The Bosun's Confession

Leah Hodges is twenty-eight years old, and she has decided, somewhere around the fourth pallet of the night shift, that she is the least experienced person on the entire MS Serendipity. This is not literally true. There are deckhands who have never been on a date at all. But Leah has decided it anyway, the way you decide the ship's coffee is terrible even when you drink three cups of it.

She stacks pallets in the cargo hold, which sounds duller than it is, or possibly exactly as dull as it sounds. She has been doing it for three years. The forklift has a name she gave it in her first week, Bertha, and Bertha is currently lifting a pallet of pool towels with the patience of an old dog.

Here is the thing Leah does not say out loud, to anyone, ever. She wants to be the kind of woman who knows what she wants in bed and can just say it. Not vague suggestions. Not hoping the other guy guesses. She wants to be experienced and confident, and she wants a specific man, and the specific man is Henry Kramer, who is thirty-one and assistant bosun and walks past her section of the hold four times a shift like clockwork with a clipboard he mostly does not look at.

Her one experiment, a bartender she had a fling with when she was twenty-three, taught her a great deal about what she does not want, mostly by example. He never asked her anything. She spent five weeks waiting to be asked something. Then the fling ended and she learned nothing new except that she could be quiet for a very long time.

Henry appears at the top of the ramp at eleven, doing his deck check, and Leah knows it is eleven because of the walk past.

"There she is," he says. "The serious face."

"What serious face?"

"That one. Right there. You're doing it at the pool towels. Did the pool towels insult you?"

"They're stacked wrong," Leah says, which is a lie, they are stacked perfectly, she stacked them. "Shipment came in like this."

Henry leans on the rail and looks at her, and she has planned, honestly planned, a whole sentence about wanting to tell him something, and what comes out is, "Long shift?"

"Every shift's long, that's the whole deal with shifts." He grins at her. She likes his grin. She has liked his grin for two years and has done nothing about it, which is the exact problem she is trying to solve. "See you on the next pass, Hodges."

And she chickens out. She chickens out so completely that she watches him walk down the corridor and thinks about calling after him and does not, and then Bertha beeps at her because Leah has been standing still with the forks in the air like an idiot.

She rehearses it anyway, while she works. She rehearses it in the shower. She rehearses it in the crew mess, eating rice that tastes like the rice from two nights ago. The problem is every version of the sentence sounds insane in her head. Hi Henry, I've thought about you a lot and also I would like to be the sort of person who asks for what she wants, is that a conversation we could have over a drink on the observation deck, which is quiet after ten. Actually that one is not insane. That one is almost reasonable. The rehearsal does not help, though, because rehearsal never survives contact with Henry Kramer leaning on a rail.

At two in the morning the ship is doing its best impression of being asleep. Leah is running a pallet of replacement linens aft when Bertha, who has never once in three years let her down, coughs, shudders, and dies in the middle of the corridor directly in front of the engineering supply door.

"No," Leah tells her. "No, no, don't do this!"

Bertha does it anyway. The hold lights hum. Somewhere far above, four hundred tourists are dreaming about the buffet.

"That door hasn't opened clean since Tuesday," says a voice behind her, and there is Carl Gilbert, forty-five, chief engineer, holding a flashlight and wearing the expression of a man whose shift was going fine until roughly ninety seconds ago. He has been married eleven years to a woman he met in port, two kids, and his entire professional philosophy is that nothing on the ship should be dramatic. "What happened?"

"She stalled. She never stalls."

"Everything stalls eventually. That's the whole deal with machines." He crouches by Bertha's battery compartment and sighs at whatever is in there. "This is a fifteen minute fix, which means fifteen minutes of you standing here, which means the linens are late and somebody in Miami will have opinions."

"Sorry, Carl."

"Don't apologize to me, apologize to the forklift, she's embarrassed." He waves her back. "Go sit down, Hodges. You hovering makes it worse."

So Leah sits on a coil of rope and does not hover, and instead uses the full fifteen minutes to rehearse the confession a ninth time, revising it, cutting words, cutting more words, until it is four words long and she is fairly sure four words cannot be said to a man leaning on a rail. Carl finishes in eleven minutes, announces that Bertha is ashamed of herself and will behave, and leaves Leah alone in the hold with a running forklift and a heart pounding like a hammer drill.

The crew mess at three is empty except for Noelle Spanner, which Leah should have predicted. Noelle is twenty-six, the ship's purser, keeps excellent accounts and even better tabs on other people's business, and has never once dated a crew member, a policy she explains to anyone who stands still long enough. She is eating yogurt at the corner table like it is a throne.

"Sit," Noelle says.

"I was going to get coffee."

"Sit, then get coffee, then tell me why you've been rehearsing something for two weeks."

Leah sits. "I have not been rehearsing anything."

"You've been standing in corridors moving your mouth. I've seen you do it three times. You look like a woman practicing a speech." Noelle points her spoon. "It's Henry."

"It is not Henry."

"It is absolutely Henry. You make the serious face at him and then you make a different face when he leaves. I'm the purser, Leah, I notice cargo." Noelle leans forward with the delight of a woman who has waited weeks for this. "You want to tell him something."

"Noelle."

"You want to tell him something and you keep chickening out. That's it, isn't it. That's the whole situation."

Leah stares at her yogurt lid. The truth is she does want to tell him something, and she has told exactly nobody what it is, not even herself out loud, and here is Noelle with her spoon like a subpoena. The problem with a best friend is that they are correct at inconvenient moments.

"Fine," Leah says. "Maybe there's something I want to say to him. Something specific."

"Specific how?"

"That's private."

"You can't say 'something specific' and then stop. That's not how specific works." Noelle puts the spoon down entirely, which is how Leah knows she is serious. "You've liked this man for two years. What could you possibly want to tell him that's worse than two years of nothing?"

And Leah, twenty-eight years old, forklift operator, least experienced woman on the whole ship, looks at her friend and says, "I want to tell him what I want in bed. Out loud. In actual words. And I want to not die of embarrassment doing it."

Noelle is quiet for exactly three seconds, which for her is a geological era. Then she says, "Okay, that's better than I guessed," and reaches