Shipboard Showdown

Trev boarded the St. George's Promise on a Tuesday afternoon in October, hauling a duffel bag that weighed less than it should have because he'd packed in a hurry. Twenty-four years old, divorced for seven months, and about to turn twenty-five on Friday. His ex had always made a big deal of birthdays. Cake, decorations, the whole thing. He figured the best way to get through this one was to be in the middle of the Cabot Strait where nobody knew the date.

The ferry ran from Nova Scotia to Newfoundland and back over a week, two nights each way with a layover. He'd booked the whole thing on a whim after his shift ended. His sergeant had asked him twice if he was okay. He'd said yes both times, which was apparently the legal minimum.

His cabin was below the waterline, no porthole, a narrow box with a fold-down desk and a bunk that smelled faintly of diesel (he'd read reviews complaining about exactly that, so at least the internet had been honest about something). He dropped the bag on the lower bunk, tested the mattress with one hand, and decided it was fine. He wasn't picky. He'd slept in his cruiser during stakeouts.

He went up to find the bar.

The bar was small, maybe eight tables, with a counter that had seen better decades and a chalkboard listing three beers and a rum the bartender was clearly proud of. The bartender was a big guy, maybe twenty-nine, with a beard he probably trimmed daily and a name tag that said LEO.

And there was a woman at the counter laughing at whatever he'd just said.

She was loud about it. Not fake-loud, but loud, head back, hand on the counter, the kind of laugh that made two retirees at the corner table turn around and smile without knowing why. She was maybe twenty-six, dark hair pulled up in a clip, wearing a hoodie with the ship's logo on it and leggings. Crew, then. Entertainer, judging by the laminated schedule taped to the wall that said DAILY TRIVIA WITH ROXIE in letters that had been traced over twice for emphasis.

Trev sat at the far end of the bar and ordered a beer from Leo. Roxie was still going on about something.

"I'm serious, Leo, the man tried to do a card trick and lost the card. Lost it. It was in his sleeve the whole time and he just walked off."

"And they paid you for that show?" Leo asked.

"They paid the ship. I got a complaint form and a free dessert." She thumped the counter. "A mediocre dessert."

Trev drank his beer and told himself the irritation he felt was about the volume and not about the fact that she looked like she was having a better birthday week than he was going to.

* * *

The first night, the bar filled up with maybe twenty people, most of them crew and a handful of passengers who didn't sleep well on boats. Trev stayed because going back to a windowless cabin at eight in the evening felt like admitting defeat.

Around nine, Roxie climbed onto a stool at the bar and announced, to nobody and everybody, "Trivia is cancelled tomorrow. Leo broke the buzzer."

"I did not break it," Leo said from behind the taps. "It fell. There's a difference."

"It fell because you were using it to stir a drink, you animal." She spun on the stool and scanned the room until her eyes landed on Trev. She'd been doing that all night, actually. Looking at him. "You. Cop face. You've been sitting there for three hours nursing the same brand of boring beer. Entertain me."

"I'm not a cop," Trev said.

"You've got cop face. Square jaw, tired eyes, sits with his back to the wall." She pointed at him. "I bet you're a cop."

"I'm a cop," he admitted. "But I'm off duty."

"Even better. So you'll arm wrestle me."

"Why would I do that?"

"Because you've got that look. The look of a man who thinks he can beat a cruise ship entertainer at arm wrestling, and I want to watch that look die." She hopped off the stool and cleared the closest table with one swipe of her forearm, sending a coaster skittering. "Come on. Leo, be the ref."

The retirees at the corner table perked up like this was the entertainment they'd actually paid for. Which, Trev supposed, it now was.

He should have said no. He knew that even as he stood up and crossed the room. But she had the specific energy of a person who would not let go of something once she'd sunk her teeth in, and Trev had spent seven months learning that saying yes to small stupid things was cheaper than explaining why not.

They set elbows on the table. Her hand was small in his and she grinned at it. "Don't hold back. I'll know."

"I won't," he said, and he meant it, because he'd arm wrestled guys twice her size in the academy rec room and size meant less than people thought.

Leo counted them down. Three, two, one, and Trev pushed, steady, expecting resistance, and got none, because she wasn't resisting, she was holding, letting him commit his weight forward, and then she turned her wrist and dropped his arm to the wood so fast his elbow cracked against it.

The corner table cheered. Leo said "ow" on Trev's behalf.

"Best two out of three?" Trev asked, shaking his hand out.

"Nope. One is the format. I just made it up." She leaned in close, close enough that he could smell beer and something floral under it, and said, quiet, just for him, "You commit too early, Officer. Bet your ex knew that."

She pulled back before he could decide if he was insulted. "Same time tomorrow. Darts. I'm going to beat you at something with a scoreboard, so there's a record."

"I don't remember agreeing to darts," he said.

"You'll be there," she said, and went back to the bar, and the thing was, she was probably right.

* * *

The second day the strait was flat and gray and the deck had maybe six people on it, all of them wearing jackets. Trev walked the length of the ship twice, ate a hot dog from the grill that tasted like a hot dog from any grill anywhere, and ended up near the bow because that's where the benches were less wet.

Roxie was there.

She was on a towel on the deck planks, in leggings and a sports top, doing some kind of stretch where she folded forward over one straight leg and reached past her own foot. Her hair had come out of the clip and hung down and swung when she breathed. Trev stopped maybe fifteen feet away, telling himself he was just pausing to look at the water, which was a lie, because he'd already looked at the water twice and the water was the same water.

She went deeper into the stretch. He watched. He was off duty, he told himself, and looking was legal in every jurisdiction he'd ever worked in.

Then she twisted her torso, looked straight up at him from under her arm, and grinned.

"Enjoying the view?"

"The ocean's very nice," Trev said.

"The ocean is behind me, genius." She sat up, unbothered, and started unwinding the stretch. "How long you been standing there?"

"Ninety seconds."

"That's specific. Cops." She wiped her face with a small towel and patted the bench beside her. "Sit down. You're hovering and it's making the retirees nervous."

He sat. Up close she had a small scar over her eyebrow and no makeup on and she was still, annoyingly, exactly as pretty as she'd been last night. "So what do you do on this boat?" he asked. "Besides trivia and arm wrestling strangers."

"Everything. Trivia, karaoke, bingo for the seniors, and a murder mystery night where I play the victim, which is the role I was born for." She stretched her arms overhead and groaned happily. "Six months on this route. You?"

"First week."

"On purpose?"

"On purpose, yes."

"Running from something or toward something?"

"Neither. I'm on vacation."

"Nobody takes a ferry to nowhere for a vacation." She looked at him sideways. "Birthday, maybe."

Trev kept his face flat. "Why would you say birthday?"

"Because you booked a solo week on a boat the week of your birthday, because you flinched when I said it, and because Leo told me you asked at check-in whether the bar did anything special on Fridays and then told him to forget he told you that." She was grinning wider now. "That's three pieces of evidence. I rest my case."

"That's not evidence, that's bartender gossip."

"So Friday's your birthday."

"I'm not saying."

"You don't have to, your face is saying it." She stood, rolled the towel, and looked down at him with the same expression she'd had over the arm wrestling table. "Darts tonight. If you win, I'll forget your birthday. If I win, we're celebrating it, and you don't get a vote."

"That's not how bets work," Trev said.

"It's how my bets work." She was already walking toward the door, and she called back without turning around, "Seven o'clock. Bring the cop face, it does nothing but I like looking at it."

Trev sat on the cold bench and watched the gray water go by and realized he'd been on the ship for less than thirty hours and this woman had already beaten him twice, in public, and somehow the week was starting to feel less like hiding and more like something he hadn't planned for.

The darts happened that night, and the darts went badly.

"I don't understand," Roxie said, pulling her darts out of the board for the fourth straight leg. "You're a cop. You carry a gun. Guns require aim."

"Guns require aiming at things ten feet away," Trev said. "Also I'm holding back so you don't cry."

"I've never cried in my life, my doctor confirmed it." She threw a triple twenty and turned around with her arms out like she'd won the lottery. "That's the record for this board, by the way. Set it just now. Witnessed?"

Leo, wiping glasses down the bar, raised a hand. "Witnessed."

"You two are colluding," Trev said.

"We are absolutely colluding," Roxie agreed. She checked the scoreboard she'd insisted on drawing on a napkin with a ballpoint pen. "Okay. That's four-nil. We stop here so you can keep your dignity."

"My dignity left at arm wrestling."

"True. Good self-awareness though. That's growth." She hopped onto a barstool and spun it a quarter turn. "So. Big news. I'm getting transferred."

"To where?"

"The Aurora run. Bigger ship, actual stage, actual sound system that doesn't cut out when the dishwasher turns on." She said it lightly, but she was picking at the napkin scoreboard while she said it. "Three days. I fly out Saturday morning from Argentia."

Something in Trev's chest did a small unscheduled thing. "Three days."

"Three days. Don't look sad, it's creepy on you."

"I'm not sad. I'm doing arithmetic."

"On what?"

"On how many darts games I can still lose."

Leo laughed from the tap. Roxie pointed at him. "See, that's the problem with this boat, everybody's charming, it's exhausting."

"Actually," Leo said, coming over with three glasses because apparently he'd been listening the whole time, which bartenders do, "we play cards Thursday nights. Crew lounge, aft, below deck. Germ-free, well, not germ-free, but tourist-free."

"Crew lounge," Trev said. "Am I even allowed in there?"

"He's allowed," Roxie said.

"He's not," Leo said.

"He's allowed because I say so and it's my lounge too." She flicked the napkin at Trev's chest. "Thursday. Nine o'clock. We play for drinks and Leo cheats."

"I don't cheat," Leo said. "I deal unevenly, which is a different thing with a different moral weight."

Thursday night the crew lounge was exactly as glamorous as Trev expected: it had a folding table, a lamp with a bent shade, a couch with a blanket on it that had seen things, and a poster about hand-washing. Geri, the ship's massage therapist, came in wearing a big cardigan over her work tunic, hair everywhere, already talking. Leo dealt.

"So the rules," Geri said, shuffling her hair back over one shoulder. "Loser of each hand buys the next round. Ship's bar is closed but Leo brought a bottle up so legally none of this is happening."

"Legally none of this is happening," Leo agreed, dealing.

"I'm a cop," Trev said.

"Off duty," all three of them said at once, and Geri laughed her seagull laugh and Trev felt himself actually relax for the first time since Tuesday.

The first hand went to Geri. The second went to Roxie, who crowed about it for a full minute. The third, Trev won, and everyone acted like he'd cheated, which he had slightly, by having a good poker face, which is a professional skill.

"Okay, new stakes," Roxie said, dealing the fourth hand. "Chip rules. Every chip you lose, you answer a question. Truthfully. House rules."

"Whose house?"

"This house. My temporary house."

"That's not poker, that's an interrogation with beer," Trev said.

"You'd know, you're the professional." She pushed the chips toward him. "Scared?"

"I'm off duty," he said, and Geri yelled, "Again," and everyone laughed, and he lost the first chip almost immediately.

Roxie leaned her elbow on the table. "Okay. Worst job you ever had before policing."

"That's your question? That's nothing."

"It's round one, I'm warming up."

"Fish plant. One summer. I gutted fish next to a woman named Doreen who sang nothing but Patsy Cline and I can no longer hear 'Walkin' After Midnight' without smelling fish."

"I love that so much," Geri said, wiping her eyes.

He lost the second chip to Leo, and Leo asked him his worst breakup line, and Trev told the truth, which was "I said 'let's just be honest about the math,'" and Roxie put her head down on the table and pounded it with her palm and Geri said "the MATH?" like the word had personally harmed her.

Then he lost a third chip, and Roxie sat up and her face did something, the joking