Stranded Hearts in the Storm

The wave hit the ferry off the coast of Martha's Vineyard, and Maya Chen, thirty-four years old and a graphic designer from Boston who had never once been seasick in her life, learned in about four seconds what a nor'easter could do to a boat.

She had been sitting in the cabin with a cup of vending machine coffee she did not even like, going over a client logo in her head, when the whole deck heaved sideways. Coffee went across the floor. A woman screamed. A man near the snack counter went down hard on one knee and swore loud enough to turn every head. Then the lights flickered, and the engine did something that sounded like a hammer dropped into a garbage disposal, and every conversation in the cabin stopped at once.

The ferry tilted. Not a lot, not the dramatic lean of a movie, just enough that people had to grab the seat backs to stay upright. That was the part that got to Maya. A bad wave was weather. A tilt was a problem.

"Everybody stay seated," came a voice from the back, calm the way a hand on a stove burner is calm, like it was costing something to keep it level. "Deck crew's on it. Sit down, hold on, breathe."

Maya turned in her seat. The man talking was tall, maybe thirty-eight, wearing a ferry deckhand's slicker over a flannel shirt, gray stubble, a face that had been out in weather a lot of its life. He had a flashlight in one hand and he was counting heads, his lips moving a little, like counting was a habit he could not shake.

She would find out later his name was Ethan Reed, that he had been a paramedic in Providence for nine years before he burned out on it, and that he had taken the ferry job because he liked water that mostly behaved. But in that first minute he was just the only person on the boat not panicking, and Maya's eyes stuck to him the way they stuck to a design that worked.

The engine made the garbage disposal sound again, longer this time. The floor shuddered. Somewhere below them a door banged, and then Ethan came back through the cabin entrance half soaked, shouting over the wind.

"We're taking water. Lower deck. Crew needs volunteers to help move people up and forward."

That broke the room. People were up, voices overlapping, a man in a Red Sox cap yelling about life vests, two college students at the window crying, a grandmother in a church coat saying the rosary in a voice like a Metronome. Ethan looked at the crowd and Maya could see him doing math he did not like.

He climbed onto a bench so they could all see him. "Pair up," he said to the room. "Strong hands to the back with me. Everyone else, life vests are in the bins under the windows, put them on, help the person next to you. You don't have to be brave. You just have to help the person next to you."

It was good, Maya thought. It was the kind of line that worked because it was small. She put on her vest, helped the grandmother with hers, and then, for reasons she could not have explained to her sister Deb later, she walked to the back and stood next to Ethan.

"I'm decent at carrying things," she said. "I move apartments a lot."

He glanced at her, took her in, the vest, the hands. "Chen," he said, reading it off her laptop bag tag. "Alright, Chen. One rule. Anything starts to go, you let go of whatever you're holding and you grab the rail. Nothing on this boat is worth your grip."

They worked. The tilting got worse as they moved passengers from the aft cabin toward the bow lounge, and the deck under their feet had a slick rhythm to it now, water coming in somewhere and finding its level. Ethan carried the man who had gone down on one knee in the cabin, his ankle already swelling, on his back, and Maya kept the crowd moving with her voice, which surprised her, because she was not a loud person at the office or anywhere else.

Then the ferry dropped into a trough and the forward stairwell door burst open with a spray of cold sea, not a flood yet, but enough to send people scrambling for the aft stairs. People screamed and shoved, and the crowd at the aft stairs turned into a knot of elbows and coats.

Ethan's arm came around Maya from behind, solid as a railing, and he hauled her against the bulkhead out of the crush. "Breathe," he said, close to her ear. "Look at me. Count with me. One, two, three."

She counted. His hand stayed at her waist through the next three waves, steering her, steadying her, and she noticed the heat of it through her wet coat and filed the noticing away, because there was no room for it just then.

The crew got the stairwell door dogged shut. But the word came down the deck in a low voice, crew to crew, and Ethan heard it and his jaw changed.

"Engine room's flooding," he said, quiet, just to her. "They're beaching her on the shoal if they can. Either way we're here till morning, and this deck is going to keep taking water."

"So what's the smart move?" Maya asked. Her voice was steadier than she felt.

"There's a dry storage hold above the waterline, aft, up on the port side. Small. I know it because I stowed gear in it last week. We get a handful of people in there, we're out of the wash." He looked at the knot of passengers. "I can't move all of them. I can move some."

"Then move some and I'll keep count," Maya said. "I'm good at lists."

Something crossed his face then, the first thing close to a smile she had seen on him. "A list person. Figures."

They got eleven people into the hold, including the grandmother, the man with the ankle, and the two students, and then the crew sealed the forward passage behind them because the deck had become a lost cause. The hold was a box of a room, maybe twelve by fifteen, stacked with foam fenders and coils of line, lit by one battery lantern Ethan found on a shelf. The hull boomed around them like a drum being played by something with no rhythm.

The list got worse. The floor tilted a little, enough that they stacked fenders into a back wall for people to lean on. Ethan tied a rope handline across the room so nobody would slide if the lantern went out. The grandmother kept the students' hands in hers and hummed the next decade of the rosary. Maya made a list, on the back of a ferry receipt, of who was in the room and anything anyone had told her about injuries, because her hands needed a job.

When she finished, she looked up and found Ethan looking at her.

"You didn't have to come back there with me," he said. "First volunteer on that deck, and you didn't know me."

"You counted heads," she said. "I figured a man who counts heads is keeping promises to himself. That's the kind of man you want next to you in a box floating on a shoal."

He laughed, short and quiet, like the hull was listening. Then a wave hit and the whole room leaned, and Maya's feet went out from under her on the wet deck plates, and his hand was there again at her waist, catching her, holding her against him for a second longer than catching required.

"Got you," he said.

"Yeah," Maya said. Her heart was doing something she decided not to name. "I noticed."

He didn't let go of her waist. "Good," he said, and then the lantern threw their shadows long against the fenders and neither of them moved.

The eleven other people in the hold had arranged themselves into a kind of sleep, the way exhausted bodies do, leaning on foam and each other. The grandmother's rosary had slowed to a murmur. Ethan looked at the room, then at Maya, and she watched him decide something.

"There's a corner back there," he said. "Behind the line locker. Not private. Private enough."

"Okay," Maya said. Plain. She wanted him to hear that she was saying yes, not being swept. "Yes."

They crossed along the handline and knelt in the dark behind the locker, and his mouth found hers and it was not gentle and neither of them wanted gentle. Her coat was wet and stayed on because there was no time and no heat to spare, but his hands went under it, under her sweater, and she felt his palms on her skin, cold and rough, and she made a sound into his mouth that embarrassed her and then didn't.

"I've been looking at you since the aft cabin," he said against her neck. "Filing it away."

"Me too." Her fingers worked the buttons of his shirt, clumsy, and gave up and just pushed it open. His chest was solid, hair matted with salt spray. She put her mouth on his collarbone because she had wanted to since the stairwell and now she could.

"Can I?" he asked, his thumb at her zipper.

"Yes. Please."

He got her jeans open, and her hips lifted to help him, deck plates cold under her bare ass. His fingers slid into her and she was already wet, embarrassingly, gloriously wet, and he made a low noise when he felt it. "Chen."

"Ethan. Fuck. Do that." He did that, two fingers curling against the front wall of her pussy while his thumb found her clit, and the hull boomed and the floor tilted and she gripped his shoulder with one hand and the locker shelf with the other and rode his hand through two waves, breathing hard, counting without meaning to. One, two, three.

"Do you want more?" he asked, breathless.

"Yes." She reached for his belt because she wanted more than fingers and she was not going to spend the whole night being polite about it. "Do you?" His cock was hard and heavy in her hand, thick, and he swore under his breath when she stroked him, his forehead dropping to her shoulder.

"Condom," she said.

"Jacket pocket. Paramedic habit." He rolled it on with steady hands, which she found absurd and wonderful, and then he was at her entrance, pausing, looking at her face in the lantern glow.

"Yes," she said. "Now."

He pushed in slow and she took him inch by inch, her breath coming out in a long low sound she muffled against his neck, and then he was all the way in and they both went still for a second, the ship rocking them, his cock deep in her pussy, her legs wrapped around his hips.

Then he fucked her. Not frantic. Deliberate, deep strokes timed to the swell, like he'd found the rhythm of the sea and was using it, and Maya put her hand over her own mouth and laughed and moaned into her palm at the