Page 7 of Total Dreamboat

Hope

I’m having quite a nice dream about sunbathing on a beach with a rangy tattooed man with floppy brown hair when the blaring of my phone jolts me awake.

It’s a ringtone that cannot be ignored: the one I have assigned to my boss, Magda.

I yank off my sleep mask and look at my phone. It’s ten thirty, making it six thirty a.m. in New York. Either she’s up uncharacteristically early or, more likely given her party girl lifestyle, she hasn’t gone to bed yet.

I accept the call. “Hey, Magda,” I say with the extremely false cheer I, and all my colleagues, use to address her. “What’s up?”

“Hope, hi,” she says in her breathy voice. “Do you have the Conifer Games press release ready to go?”

“Um, yes,” I say. “It’s in your inbox. I sent it Friday before I left. For vacation.”

“Ah, right, you’re away. I don’t see it, can you resend?”

I scowl and shake my head while brightly chirping, “Sure, no problem.”

“And we’ll need the media list finalized by tomorrow. You have that, right?”

I freeze. At no point in the last two weeks of me rushing to get all the deliverables done for this project did she mention my being responsible for the media list.

Not that she’ll care. Forgetting last-minute deadlines is her specialty. As is foisting her work on other people.

“Oh,” I say, “I assumed that was done.”

“Never assume, Hope,” she says. “You should be all over this.”

“I’ll have Lana put one together,” I say. Lana, our publicity assistant, is very capable of the task. She actually wants to work in gaming PR, unlike, say, me.

I don’t want to work in any form of PR. But shilling iPhone games for app developers is right at the bottom of the list.

“Fine, just be sure to check it before you shoot it over to me,” Magda says. “Rockabye is a very important launch for the client.”

“Yep, of course,” I say.

“Great. Have a nice trip. Where are you? Greece?”

“Um, no. The Caribbean.”

“Lovely. Bye.”

She hangs up.

Lauren is glaring at me from her bed.

“Was that your boss?”

“Yep.”

“You have to be kidding me. She just gave you work on vacation?”

“Yep.”

“Can’t you say no?”

“Nope.” I need this job. I’m financially depleted from my breakup, and my résumé is a mess from bopping around from role to role for years. Magda can smell my desperation and liberally takes advantage of it. She “delegates” so much work to me that at this point I’m doing at least half her job.

“I’m going back to bed,” I say, jamming a pillow over my face to block out the aggressive glare of the sunlight reflecting off the ocean.

“No you’re not,” Lauren singsongs. “We have aquacise in half an hour.”

“Aquacise? Are you joking? Can’t we just sleep until noon and then lay out on deck chairs and read books?”

She comes over and pries the pillow off my face. I shout and turn over.

“Come on, up and at ’em, sunshine. I’ve already done a livestream and gone to breakfast. Met an oil man from Houston named Cliff. Bald with good glasses.”

One of Lauren’s lessons to her followers is to cultivate a taste for bald men.

“Well, go flirt with him. Have his babies. I don’t care, just let me sleep.”

“Hope, aquacise is an excellent opportunity to show off our bods. Look, I brought you a latte. Oat milk and two sugars, just the way you like it.”

I grudgingly accept the beverage.

“I hate exercise classes,” I say.

“Oh, come on. This is in a pool. It’s forty-five minutes. And we’ll look very alluring and find men to have affairs with.”

“Who am I going to have an affair with when you’ve already cornered every single man on the ship?” I ask.

“Not true. I saw you flirting with Felix last night.”

I admit it, I was flirting. That kind of energy hasn’t bubbled up in me in months. It felt good.

Especially because, if I’m not mistaken, he was flirting back.

This does nothing to increase my desire to wake up for pool aerobics.

But I know Lauren’s not going to relent, so I drag myself out of bed and onto the balcony to sit in the sun with my coffee while she changes. The bright light and stunning view of the ocean wake me up.

Cruises do have their upside.

Lauren sticks her head out the door. She’s wearing a white string bikini with bottoms that barely cover her spray-tanned ass.

“You’re wearing that to work out?” I ask.

“The point is to see and be seen, my dear innocent. Can’t do that in a Speedo. Unless you’re a man of course. With a nice package.”

I don’t have the energy to talk about men’s packages before lunch, so I refrain from commenting.

I go inside and pull a black-and-white, polka-dot one-piece from my bag.

It’s got a retro vibe and a ruched waist that flatters my figure.

It’s not exactly sportswear, but it’s more appropriate than my other option—a crimson bikini that hoists up my boobs in such an aerodynamic way it borders on the obscene.

I do not wear two-pieces—since puberty, I’ve had the kind of breasts that precede you in a room and give you back problems. Lauren, who is flat-chested, is obsessed with them and often sneaks up on me and pokes them when I’m not looking.

It is she, in case you did not predict this, who sourced and purchased the bikini.

“You’re wearing that one?” she pouts when I emerge from the bathroom.

“Yes. If I try to exercise in the other one I’ll drown.”

“Good. Then some handsome man will try to save you.”

“And his elderly back will go out and we’ll both drown.”

“Come on, Miss Priss. We’ll be late.”

The Lido Deck is not nearly as deserted as I would have imagined at eight a.m. To Lauren’s delight, the group of four gentlemen we saw checking in are stationed near the pool, finishing breakfast. She waves at them—she made sure to introduce herself at the champagne reception yesterday—and you can almost feel the effort it takes them not to gawk at her body as they wave back.

(I will spare you a description of Lauren’s physique.

Let’s just say Peloton and Tracy Anderson have both done brand collaborations.)

She goes straight over to them and hands the tallest one her phone. “Todd! Hi! Would you mind taking a picture of us?”

I glare at her. She knows I hate being photographed. Especially in a bathing suit. Especially by a stranger.

“It would be my pleasure,” he says, looking delighted at this opportunity to stare at a gorgeous woman in a string bikini.

And me, I guess.

“Thank you so much. We want to document every minute of our trip. We’re having so much fun, aren’t you?”

“Time of my life,” Todd says. “And it’s only day two.”

Yep. Eight to go.

Have fun , I remind myself. Free. Vacation.

Lauren throws her arm around me.

“Smile, girls,” Todd says.

Lauren flirts with the camera—and therefore Todd—and I try not to roll my eyes. My only consolation is that I have made Lauren solemnly swear never to post photos of me on the internet.

I hate social media, and I refuse to be B-roll.

“I took a selection,” Todd says. “You look great.”

“You’re so sweet,” Lauren says.

She pauses thoughtfully.

“Actually, would it be too much trouble to take a quick video of us while we’re exercising?”

This is one of the lessons she’s always reinforcing on TikTok—find a way to get a captive audience. Now he’ll have a free pass to watch her as she gambols about in the water.

“Of course,” Todd says, seeming genuinely honored.

By the pool, a group of mostly women are chatting with an instructor in a modest one-piece handing out pool noodles.

Here I will digress to say that if you’re imagining out-of-shape middle-agers, this is not that crowd.

The vast majority of the people on this ship are nipped, tucked, and exercised into the picture of late-in-life fitness.

I suspect they will be much better than me with the pool noodles.

“Hi there!” Lauren says to the instructor. “We’re here for aquacise.”

“Welcome, girls!” she says. “I’m Sue, the fitness officer. We have a few minutes. Let’s all do some stretching while we’re waiting for the others.”

She leads us in shoulder rolls, backbends, and toe-touches, which Lauren uses to waggle her ass in the air.

“Ready to get in the pool?” Sue calls.

“Yes!” everyone choruses back.

I’m expecting we’ll tread water or something—how strenuous can pool aerobics be?—but she starts us with a high-knee jog under water, which requires you to hoist your legs up all the way to your sternum.

It’s really, really hard.

“A little faster now!” Sue coaches. “Kick those legs out behind you. Work those quadriceps!”

I don’t know what quadriceps are, but I do know I’m not enjoying “working them.” She makes us add our arms—clapping underwater—then makes us swivel to stretch out our hips, then squat to activate our hamstrings.

By the time this sequence is fully underway I’m out of breath, and it’s only been five minutes.

“Now grab your noodles, everyone,” Sue calls. “Time to pick up the pace!”

I glance around for someone to commiserate with, but my fellow exercisers all look excited to increase the misery.

“Let’s do some jumping jacks!” Sue says. She folds her noodle into an arch and starts leaping up and down.

“How is this so difficult?” I pant to Lauren.

“It’s not,” she says, flashing a big grin at Todd, who’s recording this diligently.

“It’s killing my legs,” I say.

“If you smile it will be easier.”

“That would expend energy I don’t have.”

Sue adds in turns, lunges, leg tucks. At this point we’re making such a ruckus that most of the assembled denizens of the pool deck are watching us. It must be quite a show, because many of them are smirking.

Including, I notice with horror, Felix.

He’s sitting in the shade in swim trunks and a T-shirt reading a book, but he catches me glancing at him. He arches one brow at me as if to say, “Oh, is this what you’re into? Very cool stuff.”

“Higher!” Sue shouts. “Last set, make it count!”

I don’t want to be seen being bad at jumping over a pool noodle, so I leap up with more force than I’ve used in the whole class.

One of my entire breasts bounces out of the top of my bathing suit.

Like the whole fucking thing.

The correct thing to do in this instance would be to duck underwater before anyone notices, but the problem is I’m still holding a pool noodle under my body.

So what I actually do is squawk and drop the noodle, which flies up out of the water and bounds into my face—all while my boob bounces around and I try to catch it and shove it back into my suit.

Which is not easy as the top is tightly boned for support and I have to flatten my breast like I’m preparing for a mammogram.

Lauren has noticed my struggle—as has, I assume, most of the people within a fifty-foot radius—and, helpfully, is doubled over with laughter.

I shove myself back into a semi-clothed state but I know—I know —that Felix caught this whole incident.

Sue is pretending nothing has happened and is shouting out cool-down instructions, but I’ve had enough aquacise for one lifetime. I doggy paddle to the steps and pull myself out.

I would like to run off to my room in shame, but I’m soaking wet, out of breath, and don’t want to abandon my stuff. Which, conveniently, I left on a chair a few feet away from where Felix is sitting. And in the interim between spotting him and making my grand display, he has removed his shirt.

He’s all lean muscle and those sexy tattoos, and I find him incandescently hot.

I grit my teeth and wave.