In all the chaos of dinner, Katie completely forgot about the issue with the sleeping arrangements, but she was relieved to find that someone had addressed it when they returned to the room.
The sofa cushions had been removed, and a twin size sleeper had been pulled from its base and dressed in sheets and a blanket. A curtain had been pulled shut between the sofa and the bed, dividing the room into two parts and allowing both sleep spaces to have privacy.
“I’ll take the sofa,” Ben said. “You can have the bed.”
“No way. You’re way too big for a twin, and I think that’s even smaller than a standard twin. I’ll take the sofa, and you take the bed.”
“I can’t do that.” His nose wrinkled in distaste. “I try to have a modern mindset, and I’m all for equal rights and equal pay. But in a situation like this, I must be a gentleman and give up the bed. I wouldn’t feel right otherwise.”
“Gentleman or not, I wouldn’t feel right sleeping in that huge bed while your feet and one whole side of your body hang off the sofa. Don’t be ridiculous. I sleep on a twin bed at Maya’s, so I’ll be fine. I’m taking the sofa.”
“If you insist, milady,” he said with a dramatic bow. “Thank you. I appreciate your consideration and your generosity. Now, would you like for me to leave the room so you can get changed for bed and do whatever you need to in private?”
“No, I can change in the bathroom with the door closed, and everything else I need to do takes place in there as well.”
Once she’d finished with her toiletries, she offered to wait on the balcony while Ben got changed for bed with the drapes drawn.
It had been a warm day, but the night air rolling in off the water carried a chill with it that made her wish she’d thought to grab a sweatshirt.
The waves were calmer than she'd expected, and their gently rolling motion kept going as far as the eye could see, disappearing into the horizon so that she couldn't tell where the water ended, and the sky began.
Without the brilliant light of the sun reflecting off it, the water was black, devoid of any color unless she looked straight down to where the lights cast from the ship illuminated the top of the crests in a deep sapphire blue.
Looking down intrigued her, but it was also incredibly unsettling. She had no concept of how much distance was between her and the sandy bottom, but she knew it was a long way down. She shuddered at the thought of how many creatures could be swimming beneath her, unseen in those pitch-black depths.
The moon was on the other side of the ship, hidden from her view, but the sky was clear, and there were more stars than she’d ever seen in a single night.
“Beautiful, isn’t it?” Ben said as he slid the door open and stepped out onto the balcony.
“Breathtaking.”
“It’s chilly, huh? You good? You need a jacket?”
“Yeah, I was gonna grab my sweatshirt once you were done."
"Here," he said, reaching inside the door to grab his hoodie. “Just put this on.”
"Thanks."
She settled into one of the chairs, and he sat next to her, propping his feet on the railing. They sat in silence, each of them lost in their own thoughts as the sound of the waves and the view of the constant roll of the water soothed them.
Her mind was relentless, replaying every moment of the day and evening, obsessing over everything she felt she’d gotten wrong or wished she’d said differently.
She couldn’t go back and change any of it, but there was one topic that she could at least offer further explanation on. He hadn’t asked for it, but for reasons she didn’t care to analyze too deeply, she cared what Ben thought and wanted him to understand.
“Hey, about the writing thing…I know I probably overreacted, but the thing is…writing has been part of my identity for practically my entire life. It’s what I always wanted to do, what I felt like I was supposed to do. I've always been good at it, and it came easy for me. Whenever I imagined my future, success was being a writer. But now, I'm scared that maybe I’m actually not a writer, and that’s why it’s such a sensitive subject.”
“What do you mean? Why would you suddenly not be a writer? Is this because you’re not published yet? That’s not what makes you a writer.”
She let out a heavy sigh as she zipped his hoodie higher and shoved her hands into the pockets.
“The truth is I haven’t been able to write in…years. It’s like my stories all dried up and went away. I sit down and stare at a blank page or a blank screen, and nothing will come. When I was younger, I always had characters talking in my head, all the time. Entire stories played out up there with dialogue and settings and plot twists galore. By the time I was in high school, I’d often be working on three or four stories all at one time with more on the back burner waiting for a turn.”
Ben smiled. “I get that way with projects sometimes. Like they all want to be top priority and they’re jockeying for position so they can be completed first.”
“Exactly. But then, little by little, they all went quiet. I think it started in college, and by the time I got to New York, I realized it was a problem, but my job was so demanding, and I was so stressed all the time that I couldn’t devote any headspace to worrying about that. I thought for a while that was the problem—that I simply didn’t have any energy left to create. I also wondered if having a job I hated in publishing somehow tainted it for me, like a negative association thing. Once I realized that I couldn’t write, even when I really wanted to, then I kind of panicked. I tried everything to force a story out, but the more I pushed…”
“The harder it became?”
She nodded as she stared out at the water. “So, I just stopped trying. I can’t tell you the last time I wrote something. Not even a story. A poem. A letter. Anything. No one else knows.” She glanced over at him and back at the water. “I don’t even know why I’m telling you, other than I felt like If I didn’t tell someone, I was going to go mad. It’s like this dark secret I’m hiding, and I don’t want anyone to know. My sister always asks if I’ve written anything, and I’ve been telling her I was just too busy. So, of course, since I got laid off, now she thinks that I’ll be doing so much writing. She even bought this chair at the thrift store to put in my room because she said it called to her and told her it was a writing chair.”
Ben smiled with a subtle nod, like he understood completely how something like that could happen with Maya.
“She has no clue,” Katie said, her voice breaking as her eyes filled with tears. “No one does. No one knows how bad it is—that I can’t write at all. So, now that I got laid off, everyone expects me to finally get around to finishing something, and God, I wish I could, but it’s just not there. It’s gone.” She wiped the back of her hand across her eyes. “My talent is gone, and now, they’re all gonna know, and I’m gonna let them all down.”
“You’re not letting anyone down, Kate,” Ben said, his voice calm and soothing as he pulled his feet from the railing and turned so that he faced her.
“I’m so scared.” Her tears began to come faster, and she put her hands over her eyes to hide them. “What if it never comes back? What if I can’t write again? If this is all I ever wanted to be, and I can’t be this, then who am I?”
He scooted his chair closer and reached to stroke his hand up and down her back, and while the strength emanating from his presence was comforting, it also made her cry harder.
“Shh, c’mon. It’s okay.” Cradling his arm around her shoulders, he pulled her toward his chest and held her as best as he could with them seated in separate chairs.
Her emotions had taken her beyond worrying about what he thought or whether it was appropriate to seek such solace from a stranger. She buried her face in his chest and sobbed, releasing some of the energy that had held her so tightly strung.
Once the initial wave of overwhelm had passed, she sat up, rubbing her knuckles beneath her nose. “I’m sorry,” she whispered, but Ben shook his head and shushed her, his arm still around her shoulders.
“You don’t have to apologize. You needed to let it out.”
“Maybe so,” she said with a throaty cry chuckle, “but I didn’t have to let it out all over you.”
“It’s all right. This T-shirt’s cotton. It’ll dry. Besides, what’s a little more saltwater when you’re sitting outside breathing in sea air? Stay here. I’ll be right back.”
He returned with a box of tissues, which she took with a grateful laugh. “Thanks.”
After giving her a moment to compose herself, he said, “I understand what you’re going through. I’ve been in a similar situation, and it’s scary, frustrating, and unsettling when you can’t access what’s always been a part of you. When you feel like you can’t be who you truly are or do the things you were born to do. Some people create better under pressure, but for me…and I suspect for you as well…that pressure stifles us and shuts us down. So, you may be right about the stress and the negative association from work. Add to that exhaustion, heartache, and not meeting other people’s expectations, and it’s the perfect storm for blocking.”
“But that job’s finished. It’s done. Working at the surf shop, living with Maya, it’s like a whole different world. Things are calm now, but I still don’t have any voices in my head. Well, not the kind I want to hear anyway.”
“It’s only been like a month, Kate. You probably need more time to decompress. It takes the body a while to recover from the trauma of constant stress, not to mention the emotional toll. You lost your job, you made a big move, and it’s never easy going through a break-up. Maya didn’t give me any details, but she said it wasn’t your decision. That it wasn’t your choice.”
“He found someone else.”
“Ah.” Ben nodded. “That sucks. Betrayal is a bitch to get over. I’m sorry.”
“That's the easy answer, isn’t it? He found someone else. You say that, and everyone’s like, okay, that’s why it ended. That makes sense. And they say they’re sorry and move on. But our relationship didn’t end because Grant found someone else. It's more like Grant found someone else because our relationship never should have been.” She shifted to tuck her legs beneath her in the chair. “We really had nothing in common. And I mean, nothing. I hadn't dated anyone for a long time, and I'll admit… I wanted to be in a relationship. I wanted to have someone to go do things with. You know, watch a movie. Go to a concert. Take a walk in the park. Even just sit on opposite ends of the couch and read separate books at the same time. When I met Grant, he seemed so…worldly. He wasn’t like anyone else I’d met. He was so knowledgeable about, like, everything. He’d been all over the world to all these places I’d only read about or seen in the movies. I thought he was cultured and sophisticated, but it was really more like he was snob. He had a magnificent loft apartment in a ritzy building in this awesome neighborhood, and he had connections all over town, so we always got ushered in the back door or seated in the VIP section.”
“Was he older?” Ben asked.
“Yeah. Like ten years older, which at the time, I thought was cool. I thought all of it was cool when it started. Like this was the kind of person someone who lived in New York would date. This was the kind of guy a successful writer would date. That was the kind of apartment I’d always dreamed of when I thought about living in the city. That’s what sad, really. I don’t even miss Grant. We broke up not even a month ago, and he rarely even crosses my mind other than when I question why I was in it for so long. The thing I miss most was the apartment. God, I miss that apartment.”
Ben chuckled, shifting his feet to the railing again. “That must have been a great apartment. How long were you with this guy?”
“Well, technically, almost two years. But we’d only been seeing each for four months when he got the transfer to London. We hadn’t even had any conversations about being exclusive or what the future might hold. But because he was leaving, I felt like I was about to lose something and I needed to hold onto it, you know? Then when he mentioned that he might sublet his apartment while he was gone, we started talking about me moving in, and one thing led to another.”
“You dated for almost two years, and he was gone over a year of that?”
“He was gone fifteen months, yeah. I sound pretty dumb right now, don’t I?”
“No, that’s not what I was thinking at all.”
“What were you thinking?”
He turned his head to look at her, his face unreadable in the shadows of darkness. “I was thinking that when you came to Florida for that concert, he’d just left for London. So, you’d only been dating four months, and you hadn’t made a serious commitment yet, other than subletting the guy’s apartment. Hmm.”
“What?”
“I should have tried a lot harder.” He stood before she could process his words and question what he meant. Stretching his arms over his head with a big yawn, he went to the door and then turned back to her. “When I feel myself going into burnout or reaching a shutdown, I try to step away completely for a bit. I don’t pick up a brush or a tool. I don’t even step inside the studio. Instead, I try to fill my creative well with things that bring me joy. I spend time with nature. I visit a place I’ve never been. I read a book from an author I’ve never read. It sounds like your well ran dry, and you can’t pull from an empty well. I think you need to give yourself some grace and spend some time focusing on joy. When you’re in a good place, you’ll find your muse again. For now, set it aside and let it go.”
“I just told you I haven’t written anything in years, so I think it’s been set aside for a while already.”
“You may have set it aside physically, but you haven’t done it emotionally. Not in here.” He bumped his fist to his chest. “Let go. Find your joy. Find your peace. You’ll never stop being a writer, Kate. It’s who you are. You just need to get quiet enough in your own head that you can hear the voices again. I gotta get some sleep. Feel free to leave the door open if you want so you can hear the ocean. It should be chilly enough that it won’t get stuffy without the AC.” He smiled, and even though it was muted by the darkness, it was enough to make her melt.
“Thanks. For…you know.”
“G’night, Kate. Remember the mantra: Tomorrow is going to be a great day. You’re going to have the time of your life. Now you just need to believe it.”