Page 36 of Ship Happens

He swings the putter and it makes contact with the pink golf ball with a soft tink. Owen watches as it rolls forward on the faux grass, rolling and rolling and rolling toward the mouth of a giant hippo that opens up, the only obstacle between Owen and victory.

Well, at this point, victory isn’t actually an option, not when Owen’s already well over his twentieth stroke on this hole alone. He watches the ball, but before it even makes contact, Owen can tell that he’s messed up the timing.

Again.

The mouth closes, the ball tapping against it, leaving Owen to watch as it rolls back toward him, bumping the toe of his shoe.

“I’m going to kill myself,” he whispers under his breath, holding the rubber end of the putter to his forehead.

The only consolation is that no one else is here to witness just how horribly things are going. Around the eighth stroke, Owen grew tired of his friends doing their best to pitifully hype him up every time he swung the putter—or offering to swing for him—so he’d told them to move along, that he’d catch up with them eventually.

By his best estimate, that was about half an hour ago. But it’s hard to remember.

Owen sets the ball up again, spreading his feet apart, holding on to the putter tight as he readies himself again. “Come on,” he breathes. “Come on, come on.”

He swings the putter again, harder this time, but not too hard.

Rolling in a direction that Owen didn’t want it to, the ball knocks against one of the plastic rocks that serve half as decoration, half as an obstacle, and entirely as the bane of Owen’s existence.

“Fuck you,” he says, staring down at the ball, catching the stares of a few other cruise-goers loitering around.

“What did I do?” a voice asks.

Owen doesn’t have to turn to know who it is.

“Not you,” he says to Jacob as he places the ball back in front of his feet. “The ball. The rock, the hippo, the . . . everything.”

“What did the ball do?” Jacob keeps himself back, leaning against his own putter as he watches this travesty unfold in front of him.

“Pissed me off.” Owen doesn’t bother with his breathing exercises; they haven’t worked up until now anyway. He just swings blindly, watching as the ball careens even further away from the hippo’s mouth, toward a flat area of the course painted blue that’s meant to represent water.

“I think that’s a penalty,” Jacob helpfully reminds him.

Owen shoots him a glare. “I think that’s a penalty,” he mocks Jacob childishly as he goes to retrieve the ball, Jacob laughing him off.

“How far above par are you?”

“I don’t remember.”

“Come on,” Jacob teases, stepping a bit closer onto the actual green. “There’s no shame here, you can be honest.”

“No, I actually don’t remember,” Owen assures him. “I stopped keeping track.”

As Jacob’s smile brightens, Owen feels his heart soften.

He does his best to ignore the way that Jacob fixates on him, but it’s so hard when those gentle brown eyes seem to focus solely on him, as if Owen’s the only person out on the deck. Everyone save for Owen and Kaitlyn was hungover this morning, so the two of them had grabbed breakfast and stopped at some of the shops to pick up a few odds and ends that they’d forgotten to pack. Everyone was still asleep when they made it back to the room, so they’d gotten changed and headed to one of the pools.

Jacob joined them not long after they arrived, his thighs just out, ass stretching the fabric of his bathing suit. Owen had to put on his sunglasses just to survive, never mind that they made it even easier to ogle Jacob’s body. Of course he tried to make small talk with Owen, and Owen tried his best. He really did. But eventually he had to leave.

Afterward, he grabbed a late lunch with Kevin, exploring more of the ship and figuring out how to navigate his way around. By the time they made it back to their room, everyone was ready to eat again, so they picked one of the ship’s buffets, and while on their post-dinner digestion walk, they’d stumbled onto the lido deck, completely transformed from the party the day before, decorated with all kinds of booths and games like a carnival.

“You could just cheat—Kev and Abigail did on the last hole, that windmill is no joke.” There’s something about his tone that both irks and endears him to Owen, like he’s being both patronizing and genuine all at once.

“I’m not going to cheat!” Owen insists. “It’s golf, this game isn’t going to get the better of me.”

“Actually, I think this is Putt-Putt,” Jacob corrects. “There is a difference.”

As he says that, Owen lines up another shot, and just when he thinks the ball will finally make it through the hippo’s mouth, it knocks against one of the huge teeth sticking out of the ground from where the creature is supposed to be swimming.