Page 73 of Bonds of Shame, Bonds of Lust

I laughed despite myself. It came out smaller than I wanted it to.

She waited.

I set the empty glass down. "I can't answer that on a plane."

She looked at me hard. Then she sat back in her seat and turned, almost gently, to the window.

"All right," she said. "Not on a plane."

She didn't sound surprised.

"Tell me more about the cruise," I said. I still didn't know how it really worked. Panels and workshops in the daytime, she told me, parties and dancing and shore excursions, and enough open time to enjoy being somewhere beautiful.

"No men around at all?" I asked.

Janice grinned. "You don't need men to have fun, Lacey. I'll make sure of it." And she clinked my empty glass.

31 - CRUISING TO PARADISE

Lacey

We took a shuttle from the airport to the port, and when the ship came into view, I forgot the rest of it.

It was enormous.

I'd seen cruise ships in photographs. Photographs turn them into hotels. They don't prepare you for standing under one, the deck stack climbing past the point your eye wants to follow it, white tier on white tier, balconies running the length of the hull in rows, like drawers in a cabinet built for something larger than people. Glass elevators crawled up the outside. Lifeboats hung halfway down, orange and the size of buses and dwarfed anyway.

"Janice," I said in awe.

"I know," she said. “Welcome to the Calypso.”

"This isn't transportation. This is a floating city with a drinking problem."

She laughed. "Pretty much."

The terminal moved like an airport that had decided to be cheerful about it. Families steering luggage carts. Couples handing phones to strangers and arranging their faces. Crew in white directing the current toward the check-in counters. Within a few minutes someone I'd never met had taken our bags off us and handed us boarding cards in return, and nobody asked me to fill anything out, and I had a small, embarrassing flush of importance.

When we stepped aboard, I stopped walking. The atrium went up through the middle of the ship, deck above deck above deck, open all the way to a glass ceiling that put the whole well of it in full sun. Staircases curved between the levels. The railings were brass and somebody polished them, which meant somebody's whole job was the railings. Restaurants and lounges opened off every side of the drop. People were wandering the floor with drinks in their hands and it wasn't even noon yet, and the old version of me had an opinion about it, and the new one looked at the drinks and thought, why not.

"This is ridiculous," I said.

Janice slipped her arm through mine. "Welcome to cruising."

"I feel like I should be carrying a small dog and wearing a monocle," I said.

We found our cabin eventually. Janice insisted on calling it a cabin, which sounded infinitely better than a room. A king-sized bed took up one wall, dressed in crisp white linens. A small sitting area, a desk, a wall-mounted television, and enough storage to make me wonder how long some people stayed on these things.

Janice barely looked at any of it. She grabbed my wrist and pulled me straight through the room.

The balcony doors slid open.

I stepped outside and forgot the room existed. The ocean ran out flat to the edge of everything. The ship sat so high above the water that looking straight down pulled at my stomach. The harbor spread around us, the smaller boats moving through it like toys.

"Oh my God."

The breeze caught my hair.

"Janice, if somebody fell from here—"