The Ferry Agreement

We boarded the Sunrise Voyager at four in the afternoon, both of us sunburned already from the taxi line, and I want to note up front that I am twenty-three, Olga is twenty-four, and neither of us had been on a cruise before. We were traveling on a last-minute deal Olga found through her job, which is the one perk of selling travel for a living.

"Deck five, cabin twelve," Olga said, reading the key card upside down. "Why do they print it upside down?"

"They don't. You're holding it wrong."

She flipped it and squinted at me. "You don't know that."

"I absolutely do not, but I said it with confidence, so."

The cabin was small but fine, two beds, a bathroom that was very cramped, and a balcony that made up for everything. We dropped our bags on the beds and just stood there a second, looking out at the water in San Juan harbor.

"Okay," Olga said. "This was the correct life decision."

"It really was. I've answered four hundred ticket emails this month and I owe none of them anything for seven days."

We cracked the bottle of wine we'd smuggled on in Olga's suitcase, sat on the balcony in the plastic chairs, and watched the city slide away. The ship pulled out around five, and there was this moment where the whole harbor went golden and Olga raised her plastic cup and said, "To poor decisions made in advance."

"That's not how toasts work."

"That's exactly how toasts work. We planned these decisions. That makes them responsible."

So we drank to our responsible poor decisions, and it was warm, and I remember thinking this is the best day of my life and meaning it.

* * *

That first night we found the promenade bar, which was less crowded than we'd expected because apparently most passengers eat dinner at six and then collapse. We got stools, ordered something with rum in it, and within ten minutes two guys at the end of the bar had drifted over, the way guys do when they clock that we're not interested in being left alone but also not interested in being hit on hard.

The taller one was maybe twenty-seven, sandy hair, easy smile. "Henry," he said. "This is Johnny. We work the engine room. We're off until noon tomorrow, so we are legally obligated to be here."

"Legally obligated," I repeated.

"Ship rules. Somebody has to keep the bar's numbers up."

Olga laughed before he'd even finished, which I knew meant she liked him. She's a sales rep, she reads people for a living, and her laugh comes out early when she's decided. "I'm Olga, this is Jess. What does an engineer actually do all day?"

"Fix things," said Johnny, who was twenty-five and had the kind of face that gets better when he grins, and he was grinning. "Then fix them again when they break in a new place. It's a ship, everything breaks in a new place eventually."

"And then Henry yells at the sea about it," Johnny added.

"I don't yell."

"He yells."

"We'd heard about your work ethic," Olga said, deadpan, and Henry raised his glass to her like she'd paid him a compliment.

We ended up talking for two hours. That's the thing nobody tells you about cruises, the bar is where the interesting people end up, and off-duty crew have better stories than passengers by a factor of ten. Henry told us about a crossing where the galley freezer died and the whole ship ate shrimp for three days because it was that or lose it. Johnny told us about a passenger who tried to smuggle a parrot on board in a hatbox and how the parrot got loose in the engine room and lived there for a week, eating sunflower seeds the guys left out.

"They named it Piston," Johnny said. "Captain found out on day four. Captain is not an animal guy."

"What happened to Piston?" I asked.

"St. Thomas. Some marina guy took him. Apparently he still swears in two languages."

"Which languages?"

"English and whatever the bosun speaks. We think it's Portuguese."

At some point Henry asked where we were from, and Olga gave the honest answer, which is that she sells trips like this one and I do tech support and we lived on the same dorm floor for one semester and stayed friends because neither of us could stand our actual assigned roommates. Henry said he'd been on ships four years and Johnny two, and they compared notes on ports like old married guys comparing lawns.

"Best port?" Olga asked.

"Depends," Henry said. "Best for food, best for drinking, or best for not getting lost?"

"All three."

"Then it's three different ports and you're going to have to sail more."

"Oh no," Olga said, clinking her glass against mine. "Whatever will we do."

Henry laughed, and I caught myself watching his hands around the glass, which was not a thing I meant to be doing. He was cute. That was the plain fact of it, cute in a way that was going to be a problem for exactly as long as this cruise lasted, which was fine, because I was on vacation and problems were the point.

* * *

Back in the cabin, after dinner we hadn't needed but had eaten anyway, Olga sat cross-legged on her bed in her pajamas doing the crossword from the daily bulletin, badly.

"Okay, don't judge me," she said, not looking up. "But Henry is very cute."

"I noticed. I noticed about an hour before you did."

"Ha! I knew it. You did the thing."

"What thing?"

"The thing where you laugh at everything he says. You laughed at the parrot thing like it was a job."

"The parrot thing was funny."

"The parrot thing was mildly funny and you cackled." She set down the pen. "Anyway, good. Because I have a confession, and it's more fun if we both have one."

I sat up. "Johnny?"

"Johnny." She said it like a verdict. "Those arms. And he told that whole story about the parrot without breaking eye contact with me once, did you catch that?"

"I caught it. I catch everything."

"You were busy cackling."

"Okay, so we're both terrible," I said. "Great. What do we do about it?"

"Nothing. We're on a ship for seven days with two guys who live on the ship. It's a fantasy, it's not a plan." She went back to the crossword. "Seven across is, I think, 'armoire.' What do you think would even happen, hypothetically? If we were the kind of people with plans."

"Hypothetically?"

"Hypothetically."

I lay back and looked at the ceiling, which was close enough to touch. "Hypothetically, all four of us in some cabin, Henry and Johnny arguing about who gets the good pillow, and us pretending to be shy about it for about nine seconds."

"You'd last nine seconds?"

"Five. I'm on vacation."

Olga laughed so hard she lost the crossword. "Okay so what about you and me? In this scenario. Are we allowed to, you know."

"Hypothetically?"

"Sure."

"I think in the hypothetical we'd be very friendly," I said, and I felt my face go warm saying it, because I'd had the thought before, more than once, back in our dorm room days, and buried it in the category of things that stay jokes. "Hypothetically."

"Huh," Olga said. And then, quieter, the way you say something you've been carrying around: "Me too. For a while, actually."

We looked at each other across the little cabin, both of us grinning like idiots, and she pointed the pen at me.

"This is a terrible idea."

"It's the best terrible idea I've ever had," I said. "But we're not doing anything. It's night three before anything happens, minimum. We're responsible."

"Responsible poor decisions," she said, and raised the pen like a toast, and that was where we left it, her with her crossword and me with the ceiling and the ship humming under us, both of us absolutely not thinking about the morning.

The next day was all ocean, which sounds boring and mostly was, in a good way. Olga and I slept until ten, ate too much at the buffet, and napped so hard we woke up confused about what year it was. But around six we were back on the promenade deck with drinks, and there were the engineers, off shift, freshly showered, sitting at the bar like they'd been waiting, which they probably had been.

"Ladies," Henry said. "We have a proposal."

"Oh no," Olga said. "Proposals on day two. That's fast."

"Slow down, it's not that kind. The crew mess. We get a fridge, a blender, and drinks at a third of the price. Passengers never go down there. Interested?"

I looked at Olga. Olga looked at me. "We're interested," she said.

So that's how we ended up in a fluorescent-lit room in the belly of the ship, sitting on benches that had clearly been bolted down sometime in the previous century, drinking rum drinks that Johnny made with the confidence of a man who had never read a recipe. There was a dartboard nobody used and a poster about hydration. It was great.

"This is so much better than the promenade bar," I said. "No one here is wearing a lanyard!"

"We hate lanyards too," Johnny said. "Occupational thing. We wear badges on lanyards all day, so off duty it's lanyard-free living only."

"It's the little rules that keep a man alive out here," Henry said, and clinked his glass against mine, and okay, fine, I laughed at that too, and Olga gave me a look across the table that said the thing instead of saying it.

Somewhere around drink three, Johnny leaned back and said, "You know what we haven't played in ages?"

"Please don't say darts," Henry said.

"Never have I ever."

"Oh, we are absolutely playing this," Olga said, turning on the bench to face the table. "I've been waiting my whole life to learn tech support secrets."

"That works both ways," I said.

The rules got established fast, mostly by Henry, mostly wrong, and the first few rounds were the usual garbage. Never have I ever eaten gas station sushi. Never have I ever lied to get out of a wedding. Johnny put a finger down for the wedding one, and Henry put a finger down for the sushi, and Olga put a finger down for both, which got her a round of applause.

Then Johnny said, "Never have I ever kissed a coworker."

Olga and Henry both put fingers down. I did not. "I work from home," I said. "My coworker is a printer."

"Did you kiss the printer?" Johnny asked.

"I did not kiss the printer."

"Weak," said Olga.

Then Henry, looking casual in a way that was not casual at all, said, "Never have I ever thought about kissing someone at this table."