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too. Scooting over to him on my butt, I undid his tie, set it aside, and then unbuttoned his white shirt.
    After that, I had to pause. How strange to be undressing him. Maybe I shouldn’t. I mean, he probably wouldn’t have done the same to me. Although that was different, wasn’t it?
    I shook my head to clear it, tried to take on the mental tone of a caregiver. I was just trying to help him, because he might really be injured. And might be worse off if he sat there in wet clothes. And I would feel terrible if I could do something, anything, and didn’t. So I grabbed hold of his shirt and pulled it off him.
    His T-shirt was thicker and wetter and harder to get off, but I pulled it over his head. His chest was tan and muscular, and something silver hung from a black cord around his neck.
    “Max?
    Max!”
    He didn’t answer.
    I reached out and held it in my hand, then glanced up at his face. I hadn’t really noticed before, but he was handsome. Even unshaven and asleep. I shook his shoulder a little. His eyes stayed closed and he didn’t budge.
    The silver at the end of the cord was oblong, with a swirly pattern of different blacks etched into the surface on one side. Something so familiar about it. Holding it in my hand, my glance rested on my thumb and I realized what the pattern was.
    A thumbprint in the silver.
    His own?
    I pressed the silver thumbprint up against my own. They were very close in size.
    Max’s hands were considerably larger than mine, even though he wasn’t that big a man. The print couldn’t belong to him.
    So whose was it?
    A girlfriend’s?
    I wanted to know more, but he obviously wasn’t talking at the moment. I let the thumbprint drop back against his chest.
    A ragged scar ran down the length of his side. I wondered how he got it and whether he would tell me when he woke up. He seemed like the type to not want to tell stories about scars, like some people did.
    He seemed like the type to not want to tell any stories at all.
    I backed off with the clothes, tossing the T-shirt to a corner of the raft, then holding up the button-down so the wind could blow it around, drying the thin material fairly quickly. I put that back on him, which wasn’t easy, but I felt a sense of satisfaction when I finished.
    Then I took off my hoodie and tried the same drying trick. But the material was so thick that even after my arms got tired of holding the thing up, it wasn’t near to being dry. I knew I should try to dry my camisole, since it was next to my skin.
    I hesitated for a moment or two. Then, tired of being clammy, I turned my back to Max and pulled my camisole over my head, then held it up in the wind, trying not to think about the fact I was naked from the waist up in a raft with a man I didn’t know.
    My camisole was cotton and dried pretty quickly. The cloth felt so warm when I put it on, which made my wet Bermuda shorts feel even worse. I realized they would dry just as fast, if not faster, so, glancing at Max to make sure his eyes were still shut, I slipped those off as well. I told myself that having dry pants would be worth the few moments of embarrassment. And my pink underwear actually looked like—and covered more than—my bikini bottoms anyway, so it was all relative.
    When my pants were dry and I put them back on, I turned around and asked him what had been on my mind for a while. “Do you think they’re looking for us?”
    No answer, as expected.
    So I replied, “Of course they are.”
    Funny, it didn’t make me feel any better.
    I tried to think of something that would.
    “People have survived for weeks in rafts. In way worse situations than this.” One in particular came to mind.
    Whenever we were down to no new DVDs to watch on Midway, I was forced to watch some older movies. One was about the USS Indianapolis , which, in 1945, was on a secret mission to the Mariana Islands to deliver components for the atom bomb that got dropped on Hiroshima a week later. The ship was on the