Anchor Watch

An Exclusive Bonus Chapter from Sailing Past Straight
by Riley Kendra

⚠️ This bonus chapter takes place after the epilogue. It contains spoilers and extremely explicit content. Read the novel first. 18+.

Anchor Watch

ALINA

I put the anchor down in Kolona in the same place I always do.

Megan says it’s sentimental. I say it’s good holding. It’s eight meters over clean sand, eighty yards off the bar, where a woman in a navy swimsuit once swam out to me and corrected the record. Both things are true. The second evening of a charter, I come here, and I drop the hook on the same patch of the Aegean, and I let the chain run until my boat lies quiet.

By midnight she was lying quiet. Six guests were asleep. Chicago had the filing drawer forward. The wall beside my bunk belonged this week to a retired headmistress from Leeds named Hilary, who snores like a diesel at low revs, slow and regular, with a small catch at the top.

I had been on deck four times since ten.

I’m not ashamed of it. It’s the work. You check the chain where it goes over the roller. You check the snubber. You put two lights on the shore in a line, the taverna and the chapel, and you look at them every half hour, and if they’ve opened, you’re dragging. I have done it every night at anchor for twenty years. I do it the way other people say their prayers.

I came down the steps the fourth time, barefoot, in my shirt, and stopped.

She was sitting on the edge of my bunk with the reading light on, in the white sleeveless shirt and nothing else, and her hair down past her shoulders. She had my phone in one hand. In the other she had two flat strips of soft blue webbing, a yard long, the kind that hold a mainsail to its boom.

I hadn’t seen her go to the locker. That’s how I knew she had planned it.

“Close the door,” Megan said, very low.

I closed the door.

“Latch.”

I dropped the brass hook.

“I’ve set the anchor alarm,” she said. She turned the phone so that I could see it: a small blue circle on a chart, and a dot in the middle. “Thirty meters. If she moves, it rings like the end of the world. The taverna and the chapel are in line. I looked at ten, at half past, at eleven, and three minutes ago. The chain’s lying northwest. The snubber’s on. I’ve written it in the log.”

“I know. I saw it.”

“You saw it, and you went up again anyway.” Her eyebrows lifted. “Four times, Alina. You’ve checked a chain that I checked. There’s a watch list. It’s on the back of the crew list; I added a column in April. Tonight says SAYER.”

“It’s a habit.”

“It’s rope.” She laid the phone face up on the shelf, where her notebook lives. “I’m relieving you. You are off watch, Captain. I’d like that to mean something, for once, so I’m going to arrange it so that you can’t go and look.”

I looked at what was in her hand. My mouth had gone dry. Something a good deal lower had done the opposite.

I’ve tied her. On a white-hot afternoon at Kleftiko I put her wrists on my handrail, and since then, when she asks, I have done it some dozens of times, in this cabin and in a bed that doesn’t move. I know what it does to her. I know the precise moment her mind lets go; I can feel it happen, like a boat coming off the wind.

Nobody has ever done it to me. Nobody has ever asked. I’m the one with the knots.

“Yes or no,” Megan whispered. “If I tie your hands.”

Through a centimeter of plywood, Leeds drew a long breath in, and caught, and let it go.

“Yes,” I said.

It came out with no voice in it at all.

“Shirt off. On your back, the other way around. Head at the open end.”

She had the voice. I don’t know where she keeps it. It’s mine; she took it off me a year ago and has improved it. I pulled the shirt over my head and lay down where she said, with my head where the ceiling lifts and my feet in the low dark under the cockpit, and she knelt astride my ribs, warm and bare under that shirt, and put my wrists together over my head.

The webbing went around twice, flat. I felt her check it. Two of her fingers slid under, between the strap and my pulse.

Then her hands were busy at the rail. She wasn’t looking at them. She was looking down at me, upside down, with her hair hanging in my face and my father’s compass lying in the hollow of my own throat.

“What knot is that?” she said.

I tipped my head back. A small loop. The end up through it, around, and down again, folded double.

“Slipped bowline.”

“A slipped bowline. Which I can tie in nine seconds without moving my lips. The tail is beside your right thumb. One pull, and the whole knot falls out.” Her mouth curved. “You know how to get out of that one. You taught it to me. There was a rabbit.”

“I regret the rabbit.”

“No jokes. Jokes are rope.” She bent until her lips touched my ear. “Here are the terms. No stops everything. Not please, not I can’t; I intend to ignore those. You don’t move your hands. You don’t make a sound; that wall is Leeds. You don’t come until you’re told. And you don’t check anything. Not the chain, not the lights, not me. For the next hour there is not one thing on this boat that is yours to look after.”

That was the clause that went through me. Not the hands. That.

“Megan.”

“Yes or no.”

“Yes.”

“Good,” she breathed. “You’re already doing well.”

She started at my wrists and came down.

I know that road. I laid it out myself. But I had only ever been the one walking it. Her mouth on the inside of my arm, on the hollow beneath it, the side of my breast. She didn’t ask anything. She turned my chin with two fingers and kissed me until I had no air. She took my nipple between her teeth, hard, the way I like, and held it, and when my back came off the mattress she put one palm flat on my breastbone and waited until I had lain down again. All of it in silence. All of it between one of Hilary’s breaths and the next.

She pushed my knees apart with her own and sat back to look.

I’ve said I’m not shy. I’m not. But there is a difference between being looked at and being unable to do anything about it, and I had not understood the size of it. My hands closed on nothing. I felt the strap take up, soft, an inch, and hold.

“There,” Megan whispered. She had seen it. “That’s the rail. Hold on to it. It’s what it’s for.”

I got my fingers around the teak. I held on.

She put her mouth on me, and there was nothing exploratory about it. She has had a year. She went straight to the place and the pressure, with two fingers pushed deep and curled, and she brought me up so fast that I was shaking inside two minutes, with my jaw locked and my heels digging into the sheet.

She stopped.

She lifted her head and took her hand away and knelt there watching me breathe through my nose. My hips went after her. I couldn’t help it.

“No,” she said, barely a sound. “Lie still. I didn’t say.”

I lay still. I have brought a boat through the Kafireas strait in forty-five knots. That was easier.

She waited until it had ebbed. Then she bent her head and fetched it all the way back, and stopped again. And a third time, slower, with only the tip of her tongue, holding me a hair short of it while Leeds breathed in, and caught, and breathed out, nine times. I counted. It was all I was able to count.

Somewhere under us the chain shifted on the sand. A long, low grumble through the hull.

My whole body tried to get up.

It wasn’t a thought. It’s older than thought. A noise in the ground tackle at night, and I am on my feet before I’ve opened my eyes. My shoulders came off the bunk. My wrists hit the end of the strap. My right thumb found the tail of the knot, by itself, the way a hand finds a light switch.

Megan didn’t grab me. She didn’t say no.

She put her hand flat on my stomach, low, where it jumps, and looked at me along the length of my own body.

“It’s the chain,” she whispered. “I heard it too. She’s swung ten degrees with the land breeze, that’s all. The alarm hasn’t moved. I have her. I have the watch.” Her thumb moved once on my skin. “You can pull that, if you need to. I won’t mind. Or you can lie down, and let somebody else keep your boat for one night of your life.”

I lay there with a rope’s end against my thumb.

I thought about my father, who checked his engines every hour for forty years and died in a chair. I thought of a hill with four streets on it that someone had quietly left for me. I looked at the woman kneeling between my legs with her chin wet and her eyes steady, who can’t haggle and alphabetizes my spices and has never once in a year failed to turn up.

I took my thumb off the knot.

I lay down.

Something went out of me then that I’d been carrying so long I had thought it was bone.

“Oh, well done,” Megan said, and her voice shook. “Oh, that’s the bravest thing I’ve ever seen you do. You’re so good. You have no idea.”

That nearly did it by itself. She knows it does. She came up my body and lay on me, all her weight, and kissed the corner of my eye where it had run over.

“What do you want?” Against my mouth.

“Please.”

“Please what?”

“Please let me. Megan. I can’t—”

“That isn’t what you call me in here.”

I didn’t understand. I have no title for her. She’s crew on a list, and a name on a napkin.

“I’m not asking for Captain,” she whispered. “That one’s yours. I mean the other. The thing you say into my hair when you think I’ve gone to sleep. I’ve had it translated. Say it to my face.”

I had not known she’d heard.

“Agapi mou,” I said.

“Again.”

“Please. Agapi mou. Please.”

She closed her eyes for a second, as though I had put something in her hand.

Then she went down the bunk, and laid her palm over my mouth, firmly, sealing it, and put her other hand between my legs, three fingers, to the knuckle. She leaned to my ear.

She has learned some Greek this year. Market words. Numbers. One or two things I taught her by accident. And one she had asked my mother for.

“Tora,” said Megan Sayer. Now.

I came into her hand. Both her hands. I went over like a wave on a bar, with no sound, none, only breath pouring out of my nose and my arms dragging on the rail and my whole spine bowed up off the mattress. She held me through every pulse of it. She held my mouth shut and my body open, and she told me in a whisper that I was perfect, that she had me, that there was nothing to see to, nothing, until I had stopped shaking.

On the far side of the wall the diesel missed a stroke, and resumed.

She took her hand off my mouth and kissed me there.

“I’m not untying you yet,” she said. “There’s a second item.”

“There’s always a second item.”

“I’m consistent.” She was pulling the shirt off over her head. “You may use your mouth. It’s the only thing on this boat you’re in charge of.”

She knelt over my face. It’s the one advantage of that end of the bunk; there is room, just, for a woman to kneel upright if she keeps her head down. She took hold of the handrail, with her two hands either side of my two, and lowered herself.

She was soaked. She’d been soaked since the locker. I have done this for her a hundred times with my hands on her hips, guiding, holding her where I wanted her. I couldn’t hold anything. I could only take what she gave me and give it back with my tongue, and I found I didn’t need my hands. She rode my mouth in slow, short strokes, in total silence, her thighs trembling against my ears. I felt the bunk move a little with her. I watched her bite the inside of her own wrist.

She came like that, over me, bent almost double under my low ceiling, with one long shudder and not a sound, and then another, smaller, that surprised her.

Then her thumb found the tail.

One pull. The webbing fell away. She brought my arms down herself and rubbed the blood back into my wrists, and turned us both around, and put my head on her shoulder, under the low part, with the fan turning its face from one of us to the other.

“You’re here,” she said into my hair. “I have you. You did everything right.”

I lay in it. I had no word for where I had been.

After a while I felt myself begin to sit up.

“Where are you going?”

“I should look at—”

“No.” She pressed me back down with one finger. “You’re off watch until six. It’s in the log, in ink.” She was already reaching for the white shirt. “I’m going up. I’ll do the round. Chain, snubber, lights, all six hatches. I know the order. I’ve been watching you do it for a year.”

“Megan.”

“Close your eyes, Alina.”

She unhooked the door without a click and was gone.

I lay in my own bunk in the dark, and listened.

Bare feet on the companionway. Then on the deck over my head, unhurried, going forward along the side. I knew every board she stepped on. I heard her stop at the bow. A soft creak as she laid her hand on the chain; a pause while she looked at two lights. Then the feet coming aft again, and stopping.

Over the forward hatch. I knew exactly where. Three seconds. Four. Five.

Then they came on.

I had lain under those footsteps myself, I realized, without ever hearing them. I’d been making them. For twenty years I have been the one walking above the sleepers, and I had never once found out what it’s like from underneath. It’s like being a child in a house where someone else has locked the door.

I didn’t hear her come down. I must have gone by then. I surfaced only as she slid in beside me, cool from the night air and smelling of salt, and fitted herself along my back.

“Lights are in line,” she whispered. “Chain’s fine. She’s lying to the land breeze like a lamb.”

“Mm.”

“And, Alina. The forward cabin.”

“What about it?”

I felt her smile against my shoulder blade.

“Chicago isn’t crying,” Megan said.

I laughed myself to sleep. I’m told I was gone in under a minute. I’m told I snored, and that it’s in the log.

Ten days later I backed her into her slot on Pontoon C, and by six the last suitcase had gone clacking away up the concrete.

Chicago left her itinerary behind. She put it into Megan’s hand at the foot of the gangplank and said, “I won’t be laminating the next one,” and Megan, who has never in her life thrown away a laminated object, filed it in the chart table under the pilot book.

Changeover night. Fuel done, water done, clean sheets in a bag on the settee. Two berths down, Triti lay with her hatches dark; Marina had taken her crew for souvlaki. The cabin doors stood open on my boat, and there was nobody aboard but the two of us.

I was closing the log when Megan came down the steps with her notebook.

Not the phone. The notebook, the leather one. She laid it open on the chart, on top of the Cyclades, and turned it so I could read.

It was dated a year ago, in Adamas, in a hand that had been shaking when it wrote. A.P. undertakes: every part of this boat before Piraeus. Under that, a column. Galley counter. Handrail. Saloon table. Companionway steps. Foredeck. Captain’s cabin (passim). Each had a small square tick. At the bottom there were two lines with nothing beside them.

Chart table.

Wheel (tied to a quay, nobody aboard).

“You wrote that down,” I said.

“I wrote it down with my underwear on a kettle. I’d like that appreciated.” She uncapped her pen and set it in the gutter of the notebook. “You said before Piraeus. We have come into Piraeus thirty-eight times since. I’ve been very patient with you. You were acquiring a second boat.”

“Megan.”

“It’s a year and three days overdue. I’m not charging interest. I only want the file closed.” She put both hands on the edge of the chart table behind her, the way she had once on a galley counter, and lifted her chin a centimeter. “Yes or no, Captain.”

“Yes.”

I had her up on it before the pen had stopped rolling.

She was in the white shirt and a pair of my shorts, and I took the shorts. I wasn’t slow. She’d had her slow night in Kolona, in silence, with a headmistress breathing through the wall, and I had been walking around my own deck for a week with that in my body. I put her on her back across the Aegean with her head under the brass plate her sister had engraved and her heels on the fiddle rail, and I got down on my knees on the saloon floor.

“You’re lying on Kythnos,” I told her.

“That seems right. Oh—”

It came out at full volume. Nothing answered it. No kettle, no headmistress, no nurse on the other side of a centimeter of plywood. She heard that too. I felt her whole body understand that it was allowed.

So I gave her something to be loud about. I held her open with my thumbs and used my whole mouth, the flat of my tongue and then the point of it, hard and fast on her clit and no teasing, and she got one fist into my hair and the other around the grab handle and told the deckhead what I was doing to her. She has a filthy mouth now. She says cunt the way she says deliverable. She said, “Fingers, Alina, don’t make me itemize,” and I gave her two and she said, “More,” so it was three, and I looked up the length of her, flushed to the collarbones, the shirt fallen open, my father’s compass swinging over her from my own neck, and I folded my hand and gave her four.

The sound she made set a dog off on the next pontoon.

“That’s the foghorn,” I said into her thigh.

“Don’t you—God—don’t you dare stop to be clever—”

I didn’t stop. I fucked her with my arm, deep and steady, my mouth sealed over her, and she was so wet it ran down my wrist onto the chart. I’ll be drying the Kea channel with a hair dryer. She came with her back off the table and both heels drumming on the rail, clenching on my knuckles so hard I felt it in my elbow, shouting my name up through the open hatch into the whole of Zea.

I stayed where I was until she had finished shaking. Then I stood, and leaned over her, and picked up the pen.

“May I?”

“It’s my notebook.”

“It’s my chart table.” I made the tick. I pressed hard. “One.”

She lay there laughing, with her hair all over the Cyclades. Then she stopped laughing, and sat up, and looked at me, and I knew that look. I’ve seen it across a cockpit in a gale. It’s the one where she has counted the room and decided who is doing what.

“The second item is mine,” Megan said. “Go up. Take that off. Hands on the wheel, and wait for me.”

She had brought the bag down from Kastella. I should have known something when she carried her own bag aboard on a changeover night.

It was past one. The awning was rigged over the cockpit and the lamps along the pontoon had gone to half. Halcyon lay stern to the quay on two lines, both hers, breathing a little on the wash from the harbor mouth. I stood at my own wheel with nothing on but a brass compass, and I put my hands on the spokes at ten and two like a girl taking her exam.

I have held that wheel in forty-five knots. My palms were wet on it.

I heard her on the steps. I heard a buckle. I didn’t turn around. I’d been told to wait.

Her hands came first, flat on my shoulder blades, warm. Then her mouth at the nape of my neck. Then all of her along my back, breasts and belly and the leather, and the blunt slick weight of the thing lying up against me.

“Feet apart,” she said in my ear. It was my voice. She has had it a year, and she’s better at it than I am. “Wider. This is the only helm order you get tonight, so listen. You hold her steady. You don’t let go of that wheel. And you are as loud as you like. I’ve checked the pontoon. There’s a German on the next pontoon, and he can fill in a form.”

“Megan—”

“Yes or no.”

“Yes. Please.”

Her hand went between my legs from behind, and she made a low sound when she found what was there. I’d been soaked since the chart table. She stroked me twice, three times, spreading it, and I heard the bottle anyway, because she is thorough. Then she set the head of it against me and pressed.

Slowly. She has learned how. One hand on my hip, one flat on the small of my back, and a long steady push that opened me an inch at a time until her thighs were against mine and I was full to the throat. I put my forehead down on the top spoke and groaned.

“There,” she said. “Look at you. You took all of that standing up. You’re so good.”

It goes through me every time, and she knows precisely where to put it.

Then she moved, and it was the stroke. It’s always the stroke with her, long and even, from the hips, out nearly to the tip and home again, and at the bottom of each one a roll that ground the base against her and drove me up onto my toes. The wheel was locked. It didn’t give a centimeter. I hung on to it with both fists and pushed back onto her, and the boat started to move with us, a slow rock against her lines, the fenders creaking on the quay. Anybody walking the pontoon would have known exactly what was happening to the captain of Halcyon.

I found that I wanted them to know.

“Louder,” Megan said. “I can’t hear you over the rigging.”

“Harder, then.”

“Is that a request?”

“It’s an order—”

She laughed, breathless, and gave it to me hard. Her hand came around my hip and found my clit, two fingers, firm, the way I like, no softer about it at all. Her other hand left my back and closed in my hair, and she pulled my head up off the wheel so that I was looking straight down my own deck at the mast and the dark harbor and the lights of Kastella on the hill, where there are four chairs.

“Eyes open,” she said. “Watch where you’re going. That’s your boat. That’s your home up there. And this is me, and I’m staying, and you’re doing this perfectly.”

I was loud. I’ll say so. I have never made a sound like that on a deck in my life, a long broken shout in Greek with her name in the middle of it, and I didn’t turn my face away from anything. I came with my hands locked on my own wheel and my legs shaking and her buried in me to the root, and she held me up through all of it, one arm hard around my waist, saying good and so good and I have you into the back of my neck. Then her hips stuttered against me and she came too, grinding, with a noise she didn’t trouble to keep down.

Somewhere along Pontoon C, a man applauded. Slowly. Twice.

“That’s the German,” Megan said into my shoulder.

“I know that clap. He was at Sifnos.”

We ended up on the cockpit sole, in a heap, on a cushion she had put there beforehand. Of course she had. She got the buckles undone with fingers that didn’t quite work, and reached up over the coaming for the notebook, which she had also brought.

She made the tick herself. She looked at the page for some time.

“File closed,” she said.

“No.”

Her eyebrows went up.

“There’s a second boat,” I said. “Forty-six feet. She has a chart table. She has a wheel. Marina is on leave from Thursday.”

Megan Sayer looked at me, with her hair in ruins and the marks of the harness still red across her hips.

Then she turned to a clean page, and wrote the date at the top.

← Back to Sailing Past Straight

Never Miss a Release

Get new release alerts, exclusive bonus content, and reader-only giveaways.