Hero
"And what about you?" I asked once I had regained my composure, looking back up at him. "What's your name? You certainly don't look like a man who works in shipping logistics."
He studied me for a lingering moment. I could practically see the gears turning behind those sharp, blue-grey eyes as he calculated whether or not to feed me a line.
"Max," he said eventually, settling on the abbreviation. "Just Max. I handle logistics. Import and export operations."
Logistics. Import and export. Those were always the greatest, grandest lies wealthy men in Puerto Banús told when they preferred not to admit they owned half the commercial shipping lines across the Mediterranean.
"Just Max who handles logistics and happens to own a fifty-meter yacht called the Eleni," I echoed, unable to keep the slight, dry edge out of my tone.
"Precisely," he said, and that elusive smile touched his lips once more.
He straightened up to his full height. He seemed even taller standing, the fine weave of his white linen shirt pulling taut across his broad shoulders. He stepped toward the integrated stainless-steel deck bar, opened a small panel, and pulled out two cold bottles of water. They weren't cheap plastic, but heavy glass labeled with high-end imported script. He tossed one down to me in a smooth arc. I caught it effortlessly with one hand, the glass so intensely chilled it stung my calloused palm.
"You work far too hard for a man who is only twenty-two," he said, looking down at me from the deck.
I froze with the cold glass bottle halfway to my lips. Condensation was already heavy on the surface, slipping through my fingers and dripping onto my dusty boots in the oppressive morning heat.
"Marco mentioned it to me," he added quickly, catching the sharp tension in my posture as if realizing how his observation had sounded. "He told me you were twenty-two. Said you were the hard worker of the crew. The Scottish one who keeps his head down and doesn't complain."
"Yeah," I said, forcing my tone to stay steady despite my heart hammering violently against my ribs. "Twenty-two. That's me."
I took a long, slow drink to hide my face behind the green glass. The water was crisp, clean, and fiercely cold—a sharp jolt to my system. Twenty-two. Twenty-two. The lie felt heavy on my tongue. I was nineteen. I wouldn't even turn twenty for another four months. I was standing there lying through my teeth to a man who was likely thirty-eight, who clearly had a wife somewhere given the pale, un-tanned band on his ring finger, who owned a superyacht named after his mother, and who wore a silver chronometer that cost more than my mum earned in a full month of hospital shifts. And I was lying because I desperately wanted him to see me as a grown man—someone old enough to be looked at with that sudden, intense curiosity.
He lowered himself to sit directly on the edge of the teak deck, swinging his bare feet out over the dark water so his heels hovered just inches above my shoulder. It was a breach of harbour etiquette. Owners simply didn't sit on the gunwale with hired deckhands. The crew stayed down on the concrete docks; the owners stayed elevated.
"How long have you been working in Banús?" he asked. His gaze had drifted out toward the main harbour channel, scanning the endless row of gleaming superyachts anchored under the early sun.
"Two months," I replied. "Came out in May."
"And when will this contract end?"
It was the exact question I had been dreading all summer—the standard small talk every captain and dock boss threw at you.
"Heading back to Scotland," I said. It was the master lie—the grand cover story I had painstakingly built. I wasn't stepping onto a flight bound for Edinburgh in forty-eight hours. I was heading somewhere vastly colder and far more expensive in an entirely different way—a place where snow piled high along the sidewalks in winter, and where a microscopic room in a dormitory cost more than a cottage in Anstruther. I was moving to New York.
I couldn't bring myself to tell him that. If I admitted I was flying to America on an international scholarship to study Business Management, he would inevitably ask why. Then I'd have to explain the debt, my father's heart giving out on the deck of the Hero, my dream of rebuilding Alistair's Catch into a business that could stand on its own feet, and the private, hidden stories I spent my late nights typing into my phone—narratives about men who possessed his exact dark, guarded intensity. I wanted none of that exposed. For now, I preferred being Lachlan, twenty-two, from Glasgow—a simple deckhand who scrubbed brightwork, didn't carry a dead father's legacy on his back, and didn't draft quiet, desperate romances in his Notes app.
"Scotland," Max murmured, testing the word as if evaluating its weight. "I have never had occasion to visit Scotland. Is it truly as cold as people say?"
"Colder," I said, wiping a line of sweat from my collarbone. "And rainier. You'd hate it."
"I prefer the cold," he said, turning his head to look down at me once more over the dark rims of his sunglasses. "I like places with severe weather."
We remained quiet for a long moment. All around us, the marina buzzed with expensive activity—generators thrumming, water hoses spraying, a distant horn echoing across the outer harbor. The morning sun was climbing fast, its intensity beginning to scorch the back of my neck.
"Are you busy tonight, Lachlan from Glasgow who is twenty-two?" he asked. His voice dropped an octave, turning lower and far more quiet—as if he were deliberately shielding his words from the other deckhands who were beginning to trickle onto the neighboring pontoons. He spoke as if sharing a secret meant strictly for the two of us.
My heart was hammering so violently against my ribs that I was convinced he could hear it over the steady, low hum of the Eleni's air conditioning generators.