Misty
The alarm beeped annoyingly, right by my pillow. I reached out and hit snooze, praying for just five more minutes of sleep. It was not to be, however, even though it was only five in the morning. This was the life we’d signed up for.
The light in our tiny cabin came on and Tanya instantly slid down from her top bunk. I tried to turn my head in time but it was too late. Tanya insisted on sleeping naked which never bothered me, except first thing every morning when I was presented with a daily, eye-level and in-your-face view of her hairless and exposed vagina, or a pair of smooth, bare buttocks, before she would disappear into our little shower room. It was certainly not my ideal way of waking up, regardless of how firm, tanned and sexy that ass was.
I could hear tooth-brushing and off-key humming noises coming from the small head that served our cabin, so I hauled myself out of my bunk. Blinking the sleep out of my eyes, I stared at myself in the mirror on the bathroom door. Jeez, I looked awful. My shoulder-length blonde hair was all tousled and frizzy, my blue eyes bloodshot and puffy, and the close proximity of the mirror was showing me every single open pore and blemish. I let out a long sigh and groped about on the shelves for my Lycra running shorts.
I found them and pulled them on, then stood and turned away from the cabin door. This was a habit I developed after the second-time Brett burst in uninvited, and we ended up nipple-to-nipple. The cabin really was that small. It always amazed how he always seemed to know exactly when one or both of us was half-naked but, of course, never knocked. Sure enough, as I pulled my nightshirt up over my head, I heard the door open and an excited ‘wow-ee’ come from the doorway. I quickly wrapped my arms around my bare breasts and shot Brett an evil, yet playful, look over my shoulder. It was hard to be mad at him. He didn’t mean any harm, he was just being silly and flirty. Our boat’s third deckhand stood there, shirtless, and gorgeous, a solid slab of muscle, all tanned skin and cheeky smiles, with long, wet, brown hair framing his sharp, stubbly face.
“Get the fuck out, Brett!” I snapped at him, as he stared at my bare back, hoping for a glimpse of side-boob. He opened his mouth to reply, but the words caught in his throat as Tanya stepped serenely out of the head, still totally naked and completely unashamed. She gave me the diversion I needed to grab my sports bra and tug it over my tits.
“Morning, handsome,” sang Tanya, as she squeezed her long, lithe body around me. She smiled as she walked slowly, yet threateningly, toward the open-mouthed Brett. She reached him, placed a hand on his firm chest, and effortlessly shoved him out the door, closing it behind her. She turned to me and giggled as the outside corridor was quickly filled with loud complaints and protests.
I smiled back at her. “Will you put some damn clothes on?” I insisted.
“Only if you give me a big kiss first, beautiful!” she teased, playfully caressing her proud and prominent breasts seductively.
“Oh, you bitch,” I laughed. While it seemed to me that Tanya was a tri-sexual – meaning she’d try pretty much anything – she knew I was only into guys. She’d still mess with me every chance she got, though. “Shut up and let’s go, shall we?”
“Just waiting on you!” she called behind me as I stepped into the head and locked the door. As I brushed my teeth, my mind wondered over the two months I’d spent so far crewing this yacht. Part of me wished I could be as outgoing and confident in my body as Tanya, the second steward to my third. There was, after all, not a lot of room for privacy or modesty among the crew, below-deck of Aphrodite, the 161-foot, $20 million luxury motor yacht we all worked charters on. The cramped, claustrophobic crew quarters meant everyone was bound to see your junk or your tits at some point, so why should I worry?
Plus, every night we weren’t on charter usually involved vast amounts of drinking and dancing, as you’d expected from a crew of mostly early-twenty-something beautiful people, working hard in the Caribbean and earning a ton of money. Of course, there was more than a fair share of making out and hooking up going on too, although the latter was not quite as common as you’d think, though. Especially since the morning after would leave both parties trapped on a boat with no way of escape.
And last night had been one of those nights, involving far too much rum and tequila. As the last clouds of drowsiness finally disappeared from my brain, my head began to bang. I drank down a glass of water and struggled to recall the night’s shenanigans. Brett, I thought I could remember, had made out with Sarah, our normally very professional chief steward, who was still an astonishingly attractive redhead despite being over a decade older than most of the rest of the crew. Sarah was normally a little aloof and austere when she was sober but she could certainly party when the mood took her.
Toward the end of the night, I did recollect, a bunch of the younger guys and girls had skinny-dipped off the side of the yacht, leaping laughing and naked into the black Caribbean waters, but that was pretty par for the course on those off-nights.
As for myself, I remembered flirting a little with a guy in the bar we were at, and gradually began to recall responding when Adam, the very sexy ship’s engineer, began to compliment and flirt with me. Oh, God! That was all I needed. Adam was fit, certainly. A little shorter and not quite the Adonis that most deckhands, like Brett, turned into after a length of time at sea, but he made up for it with a really smart sense of humor and a quiet vulnerability. I just wasn’t looking for anything serious. Not right now.
Remembering his interest in me, and the enthusiastic look in his eye as we flirted, my self-confidence began to return a little. I put on some makeup, brushed my hair, and, slowly the face in the mirror returned to someone I finally recognized. A little highlighting around my eyes, a little gloss on my lips, and I started to feel attractive again. And, thanks to getting up at five every morning and running around the boat for ninety minutes with Brett and Tanya, no matter what the weather or how much we’d imbibed the night before, all the tacos, nachos, and binge drinking had only a negligible effect on my body. Thanks to the work I put in, I managed to maintain my flat stomach, firm butt, slim legs, and high bust.
Don’t get me wrong, I was no buff gym-goddess, like Tanya. But Adam still called me a knockout last night, which was always nice to hear. God, I hoped things were not going to be weird between us now, though. It’s seldom a bad thing to have a more senior colleague a little sweet on you, so long as he knows it’s never going to get serious, but I needed to keep my focus for the tasks I had ahead, and the secret plans I could never tell my crewmates about.
* * *
After we ran, Tanya, Brett, and I went back to our quarters and showered for the crew breakfast-meeting. Around the table in the galley was a long, L-shaped couch built into the walls, and we three most junior crew members, along with Adam, were the first to arrive. First deckhand Mike, who displayed his usual early morning bad mood, and Azure, looking typically frumpy in her second deckhand uniform, were next to appear.
It always amazed me just how Azure, short, pretty, and olive-skinned, could fly silently and almost unnoticed about the boat during a charter but, off-duty, she could quickly throw on some heels, a backless dress, and transform into a sultry, hard-partying princess with enough cleavage to get us behind almost any velvet rope. Maybe it was because she was only about five feet tall with no shoes on at work, which was the rule aboard Aphrodite for both crew and guests alike.
The door opened and in walked Captain Harper, all white hair and bushy beard, with Keith, the newly appointed bosun. Tarquin, a Cordon Bleu chef from London, followed them, pristine in his sharp white jacket, and as gay as can be, along with Sarah, who carefully and subtly managed to sit at the bolted down table as far from Brett as possible. They’d clearly just come from their senior crew meeting.
“Good morning, everyone,” Captain Harper’s English accent was crisp as he took a chair at the head of the table “I hope you all had fun last night.” Adam and I exchanged glances, and I saw Brett’s eyes flit over to where Sarah was sitting, although she didn’t flinch. “However, today is a work day, and here’s our charter.”
Keith handed round sheets of paper that had a head-shot and some details printed underneath. When the first sheet circled around to me, it showed a big, African-American guy with a scar on his left cheek and gold where his front teeth should have been. Charming.
“D Cash,” began Keith. Unaccustomed to public speaking, he stopped and cleared his throat before continuing, “as you probably all know, is a multi-million selling rap and hip-hop artist who loves his bling.” I passed the sheet on and took the next one. This was a handsome, clean-looking chap, in his early thirties, who looked incredibly fit but that could have been just the photo. “Paul Richards,” announced Keith, “another billionaire and a motorcycle racer who currently competes at world level in the Moto-GP championship.”
I felt my hands shaking as the third paper was handed over to me. I felt the breath catch in my throat as I looked at the picture. “Tyler Harcourt,” said Keith. “Our primary charter.”
Finally, I thought to myself, the one I’ve been waiting for.
“A billionaire playboy type that does actually take his work seriously,” Keith read from his notes. “As always, don’t forget that the primary is the guy who’s paying. He’s our boss for the next few days and the one that’s going to tip you all.”
I accidentally scoffed to myself but, luckily, no one noticed. Just as no one noticed as I held on to the paper and stared at his picture. Look at him, I thought, rich, handsome, arrogant bastard. My eyes began to stare through the photograph, my mind flashing back eight years, almost to the day.
I was the most popular senior in Santa Monica High School. I had wealthy friends, a BMW convertible, and all the cute boys chasing me. I was all set, eager to head off to one of the top colleges in the country, then carve out a career, maybe in fashion. My father’s successful yacht-building company had given me and my mother a privileged life that made others envious.
The bubble burst, though. Times went bad and I didn’t find out until it was too late. The spare cash dried up and people stopped buying yachts. My dad tried to keep it secret that his business was in trouble, borrowing and dealing, trying to stay afloat until the economy improved. And he succeeded for a while, right up until my car was seized and towed, right out of the student car park in front of all my friends. After that, well, I couldn’t even get a ride home.
Soon, the house went too and, not long after, my mother. She was desperate to get back the life she was used to, I guess, because we woke up one morning and she’d just vanished. I never saw her again. My dad never managed to recover. He was able to explain to me that they lost everything due to a hostile takeover from a huge firm. He told me it was a billion-dollar corporation called HHC, and that the founder and CEO was a guy called Bernard Harcourt.
He also knew that Harcourt had been leaking the problems my father’s company was experiencing, as well as HHC’s secret plans for the acquisition, for months. The result of that illegal move was no confidence in the company, so the share prices dropped and no one dared lift a finger to help the Morgan family business out. Two days after he’d been forced to sign the handover, selling his life’s work for a measly ten thousand dollars, my father shot himself.
So, the way I saw it, Bernard Harcourt and his greedy business practices were directly responsible for my father’s death. The Harcourt family and HHC were murderers and now, at last, was my chance for revenge. Bernard had died three years ago, leaving his son Tyler in charge of HHC, and he was now only hours away from being stuck on a boat with me, for three days.
Barely eighteen, with less than ten grand to my name, no place to live, and no college degree, I’d been forced to go to work so, after a few missteps and dead-end jobs, I eventually went back to the only thing I knew. I found employment on yachts. I liked to think I was smart, attractive, and resourceful, and that helped me build a career as cabin crew on several boats, moving up to becoming the chief steward of a huge yacht in the Mediterranean.
Happily, I found I loved the work and, with tips, the money was good. And the lifestyle allowed me to never need to settle. I had no house, no car, no family. I worked boats constantly, calling each one home, for one season at a time. Any downtime I had was spent in cheap lodgings in whatever port I landed. Jamaica, Nice, Singapore, flipping from one side of the world to the other, chasing the summer vacation seasons. Not too bad at all.
However, when I heard that Tyler Harcourt had chartered a boat, I knew my chance had arrived. Having no home or real family, there was no distractions, nothing to stop me kicking my plan for revenge into action. I jumped ship immediately, flew to Aruba, and pestered Captain Harper to take me on board Aphrodite. I even lied about my experience, knowing he had a longstanding chief steward and I’d never get that job, I went for the lowest cabin crew position to make sure I got aboard. Then it was just a matter of working the few weeks, waiting for Harcourt’s charter to come around.
“Miss Morgan?” called Captain Harper, “Are you still with us?” I jerked upright in my seat and nodded, finally putting down the paper with his face on it. “Mr. Harcourt is paying for his friends and him to have a good time,” he continued. “He always brings his attorney, Henry Osborne, with him and they told us at reservation that there would also be three to five… erm… lady-friends joining them.”
“They landed in Oranjestad yesterday,” Sarah piped up, “and will be boarding at eleven this morning. Stewards, a last look over the guest bedrooms and facilities, please, then into your whites for the charter’s arrival.”
Tanya and I jumped up to obey Sarah’s instructions, as Keith called out his directions to the deckhands. The next three hours flew by as we three stewards inspected the opulent master cabin, with its huge central bed that gazed out on a panoramic ocean view across the bow of the ship, the three plush double cabins amidships and the stern twin room. We made sure the three bars, one on deck, one in the lounge and one in the formal dining room, were stocked with single malt scotch, good brandy, rum, tequila, and Dom Pérignon champagne, and that all the glassware and crystal shone. The deckhands scrubbed the decks, the hull and saw that the three Waverunners, the speed boat, and other assorted millionaire’s toys we carried were ready. The sundeck and the eight-person Jacuzzi were also thoroughly prepared, as they were the most popular places the guests liked to hang out. There were many good reasons that it cost upwards of $200,000 to charter this boat for a long weekend.