I want You Deeper

Derek stood in the airport, watching Renee move forward in line. With each step, she inched closer to the security scanner. Closer to walking out of his life for good. As she turned to take her shoes off to slip them into the bin, she looked over at him, gave him a half-wave, and smiled. He could see the sadness in her eyes from here. He felt sad, too, but it was the only option.

Turning, he headed out of the airport, already pulling up the app to call a rideshare to take him back to the boat. It had been a calm, relaxing evening, hanging out with April and Captain Jake by the hotel pool. He and Renee had been at peace, he figured, but it was tough to be so close to her without holding her hand or putting his arm around her.

“You okay?” April asked when he stepped on board a few minutes later. She’d been carrying in the groceries they’d bought on the island. Enough to get them to Tahiti, where they’d be adding another deckhand and a head steward to the team. He’d interviewed them by video chat once they arrived in Hawaii and he was glad to finally have a somewhat full staff.

Only problem was, they were short a chef. There was no one to cook for them. Derek and April had agreed they’d do what they could to make sure Captain Jake was fed, which just left them to fend for themselves.

It wasn’t that Derek couldn’t cook. He was a fairly decent chef when he put his mind to it. But he couldn’t make anything like the meals Renee had prepared. It still seemed bizarre to him that she’d only pretended to be a chef. He would have bet his bank balance that she’d been professionally trained at some top-rated culinary institute, as good as her meals tasted.

“All good,” Derek told April.Content from NôvelDr(a)ma.Org.

He grabbed a few bags and following her onto the boat with them. They’d set everything here on the dock when Derek had returned with the grocery order. It had been his only stop on the way back to the boat from the airport. Renee was on her way to her parents’ house. She was going to take some time off, she’d said.

“You should go see her.”

“Who?” Derek asked, sincerely confused as they entered the kitchen.

April opened the fridge door. “Taylor Swift. Who do you think I’m talking about, silly? Renee.”

This conversation was making him dizzy. “Go see Renee? How would I do that?”

April looked at him. “Well, when we get to one of our stops, you book a flight, just like you did for her. Go see her, spend some time really getting to know her, and decide whether you want to continue.”

Derek shook his head. “It won’t work. She doesn’t want to stay on a boat. Her life is on land. I can’t live just anywhere.”

“You can’t?” As if to illustrate her point, April looked around the kitchen. He assumed she was referring to the fact that they were on a boat that was about to head out into the middle of the ocean. He could run his company while traveling the world on his boat, so why couldn’t he run it from Middle of Nowhere, Iowa, or wherever Renee ended up?

“I don’t think she’ll be happy,” April said, grabbing one of the bags he was holding to start unloading it into the fridge.

“What do you mean?”

He wondered what April knew that he didn’t already know. Renee had been very open with him about all the lies she’d told. But his trust was still a bit shaky. He knew he had to work on keeping people at a distance to avoid being hurt, and that was more important than nobody ever letting him down again.

April shook her head. “It was obvious she felt at home here, on this boat. One word from you and she would have stayed with us. Or maybe it was just that she felt at home with you.”

Those words hit him hard. Using the excuse that he needed to go help Captain Jake, he left her to put up the rest of the food. His mind was reeling, though. As absurd as it seemed initially, he had to admit that Renee had seemed truly happy when she was on this boat, especially in the kitchen. She also seemed to light up at the compliments she got on her creations.

But then, he’d also watched some clips of her from her work at the TV station. She was amazing in the job, certainly seeming to be a natural at it. When he’d finally decided to stop running and announce he wasn’t missing, he knew immediately he had to let Renee tell the story. He had to let her go back to the life she loved.

But what if she didn’t love it? What if her time on the boat had taught her that she wanted something else altogether? Didn’t he owe it to her-to both of them-to find out?

“I think we’re about ready to push away,” Captain Jake said when Derek finally tracked him down. “Is everything ready downstairs?”

Derek got on the two-way and made sure April had all the groceries from the dock. While he waited for confirmation, he looked out at the landscape in front of him. As much as he’d always dreamed of seeing the world, he was starting to realize that this wasn’t the way he’d wanted it to happen. Now that he’d had a taste of what it was like to feel something for someone, being out in the middle of the ocean seemed lonely.

“Do you ever get tired of being out here on the water all the time?” Derek asked Captain Jake as they did one final check to make sure all the lines were untied from the dock.

“Nope.”

Derek fully expected that to be the end of it. It wasn’t like he and Jake discussed anything all that deep, so he’d assume the guy would keep things at a surface level. But then the captain surprised him.

“It’s in my blood.” Jake straightened and looked out over the water. “It’s when I’m on land that I get restless. This feels natural to me. On land, I’m just waiting until the next time I get out there again.”

Derek rolled that around in his mind as they got going. Strange, but this suddenly didn’t feel natural to him at all. His instinct was the opposite of what the captain had just said. He was on the water, but he felt like he was on his way to the next piece of land, not the other way around.

Would he get used to it eventually? Possibly. But he also could picture himself, at the age of eighty, looking back over his life and wondering what he missed. A home, a family, time spent with good friends. He could have plenty of good times while traveling the world-and certainly, that would be a life well lived. But he wasn’t sure it was the life he wanted to live.

At least not alone, anyway.

“Something’s going on with you,” April said as they made dinner that first night. He’d been more pensive than usual as he stood in the kitchen where Renee had spent so much of her time on this boat. He missed her. He couldn’t even have imagined the void her absence had left here.

“I haven’t been honest with you and the captain,” he said. “I’m not who I said I am.”

“What do you mean?”

Her focus was mostly on the clove of garlic she was mincing, so he had a feeling she wasn’t fully processing what he was about to reveal. He decided to start with the most shocking bit of news first.

“I own the biggest luxury yacht operations in the country. My name is Derek Hughes, not David Humphreys. I have a home in Silicon Valley, and I’d planned to walk away from it all.”

Still, she didn’t look up. He’d wondered, as he was talking, if he should catch her off guard while she was using a knife. That could be dangerous.

But she didn’t seem the slightest bit phased.

“And Renee was doing a story on you, undercover.”

Derek stared at her. “Renee told you.”

Why hadn’t he guessed that? He felt betrayed all over again. Renee had blown his cover to his employees. He’d started to forget how hurt he felt over her betrayal, but now it all came back to him.

“No. She didn’t say you were a billionaire. She said she was a reporter and that she told you a horrible lie, but nothing more than that. The rest of it doesn’t really matter to me. Well, except for the fact that I’ve been calling you by the wrong name.”

“Renee told you she lied to me?”

April nodded. “She was devastated. I’m pretty sure she fell for you pretty hard. By the time she figured that out, it was too late to turn back.”

Her words hit him pretty deep. He tried not to stop everything to interrogate her, instead focusing on getting the chicken breasts into the oven as planned. But his mind was spinning.

“That makes even more sense,” April said as she worked on prepping ingredients behind him. “I couldn’t figure out why she left. She wouldn’t say, aside from just the fact that you two had some kind of falling out. She seemed like she was so happy here, but for some reason, she never quite settled in.”

Derek didn’t respond. He really didn’t want to open up to April about this. It felt like he was talking to someone who was closer to Renee than him. If he stayed on this boat with her, though, that would change. They’d all get distance from Renee and start to form their own work family. They’d be traveling the world together, after all, along with the additional people he’d hired.

Suddenly, as he stood there staring down at browning chicken, things became much clearer to him. Just thinking about staying on this yacht, day after day, wondering what might have happened if he’d seen things through with Renee, had him second-guessing every decision he’d ever made.

“Question. Hand me a plate.”

April retrieved a stack of plates from the cabinets and set them next to the stove. “Did you say, ‘Question?'”

“Yes. Question. If I lined you and Captain Jake up with another yacht, would you be fine sailing without me?”

April stopped everything then and just stared at him. “You’re leaving us?”

“It’s just a hypothetical right now.” He turned to look at her as he scooped the first chicken breast onto one of the plates. Looking at her, he decided, once and for all, he’d made up his mind. “Yes. I’m leaving this ship at the next port.”