Chapter 18 Jade

18 JADE

NOW

“What the fuck are you doing?”

Rob is yelling at me as I step out of the kayak, sliding my oar into the seat hole. “Jade!”

I don’t have time to explain. I plunge feetfirst into the water, in front of the rest of the group who are kayaking, and dive down, searching for the person I spotted snorkeling a moment before. I had just said to Rob that I thought someone was swimming out there, despite this being the no-swimming zone of the resort. “That’s their problem, isn’t it?” he snapped, and the next thing I knew I’d struck something with my oar, a snorkel mask floating quickly to the surface.

Shit.

I’m not a strong swimmer, but I’m not thinking of that. I’m thinking of how I might just have killed someone and sent them to the bottom of the Indian Ocean. My eyes are stinging from the salty water as I look around, a trail of bubbles obscuring my vision. In the shadows I spot a white limb.

As I move toward the figure, I see it’s Kate. Oh, shit— she’s the one I struck with my oar. And worse, she isn’t moving. She’s just suspended in the water, her arms like a puppet’s, slowly sinking.

For a moment, my heart stops. I have no idea how to save a drowning person. I might have killed Kate already.

I kick my legs and push forward, grabbing Kate’s arm. It feels like hours pass as I tug her to the surface, finally moving beneath her to shove her upward to the light.

At the surface, the group of kayakers have gotten into the water to help. I’m trembling now, the shock of what has just happened settling in fast.

“We need to get both of them out,” a man says.

A German couple manage to pull Kate onto their kayak, where she promptly vomits. Where’s Rob? I think, just as I hear his voice.

“That’s my wife,” he tells someone. He’s still sitting in his kayak. Coward , I think. Finally, he paddles up to me, extending a hand, like John Wayne offering to rescue an injured cowboy by tossing him onto the back of his horse.

I probably shouldn’t, but I shake my head, refusing him.

“Don’t be daft, Jade,” Rob says firmly. “We need to get you back to land.”

BACK IN THE FIRST-AID UNIT, it appears the staff already know Kate.

“Back so soon?” one of them says with a grin.

“I like it so much here, I just had to come back,” Kate says weakly. Rob makes a fuss over me, helping me onto the bed on the other side of the small room.

I grimace. None of his lavish gestures are sincere, though I wish they were. He’s performing a big show, the chivalrous knight pouring kindness on his damsel. And the Oscar for Best Actor goes to… Rob Marlowe!

“We’d a bit of a kerfuffle out in the no-swim zone,” Rob tells the medic, Emir, who places a blanket over me, and one over Kate. “I think this one got hit on the head with an oar.”

“The name’s Kate,” Kate mutters angrily from the bed. “My head is fine. I swallowed a good bit of seawater, but I vomited back there, so I should be all right.”

Emir looks amused. “Vomiting? This is a remedy?”

“Well, I’m breathing, aren’t I?” Kate says.

“This is good,” Emir says, checking her pupils for dilation. “But if you swallowed a lot of seawater, we need to keep you hydrated. So, we’ll tell the chef to cut all sodium from your meals. You need to stay inside for a day or two with lots of fluids.” He opens a wall cabinet and pulls out a long row of white boxes. “Also, antibiotics.”

“What for?” Kate asks.

“The sea contains bacteria. Some of those bacteria will respond to antibiotics, some will not. Let’s hope you only swallowed the kind that does, eh?”

He sets a box down and washes his hands in the sink behind him. “You hit your head, too?”

“I think I struck her with my oar,” I tell him.

“Not really,” Kate says. “I felt it nudge me, so I tried to get out of the way.”

Emir stands behind Kate, inspecting her head for injuries. “Does it hurt here?” he asks.

“A little,” Kate says.

“What about here?”

“No.”

He moves to me, checking my vitals. “Did you also swallow seawater?”

“I don’t think so,” I say.

“You weren’t swimming?”

“I was kayaking, but then I spotted a snorkeler in trouble, so I dived in.”

“You didn’t know about the no-swim zone?” Emir asks Kate.

“Evidently not,” she says.

“You could have been killed,” Rob says, and I roll my eyes. “Any farther out and you’d have been in the jet-ski zone.”

“That’s helpful, thank you,” Kate says dryly.

“Shall I take my wife back to the villa?” Rob asks.

“Which lady is your wife?” Emir asks, and Rob looks at him as if he’s lost his mind.

“ This one,” he says, nodding at me.

“Both women should stay in the unit for at least an hour,” Emir says. “For observation.”

Rob shifts his feet, and I can tell he can’t stand the thought of being in this place for that long. A phone rings on a counter on the other side of the room, and Emir moves to answer it.

“Why don’t you go for a swim?” I tell Rob gently. “Come back in an hour?”

He eyes me, suspicious. “If you’re sure.”

I squeeze his hand and smile bravely, the rescued damsel paying her knight for his courage by urging him on to conquer another day. When I hear his footsteps trail off into the distance, I breathe a sigh of relief and turn to Kate.

“I’m really, really sorry.”

Kate glances at me. “Now, now,” she says, adopting a matronly tone. “No need for apologies. I was the one swimming in the no-swim zone.”

“I only saw you at the last minute,” I say. “We were trying to synchronize our rowing but I kept knocking into Rob’s oar. I should have looked where I was going.”

“Touché,” Kate says. “So much for it being a big ocean.”