At Sea
“Hey, you okay?” Rachel asked from my doorway.
I looked up from where I sat cross-legged on my bed, Cruz’s backpack in front of me.
She waited for a few heartbeats, and when I didn’t respond, she walked in and sat on the edge of my bed. “You skipped class today.”
“My grades can take it.” My voice sounded raspy to my own ears.
“Yeah, well, everyone is going apeshit worrying about you.”
“I’m fine.” My mantra was back and stronger than ever.
“Yeah, you staring at this bag for the last six hours? Not fine. Not even partly fine.”
“It’s Cruz’s.”
“I figured. You open it?”
“No. He asked me to…” I sighed. Maybe if I’d told my friends about Cruz earlier, they could have helped me protect him. “He told me to keep it hidden.”
She leaned back to look at it, but didn’t touch it. “Is it ticking?”
“Very funny.” A slight smile lifted the corners of my mouth. “You know what hurts the most? I have no way to get ahold of him. The university shut down his email, and I never thought to get his phone number. How funny is that? I’ve loved this man for months and don’t know his phone number.”
“This ship is like its own little universe. Phone numbers haven’t exactly been needed.”
“I sent him a Facebook message, though. At least I found him there, but I have no clue if he has internet access, or what he took with him, or if he can get out of Venezuela. I have no way to contact him.”
“One, I firmly believe that Doc will be okay no matter where he is. Two, I also know that he’ll find you. Third, just open it. Maybe there’s a way to find him in there. Or it’s a dead body.”
“In a backpack?”
She shrugged. “Stranger things have happened.”
“I’m going to need you to stop watching reruns of Dexter.”
“Hey, on-ship entertainment is sparse. Now seriously. Open it. I can leave if you want privacy, but either open it or put it somewhere. Stop staring at it.”
Right or wrong, curiosity and desperation to find something that might connect me to Cruz had my fingers unzipping before my conscience could battle back.
“Stay?” I asked Rachel as she stood to leave.
“Sure,” she said, sitting back on the bed but not touching the bag.
I pulled out the single accordion file from the main pocket, slipped the elastic over the front, and opened it. The first pocket contained the cruise itinerary.
The second held an envelope of pictures. I flipped through them. “They’re all of his sister, but he’s not in any of them.”
“She’s pretty,” Rachel said, looking at the brown-haired, chocolate-eyed girl.
“She has the same eyes as Cruz,” I said. She was daintier in her features, but those eyes were identical.
“Hey, can I see that?” Rachel asked, and I handed her a picture of Elisa standing in front of a stadium.
“She’s in Cuba?”
“What? I don’t think so. They immigrated right before she was born.”
“No, this stadium…that’s where we’re having the Renegade Open. I just saw a bunch of pictures in Landon’s suite. This is definitely it.”
My forehead puckered, and I flipped through the other pictures, this time looking for the background details. The shops were all in Spanish, and the architecture definitely fit with what we’d studied about Havana.
I put the pictures in the envelope and went back to the file, hoping for an explanation.
What I found were two passports. Both with Elisa’s picture, but only one with her name.
“What the hell?” I muttered.
“Hey, that’s…”
“Dr. Messina’s name,” I said, running my thumb over the print like some other name would appear. “But Cruz replaced her.”
“In more ways than one, it appears.”
“But why would he…?” I shook my head and looked in the next compartment. There were dozens of military papers clipped together—pages and pages of forms with numbers and acronyms I didn’t understand.
“He seriously travels with his military records?” Rachel asked.
I shrugged, unsure of what any of this was.
The next section held printed itineraries from Miami for Cruz and Elisa Delgado to L.A. Their flight was scheduled a few days after we arrived in port, just like mine. Another paper showed a printout of the stadium where we were hosting the Renegade Open in Havana. All the exits were marked, circled in red pen. Small Xs adorned sections of the map, which was broken down floor by floor. The next page showed a receipt for a ticket purchased in Elisa’s name.
Tingles ran up my forearms, followed closely by goose bumps as I put it together.
The last compartment held two ID badges just like the ones we all had to board the ship at every port. One held another picture of Elisa with Dr. Messina’s name. The other was a picture of Cruz with Dr. Westwick’s.
“You’re right,” I said to Rachel.
“About what?” She examined the map of the stadium.
“His sister is in Cuba. He was going to use the Renegade Open to get her out.”
…
The sun beat down into my gear, and I sent a shot of water from my bottle down my back. Aruba was gorgeous, but I wish I was out with the rest of the Renegades playing on the flyboards. Instead, Nick and I were holed up at a makeshift supercross track nowhere near the beach.
“You sure you’re ready to try again?” he asked from under his ball cap, the camera crew hovering so close I wanted to punch them. If not for this damn documentary, I would have still had Cruz. If not for this documentary, you never would have met Cruz.
“Yeah,” I answered, putting my helmet back on. I’d consistently slid out on each of my dozen or so attempts this morning—failing to stick every landing. I knew I only had a few more runs in me before the heat and my own exhaustion took me out.
“This is getting painful to watch.”
“I never asked you to stay.”
He whistled. “Dull your edges there, Penna. I’m not out here to cut you.”
I hung my head momentarily. “I know. You’re right. The stuff with…you know…is still in my head.”
“I get that. I really do. But if you’d like to live through this little stunt of yours, then you’re going to have to block him out for a while. There’s only room for one person on that bike, and he is weighing you down.”
“Point taken.” I gave him a nod and hopped onto Elizabeth. I rode back to the start of the track, giving myself those few moments to think about Cruz.
Where was he? How long had he been planning to get Elisa out of Cuba? How was she there to begin with? The questions hounded me at every moment, invading my peace and stealing my sanity whenever I did manage a quiet second.
I didn’t mind the stares of other students or the rumor mill that had started the minute the European History professor took over Cruz’s class and pointedly handed back an entire stack of my regraded work. Gone was the number system Cruz had used to protect us both, but I didn’t smirk that I kept my A. I deserved that grade, and our relationship had never played into the classroom. I didn’t mind that my teammates handled me like glass, or even Rachel’s constant nagging that I should tell them what I found in the backpack.
What I did mind—the sharp, rending pain in my heart when I wondered if Cruz had planned this all around me. If he’d used me.
I wasn’t stupid. He’d need me to hack into the database, just like I did every time I wanted to use the wifi, and he’d need me to add Dr. Messina back to the manifest so it wouldn’t look odd when she boarded again. Unless Cruz had a computer science degree he wasn’t telling me about, well, I was his best shot.
He wouldn’t use you like that. My heart railed against my brain, demanding to give Cruz a chance to explain before I jumped to the obvious conclusion.
There’s nothing he wouldn’t do for his sister, my head countered.
I silenced them both as I pulled up to the start of the track. Taking a deep, steadying breath, I pictured my mind like a cluttered dry-erase board. Then I envisioned wiping it clean with big, powerful swipes of my mental eraser. Mind clear, I pictured the ramp, the jump, and the perfect landing.
A peaceful wave of serenity washed over me, and I felt it. This was the time I nailed it.
My eyes snapped open, and I hit the throttle. Palm and divi-divi trees blurred as I sped down the track. Gear by gear, I accelerated as the super-ramp loomed bigger and bigger.
I hit the ramp, going nearly vertical as I raced toward the sky. Then I flew.
Feeling the arc, I pulled the bike into the backflip. The ground and sky traded places once, and my muscles screamed as I urged Elizabeth around again, watching the kaleidoscope of the earth spinning around me.
As the ground rushed up to meet me, I righted the bike and braced for impact.
My back tire hit first, then the front. My body jarred, lurching forward, but I stayed seated as I brought the bike to a stop.
In the background, I heard Nick’s whoop as I lifted off my helmet. I didn’t cheer or even fist pump. I simply leaned my head back, accepting the sun’s caress on my face. Then I laughed, loudly and joyously, ignoring the cameras.
I did it.
I was the first woman to ever successfully land a double backflip on a supercross ramp.
A small twinge of bitterness stole into my heart, twisting the taste of my victory. In that moment, it wasn’t Nick’s congratulations, or even Pax or Landon’s that I wanted. All I wanted was Cruz.
…
Nine. That was the number of times I landed the flip after the first completion. When Nick forced me to stop for the evening, he used the sunset as the excuse, but I knew it was because he saw the exhaustion stretched across every line of my body.
I had the trick, but I could still do some major damage to myself if I didn’t stop while my muscles were capable.
I changed in the tent the crew had assembled while Nick handled settling up with the facility manager in the office. Bag packed, I slung it over my shoulder and walked out into the warm, humid evening.
“Penna!” Nick called from the office doorway, which sat about ten yards back from the track.
“What’s up?”
“You have a phone call.”
“Okay.” My eyebrows shot skyward, but I crossed the distance, wondering if Pax or Landon needed something.
Nick held the door as I walked through it, his lips in a pressed line. “You’ll want to take it in there,” he said, motioning toward a small, private office.
I dropped my bag and headed for the phone, closing the door behind me before grabbing the receiver and hitting the flashing red light. “Hello?”
“Penelope.”
His voice was a soft sigh that cut through me like the sharpest knife.
“Cruz? Where are you? Are you okay?” I sat on the edge of the desk, my knees immediately weak in a way that had nothing to do with the riding I’d done this afternoon.
“I’m in Santo Domingo.”
I blinked. “In the Dominican Republic?”
“That’s the one. I fly back to the States tomorrow.”
“I looked in the backpack.”
“Okay.” His voice was annoyingly calm.
“That’s all you have to say?”
“I assumed you would when I left. I needed you to hide it from Dean Paul and the ship’s security, Penelope, not from yourself. I had no clue I wasn’t coming back.”
“What did you think I was going to do with it?” I snapped.
“I kind of hoped you’d throw it into the ocean.” Ugh, I could practically see him shrug from here, like it didn’t matter one bit to him.
“Really. You want me to get rid of fake passports, and maps, and ID badges that you obviously procured illegally and at some cost? Those passports look too good, Cruz. They must have cost you a shit ton.”
“They did. And only one is fake.”
“Oh, just one. That’s the line you want to draw?”
“Throw it overboard, Penelope. If you get caught with it, you’ll be arrested.”
“No shit, Sherlock. But you obviously need it, otherwise you wouldn’t have left it with me.”
“That’s one of the reasons I’m calling.” His voice dropped in his I’m-getting-angry voice.
“And the other?” My heart paused its beats, as if it needed his response to push life through me.
“Because I love you, Penelope.”
And just like that—I could breathe again.
“I needed to hear your voice,” he explained. “When they interviewed me, they had some of the footage already, and it wasn’t even the bad stuff. But I knew they’d find it. Dean Paul agreed that if I resigned immediately and didn’t fight it, I’d lose my job but avoid any hit to your grades, your enrollment, or your reputation.”
I rested my head in my open hand. “Oh God. You didn’t have to. I’m the one who pursued you. I…I ruined you.”
“You were the one who chased you into an office on your birthday, unable to bear the thought of another man’s hands on you?”
“Well, no.”
“Exactly. There is equal blame because we are equal partners in this relationship. And please don’t think that because there are four hundred miles between us that we’re broken up or something asinine like that.”
I grinned. “So we’re still together?”
“I just walked away from everything I’ve worked the last ten years for. If you’re not waiting for me in Miami, then it was pretty much for nothing.” There was a pause while I weighed his words against what I’d found in the bag. “Unless you’ve changed your mind?”
That small, nagging doubt edged its way in. “No, but I need to know if you used me. I found the receipt for the Open ticket, and you have to explain, because right now I know there are about fifty things you’re not telling me.”
He sighed, and I could picture his hand running over his hair. “Elisa is in Cuba.”
“Figured that out.”
“She went back with my mother. She was only a baby, and Mom couldn’t leave her like she left me.” He said it with such dispassion, as if his abandonment was simply a matter of fact.
“And when your mother died?”
“She stayed with my father. She had no choice, no way out, and she’s been stuck there ever since, living with the man who killed our mother and won’t ever see the inside of a cell for it.”
My eyes slid shut, as Cruz’s heartache took seed in my chest. “I’m so sorry.”
“Me, too. I’ve tried to get her out before, but my father is high up in the Ministry of the Interior. Every time I booked a flight, I found myself detained at the airport before I could get on the plane.”
“He has you on a watch list.”
“Yes. So when Dr. Messina left for the cruise, and I was finishing up my dissertation, I asked if she would refer me to teach on board next year, knowing that they take professors from colleges all over the U.S., and Havana was one of the ports.”
“But she left this year.”
“And I took the opportunity. It was such short notice that I had to work on everything en route—the passports, the airline tickets…convincing you that Havana was the perfect place to host the Open.”
I scoffed. “It took one suggestion. Apparently I’m pretty damn easy.”
“You’re anything but easy, Penelope. But I knew that with so many Americans coming in for the Open and the ship in port, it would have been the perfect time to get her out. She was supposed to find me at the Open—she knew I was with you guys and even that you call me Doc. That’s how she was going to ask for me, not that it matters now. I would have signed her on board with Dr. Messina’s badge—”
“That you faked,” I said.
“Yes, but when they checked the manifest, they would have seen that she was listed and let her through.”
“You mean after you asked me to remove you from the manifest so you could get into Cuba, and add her so she could get on. How were you planning to get off the ship? Posing as Dr. Westwick?”
“Yes.”
“And when he tried to get off?”
“I figured you might be able to help me figure a work-around there.”
“Unbelievable.”
“Yes,” he said softly, as if that was enough of an apology. “I was always going to tell you.”
“But only when you needed me.”
“I can’t deny that. I put so much trust in you. My entire career was in your hands—my heart, my body, my future. But I didn’t know how you’d feel about what I was doing, and quite frankly, I wasn’t prepared to bet Elisa’s life or risk that you’d get caught.”
Logically, I understood. She was his sister.
I almost laughed, realizing that while Cruz was risking his very life to save his sister, mine couldn’t even return a letter or be bothered to see me.
Elisa was innocent in all of this, and Cruz was genuinely worried for her safety.
“I’ll do it,” I said softly.
“Do what? Forgive me for not telling you?”
“Maybe, one day. But I’ll get her out. I have everything, and I can do it. I need…” I took a steadying breath. “I’d like your permission to bring the others in. I’ll need their help, and you can trust them.”
It went against everything in my nature to ask someone to confide in my friends, but this wasn’t my secret.
“No. You’re not putting yourself in danger like that. You have no idea what the laws are there, or how watched she is. I don’t give a fuck who you tell, because it won’t work without me there, and I’m not putting you in the line of fire.”
“She’s your sister, Cruz.”
“And I will find another way to get her out without risking you!” he shouted.
The air rushed from my lungs.
“I love Elisa, and I will get her out. I will get her to Harvard. But there is a line that I will not cross for her, and that line is you. Don’t you dare put yourself in danger, Penelope. I can’t bear the thought of it, and I will not live without you.”
My chin trembled, and I did my best to force back every emotion that could cloud this decision. I had cost him his career; I would not be the reason he lost Elisa.
“I love you,” I told him. “And you won’t lose me.”
“I love you even more.” His voice pitched up, stressed. “Don’t do anything. Throw the bag overboard, burn it. I don’t care. There’s another way.”
“I am the other way. You just have to trust me.”
“Penelope!”
“I love you, and I’ll see you in Miami.”
I hung up the phone before my resolve broke and then strode out of the office, Nick hot on my heels.
We were quiet on the drive back to the Athena as my mind raced with every possibility.
“Get everyone together,” I ordered as we split ways in the hallway of the Athena.
“Please?” he openly teased me.
“Now,” I said, with a smile and a nod.
I gathered the accordion file and everything that was in it and headed to Pax’s suite, where the others made their way to the dining room table.
“Out!” I said to Bobby.
“For fuck’s sake, Penna,” he whined. “The contract—”
“After what you cost me, do you seriously think I’m going to give a rat’s ass about the contract? Get out!”
He stomped like a toddler, but he took his crew with him.
“What’s up?” Pax asked.
I spread the documents on the table and leaned forward on my palms.
“I want to pull off the biggest stunt of our lives, and I’m going to need your help.”
