Hushed

by Joanne Macgregor

  I might be imagining it, but to me, Logan looks uncomfortable. His feet move constantly in an odd sort of dance. Every so often, he backs up, stepping away from the people in his space, sometimes under the guise of turning to greet someone else or to accept another glass of bubbly. But they follow him, flowing into the gap left by his retreating feet, always moving in — closer, nearer — every time he buys himself some space. Give the guy some breathing room, people!

  I can’t hear anything Logan is saying, but I paddle around the yacht, watching his advance-and-retreat two-step. The water around me shimmers with silver light from the half-moon and stars above, and the reflected colours of the hanging lanterns. Shadows of the water rising and falling play tricks on me, taking the shape of rippled wakes and dorsal fins, and when a big swell rolls beneath my board, I panic for a moment then relax as it passes under the yacht. Just a surge — no shark would be able to lift and lower the boat like that.

  Some of the partiers squeal as they lose their balance on the rocking yacht. Logan himself topples backwards onto a recessed cushioned bench and then disappears from my line of sight. I should head back to shore — there’s no point in staying out here and freezing if I can’t see him. Plus, I’ve been out on the water for over an hour, and my arms are growing tired from paddling and holding up the binoculars to watch the increasingly raucous crowd.

  I decide to give it ten more minutes, and if my prey doesn’t reappear, I’ll call it a night. A wonderful, magical night. A night about as far from my small, boring life in my small, dull world as I could possibly get. I sigh. Tomorrow, it’ll be back to books and studying for me.

  With my head full of the sights and sounds of the night, I circle the boat one last time, hoping to get a final glimpse before I head home.

  And then I see something which changes everything.

  Chapter 3

  Off and away

  Logan Rush is climbing out of the yacht.

  Almost all the partiers are clustered together on the brightly lit upper deck, their attention riveted on Britney Vaux who is stretched out on the bar counter, offering tequila body shots to roars of approval from the crowd. But Logan is on the bottom deck, at the dark and quiet rear of the yacht, where a short steel ladder leads to an inflatable dinghy and a jet-ski on the water below.

  He swings one long leg over the side, finds a toehold on the ladder, and then hoists himself over. There’s a loud boing! and a stifled curse as he bangs his head — hard by the sound of it — on the flagpole jutting out from the back of the boat. My arms stretch up instinctively, as if to catch him, because he’s dangling from the ladder by one hand while his feet scrabble to find purchase on the rungs.

  Quickly, I paddle closer. At any moment he’s sure to lose his hold and plunge into the chilly Atlantic. But he clings on awkwardly, his back to the ladder, heels perched on a rung midway down. One hand covers his mouth, and his head tilts upward as if to check whether anyone might be peering down at him. It seems that all attention is still on Britney, judging by the cheers rising above the loud music on the top deck.

  “Shh,” I’m close enough to hear Logan say, apparently to himself. “Sh-sh-sh!”

  He taps a silencing finger against his lips and then appears to remember something. His hand moves to his jacket pocket into which he’s somehow managed to wedge a champagne bottle. Unable to tug it free, he lifts the whole jacket up by the pocket and tips some of the liquid down his throat. As his head tilts back, he sways, and for a few seconds it looks like he’ll lose his balance again, but then he moves with careful, deliberate steps down the remaining rungs of the ladder until he gets to the last one. Blinking hard as if trying to focus his gaze, he stares at the dinghy floating on the water in front of him and shakes his head several times. It must hurt, because he clutches his forehead again and groans before turning to face the jet-ski.

  With a decisive nod, he leaps onto it, clambering like a drunken monkey over the handlebars and dropping heavily onto the seat, facing the rear of the jet-ski. After a moment, an expression of deep puzzlement steals over his features.

  “Hey!” he protests loudly. Immediately his eyes widen, and he puts his forefinger back onto his lips. “Sh-sh-shhh!”

  I giggle, but I don’t think he hears me because although he looks up, it’s to check over his shoulder, back at the yacht.

  “There ’tis,” he exclaims, spotting the handlebars and dashboard behind him.

  While he struggles to coordinate his limbs into turning around on the seat, I paddle around to the side so that I can see his face. He looks very pleased with himself — until his hand goes to the ignition slot and gropes the space where the key should be, but isn’t. He pats the jet-ski all over its dash and sides and seats, and then checks his own pockets — where he rediscovers the champagne and consoles himself with another slug.

  “Gone!” he says forlornly, slumping in the seat. But his face lights up when he catches sight of the dinghy again, and at once he swings both legs over the side of the jet-ski.

  Uh-oh.

  When he stands up, the jet-ski lurches sideways, pitching him head-first into the dinghy, legs and feet splashing into the water.

  With much cursing and shushing, he pulls himself into the inflatable and plonks down on one of its bench seats. He spends the next several minutes taking off his shoes, rolling off his wet socks and tucking them neatly inside the shoes, muttering incoherently the whole time. I watch, but my fascination turns into concern when he loosens the rope tying the dinghy to the yacht and it begins drifting away from the larger craft.

  I don’t know what to do. He doesn’t look sober enough to manage the dinghy — he’s still clutching his shoes and socks to his chest, for crying out loud! Should I alert someone on the yacht? The same people he seems so intent on escaping, the same people who’re now chanting, “Take it off! Take it off!”

  Maybe I should paddle over and offer to help him? I could — I know how to handle an inflatable. I pretend to weigh the options, even as I begin closing the distance between us.

  “Aha,” Logan crows from his unsteady perch.

  He leans over and pulls the starter cord. The outboard engine snarls into life and the dinghy shoots forward, toppling him backwards.

  “Oh, crap!” This time, the curse is mine.

  Clearly, the last fool to use the boat left the motor in gear when he turned it off, and now the dinghy is headed straight out to sea, with Logan Rush lying in the bottom of it. It’s moving slowly — thank God he hasn’t discovered the throttle, yet — but still, there’s no way I can swim or paddle fast enough to catch it.

  I’m about to return to the yacht to get help, when I glimpse Logan’s head rising above the edge of the inflatable. He must be on his hands and knees, crawling towards the motor.

  “The kill switch!” I yell. “Pull the kill switch!”

  But either he can’t hear me, or he doesn’t know what I mean because instead of stopping, the boat begins turning in tight circles, throwing up arcs of water as it pushes against its own wake. He must have pushed the rudder.

  I stand up on my surfboard, shouting and waving to get his attention. In the dinghy, Logan rises unsteadily to his feet.

  “No! Stay down!” I yell.

  He teeters for a few seconds, then as the boat hits a big swell, he tips sideways, pitches over the side furthest from me, and disappears into the black water.

  Frozen in horror, I stand and stare at the still-turning dinghy, looking for some sign of Logan, expecting his head to bob up out of the sea at any moment. But I see only churned-up water rippling outward from the craft. I tear the Velcro cuff off my ankle, freeing myself from my surfboard, and dive into the cold water. I’m only about fifty metres from the dinghy, and with panic spurring me forward, it doesn’t take me long to close the gap. As I swim, I look up and glimpse a flash of white in the darkness. It’s Logan’s face. As I get closer I see that one of his hands is twisted in the inflatable’s side ropes, and he
’s being towed around in circles by it.

  I time my final few strokes carefully to avoid the blades of the motor’s propeller. With a hard push out of the water, I haul myself into the boat, lunge at the engine, and put it in neutral. The dinghy slows to an idle on the choppy water.

  I peer over the side of the boat — straight down into the surprised face of Logan Rush.

  “Oh,” he says, with a spluttering cough. “Hiya.”

  “Um, hi,” is all I can think to say in this most amazing, most bizarre moment of my life.

  “What just happened?”

  “You fell out of the boat. We need to get you back in.”

  “I’m stuck,” he says, looking at his right hand which is still caught in the ropes.

  “Here, let me.”

  Half of my brain is focused on untangling his hand, the other half is freaking out that I am actually touching Logan Rush. For a brief moment, we’re even holding hands — kind of.

  “Tha’s better,” he says, rubbing his wrist in relief.

  “Not really, no,” I mutter, because now that he’s no longer snarled in the ropes, Logan is sinking down into the water.

  Chapter 4

  Losing shoes

  I make a grab for Logan’s disappearing form and manage to snag a handful of hair — this is not how I fantasized about touching those luscious locks — and tug him back up to the surface.

  “Ow,” he says, hiccupping and looking at me with a wounded expression. “Hurts. S’not a wig, y’know.”

  “Sorry,” I say, placing his hand back on the side of the boat and curling his fingers around the rope handle. “But you were sinking into the sea. And you weren’t trying to swim.”

  “No,” he replies, frowning. “Is the shark.”

  “Where?” I scan the ocean for the dark crescent of a dorsal fin.

  “Not here. On the green screen. Is the shark that does the swimming. Not me,” he says in the tones of someone making a sad confession.

  “Are you trying to tell me you can’t swim?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Not even a little?”

  “Huh-uh.” He waggles his head from side to side as if considering a tricky question. “Maybe just a little … Not very much,” he says, then adds, “Hardly a’tall.”

  “So you set off for shore when you can’t swim or handle a boat?”

  “S’many things can’t I do.” He hiccups again. “Pardon me.”

  “Let’s get you in the boat.”

  I hold out my hand and he grasps it. Trying not to get distracted by the thought that I’m holding Logan Rush’s freezing hand, I pull hard and yank him into the dinghy. I straddle the seat nearest the outboard motor while he lies on the bottom of the boat, barefooted and bow tie askew, shivering and panting.

  Pushing his hair out of his eyes, he spies his shoes and socks.

  “There you are!” he says, snatching them up and placing them neatly side by side on top of the dinghy’s inflated side — all the better, apparently, to admire them.

  “These shoes anner socks are mine,” he says proudly.

  “They’re very nice,” I reply, and he smiles.

  Whoa, that smile!

  “Uh …” It takes me a long moment to pull myself together. “Look, we need to get you back to your party.”

  At that moment, loud cheers and applause erupt from the yacht.

  “No!” He shakes his head mutinously, then groans. “You hurt my head, pulling my hair like that.”

  “I didn’t hurt your head. That was you — you bumped it on the flagpole when you were climbing down the ladder.” I point toward the yacht.

  “Did I?”

  “Yes you did. What were you trying to do, anyway?”

  He considers this for a few seconds before answering, “’Scape!”

  “Escape?”

  “Not going back,” he says, nodding gingerly. “Say, why’s everything moving up and down?”

  “Because we’re in a boat in the middle of the freaking ocean.”

  “Right. Okay. Well, we could have a drink, though. I have a bottle right here.”

  He pulls and tugs at the bottle wedged into his jacket pocket until he frees it, and lifts it to his lips, before seeming to recall his manners and offering it to me.

  “No thanks.” Though it pains me to turn down the chance of putting my lips where his have been, I figure the bottle contains more salt water than bubbly by now. “I don’t think you should drink that either.”

  He waves my caution away with an airy hand, and tips the bottle to his lips. A moment later he sputters and coughs.

  “Tastes terrible! S’awful. Did y’all spike it?”

  “No, you did! You fell in the ocean, and the seawater —” I begin, but there’s no point in trying to explain.

  Logan Rush, teen heartthrob and action-hero extraordinaire, is well and truly pickled.

  “Can’t drink that stuff.” Logan sets the bottle aside with a disgusted sniff, then eyes me hopefully. “Say, you don’t happen to have a bottle, do you?”

  “Not me, but they’ve got lots on the yacht. Should I take you back there?”

  “No.” He folds his arms across his chest. “I won’t go. An’ you can’t make me.”

  “But they’ll be worried — they might alert the NSRI to search for you.”

  “Who’s Enniserai?”

  “Sea Rescue. Let’s go back, okay?” I put a hand on the tiller.

  “No. I only jus’ got away! Told them I had a headache and needed some time in my cabin. An’ I left a note there — Taking a break, see ya in Cape Town! I’m very responissable.”

  “But —”

  “If you try an’ take me back to the piranhas, I’ll throw myself in the sea!”

  “Well, we can’t just stay here all night.”

  “Why not? S’nice being with a beautiful lady — if you don’ mind me saying that. S’nice and cosy.”

  Logan Rush just called me beautiful. I’m tempted to squee but force myself to sound business-like.

  “Cosy? It’s not cosy. It’s cold and wet. We can’t stay here.” Inspiration strikes. “You know where we could get more champagne, though?”

  “The good stuff? Not the salty one?”

  “Yep, the good stuff — the best.”

  “Where?”

  “There.” I point to the shore where the distant lights of Simon’s Town harbour form a bright beacon.

  “S’go!”

  “Alright then.”

  Gently twisting the throttle, I put the motor into gear and steer the boat back to where my surfboard floats. I drag it on board and wedge it tightly under the benched seats.

  “Just promise me this — if I get arrested for kidnapping, you’ll get me out of jail,” I say.

  “S’not kidnap,” he says, looking offended. “I’m not taking you anywhere. S’you driving the boat.”

  “Damn straight, it is.”

  I turn us in the direction of the small harbour and increase the speed. Two light splashes signal that Logan’s shoes have declined to make the trip to land, but I say nothing. He seems awfully fond of those shoes, and no way am I going back to search for them.

  The trip to Simon’s Town harbour will be quick — the dinghy has a powerful engine and we aren’t that far out. For most of our full-throttled, bouncing charge for shore, my passenger sits on the seat opposite me, smiling and humming what sounds like Row, row, row your boat. When we hit one particularly big swell, he falls off his seat but manages to stay in the boat.

  “But where are my shoes?” he shouts over the racket of the motor, staring at his bare feet in bewilderment.

  I point to the noisy engine and my ears, and shake my head, playing deaf.

  The wind is cool on my face, and I’m high on the boat’s speed and the thrill of Logan’s presence. The dark water is limned silver by starlight and phosphorescence. It should be romantic — I am, after all, alone with arguably the most handsome and desirable man in H
ollywood’s galaxy of stars — but Logan Rush is not behaving like a romantic lead.

  He alternates between complaining about his cold feet and hunting for his shoes — rummaging around on the floor of the boat and peering under my surfboard. He bends double to search under the bench seats and emerges clutching a black package from which he extracts a white, waterproof poncho — the sort kept under the seat for passengers on the boat. When he shakes it out, the wind rips it from his hands, and it flaps backwards into the night like a giant, spooky bat.

  Immediately, I throttle back and turn the boat around. Shoes will probably just sink to the bottom of the ocean where they’ll slowly disintegrate, except for the soles, but plastic is a different thing entirely.

  I spot the poncho floating in pale folds on the dark water.

  “Grab it, will you?” I say to Logan as we pull alongside. “And don’t fall in again.”

  “Why are we saving the … this thing?” he asks, dragging the wet, dripping mass on board.

  “We’re not. We’re saving fish and turtles and sea birds.”

  Logan frowns, clearly puzzled.

  “Sea creatures eat plastic — they mistake it for jellyfish — and then they choke, or clog up their insides and die. The ocean,” I explain, “does not need more plastic pollution.”

  “No.” He nods slowly. “But you know what I need?”

  “Let me guess — more champagne?”

  “Yes!” The wide smile is back. “And also, shoes.”

  We draw close to the shore, and by the bright lights of the small harbour, I see something that makes me think our landing won’t be simple or unobtrusive.

  “I think you’d better put on a poncho — see if you can find a dry one,” I tell him.

  “Why?”

  “Because you’re cold. Plus, you might want to stay hidden.”

  Logan glances to the shore, and his gaze fixes on the small crowd of girls and women, noisy even from this distance, who’re thronging the main pier that stretches out from the waterfront restaurants into the small harbour. Apparently, I’m not the only fan who found out about tonight’s party. They’ve probably been tweeting about it all evening, putting out the word on the #RushTo hashtag, sharing in WhatsApp groups, pulling in fellow fans from across the Cape Peninsula.