Seo-yun didn’t think it was such a good idea when Neal decided to walk into the cabin to check on the guy with the speargun. What was he going to do? Reason with him? Offer some kind of deal? That was the Wall Street way: the art of the deal or whatever. But then it’s not often you go into a negotiation with a guy holding a speargun. Usually it’s just lawyers in power suits sitting around a conference table, letting the billable hours pile up until someone blinks.
Piet was sitting on the other side of the cockpit from her, next to LeBlanc, who was still at the wheel, guiding the boat away from the Caymans. She jerked her head at Piet. “Shouldn’t you check on Neal?”
Piet shrugged. “He’s a big boy. He can handle himself.”
LeBlanc laughed. “You’d be surprised. Money does funny things to people.” The laugh surprised Seo-yun. Usually LeBlanc was low-key, but the sound of his laugh had an edge.
“What do you mean?” Seo-yun asked.
“Worse than anything they do on Wall Street.”
Seo-yun looked at Piet, trying to convey a sense of urgency with her expression, but Piet seemed pensive, as if he was trying to figure out the next move. Another song played on the sound system. Seo-yun recognized it. “Is this Steely Dan?”
LeBlanc raised an eyebrow. “Kenny Loggins maybe?”
Seo-yun got up and sat next to him. “Can I ask you something?”
LeBlanc sipped his wine. “Of course.”
“Why’d you do it? You had everything.”
“The mistake is thinking that money is everything.”
“So now what?”
LeBlanc checked the sail and made an adjustment, then looked at Seo-yun. “Wait and see how the story ends.”
He sat back down and corrected the course—adjusting a few degrees to maximize the wind—and then cranked the sail to tighten it up.
Seo-yun wondered if that’s why she was, as her fiancé said, acting out. But she just wanted to live on her own terms. There were probably people who would say that promiscuity in the face of her impending nuptials was wrong. And she recognized that it was a betrayal, that there were rules in organized relationships and society. She had never broken the rules before—she’d always been a dutiful daughter, a model employee, an ideal girlfriend—but now that she had stepped outside the lines, it felt good to be herself, to do what she wanted when she wanted. The rules seemed to be made to keep her from following her desires, from living the life that felt right. So she broke some rules. Is that so wrong? Was LeBlanc so wrong?
“Do you regret it?”
“If you fill up my wineglass I’ll give you a critique of advanced capitalism.”
That made Seo-yun laugh. “Marcuse and the Frankfurt school? No thanks. But I’ll top you up.”
She reached for the bottle and emptied what was left into his glass.
“Cheers.”
Seo-yun was about to clink her glass against his when she heard a loud noise from the cabin. She turned to see the guy with the speargun emerge. Piet gave her a discreet shake of the head, as if he was trying to say, Don’t do anything.
Bryan looked up at the wind vane. “Ah, the wind keeps shifting.” He turned the crank and trimmed the sail.
The man with the speargun walked toward Bryan and said, “Turn the boat around. We’re going back to George Town.”
Bryan sipped his wine. He didn’t move.
“Turn it around.”
“We’re close to Cuba. And I’ve always wanted to have a medianoche at midnight in Havana.”
“We’re going back.” The man gripped the speargun and stepped closer.
Bryan shook his head and said, “If only it were that easy.”
Seo-yun was surprised that Bryan was being defiant and even more surprised when the guy pulled the trigger. The spear flew across the deck and hit Bryan in the chest. Seo-yun heard a scream jump out of her mouth. The spear knocked Bryan off balance and he tumbled backward, falling into the water.
Seo-yun stood, unsure what to do next.
Piet used the distraction to bum-rush the guy with the speargun and slam into him. The guy stumbled, took a couple of steps, tripped over the railing, and fell into the water with a splash.
Piet grabbed the wheel and kept the sailboat moving quickly away.
“Bryan!” Seo-yun looked out over the water but didn’t see anyone. No one was trying to swim or waving in distress. There were no signs of life at all. The ocean was quiet—just the sound of the wind ruffling the sails and the soft churn of the water under the hull.
She turned and could see the dim outline of an island on the horizon. That must be Cuba. That’s where Bryan wanted to get a sandwich. It was a kooky idea: steal millions of dollars, buy a boat, get a sandwich. But she knew that the sandwich was more than a sandwich; it was the freedom to express your desire to get a sandwich and then fulfill it, even if it seemed silly. That’s what LeBlanc had been after. That’s what would make a Cuban sandwich in Cuba taste so delicious.
Seo-yun realized she was still holding her glass and reflexively sipped her wine. What else could she do?
Piet wondered if Seo-yun was in shock. Sometimes when people witnessed violence or trauma they became numb, unable to feel anything, unable to think clearly. He couldn’t tell what she was thinking or what she was feeling. She stood on the deck sipping her wine, the wind whipping her hair.
Finally she said, “Shouldn’t we go back and get Bryan?”
Piet shook his head. “He’s dead.”
“What about the other guy?”
“Fuck him.”
Seo-yun said, “I’m going to go check on Neal.”
“Better let me. I’m pretty sure that guy murdered him. He was going to kill us all.”
She didn’t say anything. She looked stunned.
Piet touched her hand. “You okay?”
“I don’t know. I don’t think I should be okay, should I?”
“You’re alive.” Seo-yun didn’t respond. Piet gave her a kiss on the cheek. “That’s something.” He stood up. “Take the wheel. I’ll go check on Neal.”
Piet walked to the companionway and entered the cabin. He didn’t know which would be worse: Neal dead in the room or Neal alive in the room. It was complicated either way. If Neal was dead they could dump him overboard and disappear. Keep the boat, keep the money, and spend the rest of their lives fucking. If he was alive, well, he might have to be made dead.
He opened the door and saw that Neal was, in fact, alive: curled up on the floor in a fetal position.
“You okay?”
Neal nodded. “I think so.”
Piet reached down and helped Neal to his feet, but Neal couldn’t stand up straight. He was hunched over, holding his stomach. “I think I ruptured something.”
That’s when Piet noticed the duffel bags. “This the money?”
Neal nodded.
“How much is it?”
Neal winced. “Oh, I don’t know. Twelve million? Fourteen? I didn’t count it.”
Piet nodded. Then he turned and slammed Neal headfirst into the wall, knocking him unconscious. Piet locked the door to the cabin, washed his face in the galley sink, and went out on deck and sat by Seo-yun.
“Is he okay?”
Piet looked at the ground and shook his head.
Seo-yun gasped. “Oh, my God. Oh, fuck.” She burst into tears and let her face fall onto Piet’s neck. He held her in his arms and let her cry. Piet decided he’d wait until she cried herself to sleep and then he’d dump Neal overboard.
Piet wanted to reassure her or say what needed to be said to make everything all right. But he just let her sob, feeling her warm body rise and fall against his. Of course feeling her that close turned him on. He couldn’t help getting an erection. And then he received a faint transmission; it was her ass, talking to him. He concentrated, scrunching up his face, and tried to send a reply. Seo-yun shifted, wiped the tears from her eyes, and, as she moved, accidentally brushed her hand against his pants leg
and felt his hard-on.
Seo-yun looked at him. “Now?”
He shrugged. “I can’t help it. You turn me on.”
She kissed him and he tasted the salt of her tears and a hint of white wine. Piet began undressing her. She let him pull her dress off. She unhooked her bra and shivered for a moment, her nipples hardening in the wind. “Poor Neal. He was really nice.”
Piet nodded. “The nicest.”
“I don’t have a lot of friends at work and I thought we could be friends.”
Piet kissed her again and said, “Why not come to Curaçao with me? We could live on the island and, you know, never worry about money again.”
Seo-yun slid out of her panties. He couldn’t read her expression. She seemed shocked but also kind of thrilled. Or maybe she was simply aroused. She looked at him and said, “You mean keep the money?”
He stepped out of his pants, letting his erection poke up into the air. “Live like royals and fuck all day long.”
It is harder to tread water with a spear jutting out of your shoulder than you might think. That was the takeaway from this experience. But Bryan was glad that the local shark population hadn’t sniffed out his wound. That was why he’d left the spear in—at least that way he wouldn’t bleed to death or attract predators. He could simply fade into unconsciousness and drown. Then the scavengers could have at him.
It was almost a relief to be free of the money. Dying at sea was a suck-ass way to die, nobody was questioning that, but knowing that he didn’t have to run or hide from anyone ever again, that felt good. Although he would’ve liked more time on the boat, even if just to spread some Camembert on a cracker and watch the sun set.
Bryan thought about the choices he’d made that led him to this point. Why had he gone into banking? Was it because his parents were wannabe bohemians? Was he rebelling? Did he become a banker because he never had cool clothes at school? His parents didn’t care about the new sneakers or hoodies his friends wore. They told him that fads were ephemeral, tricks by evil marketing people to get you to replace things that were still good. As a teenager, Bryan had played his look off as style, as early neo-normcore. But his lack of teenage cool was the reason he couldn’t get a date to the prom.
It’s not that his parents were poor; they just had different priorities. Books. Art supplies. Nicaraguan charities. They were always pushing him to go to enrichment classes and study music or sculpture or something that he wasn’t into. Naturally he discovered that the only way to break free of his upbringing was by earning as much money as he could. He could have gone into economics, maybe helped create a more just world. That was something he’d thought about in college, when being a social justice activist guaranteed he’d get laid. But how many economists had seven-figure salaries? Why should he be denied the trappings of wealth: the vacations, the two-hundred-dollar lunches, the safety and privilege of being on the side of the 1 percent? Wall Street had been a breeze, like running a casino. Easy money plucked from the wallets of rubes. It was fun.
He’d enjoyed planning the embezzlement, didn’t feel bad about ripping off the company. He only felt guilty about Leighton. Bryan wondered if everything he’d ever done, every decision, had led up to this moment. Had he become a murderer because his parents wouldn’t let him wear Nikes?
He saw something half submerged in a wave and kicked toward it. As he got closer he recognized it as a chunk of a surfboard drifting in the water. The board was painted with the words HAWAIIAN SOUL. He had no idea what a surfboard from Hawaii was doing in the Caribbean, but it might mean he was closer to land than he thought. Bryan clung to the board and laughed. He still had his new passport, some money in the bank. Things were looking up.
As any seismologist will tell you, the Cayman Trough runs in deep water along the ocean floor near where the Caribbean tectonic plate starts to crunch up against the North American tectonic plate. Squeezed in between these plates is the Gonâve microplate—the tuna salad in a tectonic sandwich bordered by the Septentrional-Oriente fault zone, which runs along the southern side of Cuba, and the Walton fault zone, which bends along the north coast of Jamaica. Occasionally the pressure of all these moving parts becomes too much and the Gonâve slips, creating an earthquake and sending powerful waves of energy up from the deep water and out across the Caribbean Sea. When the earthquakes are particularly strong, they can cause tsunamis, but even the milder slips and rumbles of the microplate can cause big waves. Rogue waves.
Bryan didn’t know it, but as he clung to a piece of Hawaiian Soul and bobbed in the water, the Gonâve microplate slipped.
There was nothing wrong with the missionary position. Seo-yun didn’t know why people disparaged it. She blamed those Joy of Sex books her grandparents hid in their bedside table. She’d looked through them when she was thirteen, and all those flip-flopping positions and funny angles just seemed like showing off. Done right, with some vigor and tenderness, the missionary position was a perfectly delightful way to have sex.
Piet had lowered the sail and let the boat drift. He told her he would take care of Neal’s body, bury him at sea. Then they could set sail for Curaçao and she’d never have to talk to her fiancé again. She felt bad about Neal. But this was the chance of a lifetime. She could disappear. Start over. No one would know what happened. There were no witnesses; there was no evidence of anything. Not only could she break the rules, she could make her own rules. Maybe even live without rules. Fuck the rules. She could live an unbuttoned life. The more she thought about it, the more aroused she felt. Seo-yun began touching herself. She couldn’t help it.
In the back of her mind she wondered if she had become mentally ill. Had the stress of her stupid wedding and the constant phone calls from her fiancé turned her into some kind of sex fiend?
Piet pushed her back on the bench and mounted her. Seo-yun lifted her legs and wrapped them around his body and felt him thrust into her. She heard the smack of their skin coming together, the dull slap of the waves against the hull. He reached a hand down and began tickling her clitoris as he fucked her. The song “One on One” by Hall and Oates started playing on the speakers and she smiled because it was appropriate, as if Bryan had cued it up just for her.
She could tell from the noises he was making that Piet was going to come soon. Seo-yun grabbed her breasts and gave her nipples a hard tweak. Her body began to shiver and convulse as her brain released serotonin and her breath caught. Her skin sparked with goose bumps and, as her body began to be rocked by undulating sensations, she felt something amazing happen; it was unlike any orgasm she’d ever had before. Seo-yun felt her body become weightless, as if the boat were flying, defying gravity. It must have been what cosmonauts felt when they pierced the stratosphere and entered outer space. It was thrilling, unexpected. She felt his cock spasm as he ejaculated into her, both of them suspended together in the air.
As she came, Seo-yun opened her eyes and saw, right behind Piet’s shoulder, a giant wall of water rising forty feet above the boat, like a sea monster emerging from the deep, blocking the sun; the power of the wave sucking the ship down into its embrace. She felt her stomach drop, as if she were on a roller coaster. Then the boat lurched and she and Piet fell off the bench onto the deck, still locked together, as the monster wave folded over them and swallowed the boat.
BECALMED
“I have to pee.”
Chlöe shrugged. “So pee.”
The jaunty jingle of a ringtone burst from the satellite phone in the cabin. Chlöe looked at Neal and walked across the deck toward the cabin, leaving him sitting there, one hand still strapped to the rail.
“I really have to pee.”
Chlöe turned and kicked a plastic bucket in his direction. “Here.”
The bucket banged into Neal’s legs.
Chlöe went into the cabin and answered the sat phone. While her midnight call was a check-in to make sure she was alive, the daytime calls were a chance to say hello to friends, to get updates on the weath
er, her schedule, and any new corporate sponsors that might be jumping on the circum-navigational bandwagon. It was one of the things they realized as soon as she set sail: the longer she was at sea, the more corporate money came rolling in.
Of course more money meant more people wanting a piece of her. Photo ops with CEOs and celebrities had her sailing weeks off course, along with meet and greets, interviews with the press, anything to keep her in the news, keep the story trending. She was constantly taking time out of her day to produce photos and selfies and video clips and aspirational tweets to shovel into the insatiable orifice of social media. You could track her progress—follow her journey across the Pacific, through the Panama Canal, through the Caribbean—and get original content on Google Maps courtesy of the generous folks at the vitamin-packed sports drink company, or you could click on a link and be whisked to a special website that educated you on various topics like climate change, meteorology, famous women explorers, and the history of oceanic navigation, all courtesy of the Centre for Marine Science at the University of Queensland, sponsored by Foster’s Lager—it’s Australian for beer, mate.
A typical week might find her taking a detour to Honolulu to eat pineapple yogurt and drink Kona beer for the press, saying hi to young girls in a sailing club, then moving on to Maui for a private dinner and strategy session with corporate marketing execs who’d flown in from Silicon Valley.
When she got to Panama, a cruise line company arranged to sponsor her passage through the canal. All she had to do was be the guest of honor at the captain’s table, shake a few hands, make a short speech, pose for some photos … which turned out to be six hours glad-handing two thousand sunburnt Americans while she tried not to catch the latest strain of norovirus.
As her number of online followers grew, so did the obligations required to get more and bigger donations. That was why she’d taken a weeklong detour through the Caribbean. She’d made promotional stops on Paradise Island and Turks and Caicos. Chlöe had to admit that there was nothing quite like docking in fancy marinas and being feted by big shots with corporate expense accounts. Taking a hot shower and drinking an ice-cold martini were two of her favorite things in life. Throw in a steak dinner and a couple bottles of Burgundy, and it was no surprise she found herself having a naughty in a luxury suite at the Atlantis resort. She wasn’t sure what attracted her more, the allure of room service and soft cotton sheets, or the surprising handsomeness of the social media marketing manager who proclaimed himself an avid surfer. She had been horny, but whether it was for sex or a bubble bath, she couldn’t say.
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