed more like a flex than a fun piece of trivia, but I supposed no more than Bayer’s.
Next came Santana, who was a stunning, curvaceous strawberry blonde, something like a redheaded Adele, with the poshest accent I’d ever heard in real life, and cleavage that made me feel better about having my own on display—it was a look that was definitely working for her. Her boyfriend, Dan, had surfer-dude, sun-streaked hair and was cute in a boy-band kind of way. Their fun fact was a joint one; they had matching tattoos of Mickey and Minnie Mouse, which seemed like a weird thing for two adults to admit, but the rest of the circle cooed and smiled appropriately.
The next couple were Conor and Zana. In a roomful of beautiful people, they were easily the standout, as much for the contrast of their good looks—different, but complementary as a couple in a way that Joel and Romi had not been. Neither gave their ages, but Conor looked to be late twenties or early thirties, tall and lean, with a close-shaved head, sharp cheekbones, and startling light-gray eyes, made all the more striking by his deep tan. He had the kind of feral grace that you saw in people who were extremely fit, and supremely in command of their own bodies. I found myself wondering if he was a professional athlete—a climber maybe, which would have fitted with his contained strength and the tan. But when he described himself, he said only that he was “in media,” which could have meant anything. His fun fact was that he’d been born at 6:06 on the sixth of June.
Maybe it was Conor’s air of complete confidence, but his girlfriend, Zana, looked much younger and much less self-possessed, barely out of uni I would have said, though that could have been partly down to her size. She was small, barely five foot, and almost ethereally slender, with a heart-shaped face, huge Bambi-like dark eyes fringed with sooty lashes, and long, shimmering chestnut hair that cascaded like waves over her shoulders—hair that I’d noticed and envied through the door. She spoke very quietly, and didn’t give a fun fact about herself, and when she sat down, I got the impression that she was relieved to be out of the limelight.
It was then that I realized that everyone else had spoken—and Nico and I were up.
Nico stood up, holding my hand, and smiled around the circle.
“Hey guys, I’m Nico. I’m twenty-eight, and I’m an actor from East London. Lyla and I have been together almost three years”—again, I bit back the urge to correct him, but let it pass—“and our fun fact, and I guess it’s a joint one like Dan and Santana—is that it’s our third anniversary this week.”
I did a double take, and then realized he was right. Well, if you counted our anniversary as the day we’d got off in my friend’s bathroom. It was the second week of February—almost Valentine’s Day. Three years. Three years. Even if I quibbled Nico’s definition of “together,” it sounded like a lot.
