Of course, it ended up being my fault…
We were tethered, but still on a boat. Did I mention my severe motion sickness? I felt that old familiar feeling.
I threw an orange life preserver at Alec’s head.
“Where are we?”
“It’s ok…” he mumbled and fell back asleep.
“I’m going to throw up!” That woke him up.
Peter wasn’t awake before Alec dragged the two of us up to the deck. That’s when we saw the security officer up the pier.
“Oh sh!t. Act calm! Act calm!” Alec wasn’t setting a great example.
He was dragging Peter, still asleep. I, on the verge of freezing to death, tried to keep up with him. There was a bathroom ahead.
“I gotta go!”
“No time! No time!” he yelled in hushed tones while pushing Peter into the backseat of his car.
Alec drove out of the pier parking lot like a bat out of clichéd hell.
I was in and out the rest of the ride, but I was able to surmise from an intermittent conversation with Alec that they were concerned that I was throwing myself at “The Crow” and decided to get me out of there.
Turns out Alec’s Dad co-owned the boat with family friends. So these geniuses decided we should trespass on yacht club property and sleep in an unsecured boat instead of a) finding a hotel b)staying in the car c) literally anywhere else.
The rest of the semester Alec lived in perpetual fear that we would be found out. Of course, we never were.
A decade and a half later I Facebooked Alec and Peter to see if enough time had passed that we could laugh. After all, “humor is tragedy plus time.” Of course, Peter and I could and had. But Alec genuinely didn’t know what we were talking about. It was so traumatic, he blocked it out.
The night of his one and only chance with Miss Universe.