Podcasts about maiden voyage

SEE THE BOYS LIVE - https://punchup.live/samtallent     Sponsors: HIMS - Support the show & get simple, online access to personalized, affordable care with HIMS @ http://hims.com/CHUBBY     Harry's - Chubby Behemoth fans get the Harry's Plus Trial Set for only $10 at https://www.Harrys.com/CHUBBY #Harry'sPod #ad     PATREON EPISODES: https://www.Patreon.com/chubbybehemoth     This week the boys are all back at their own houses. Sam remembers thinking 'butt stuff' was his, got into it by googling balloon stuff, and gets jealous of an orphan. Nathan shares some big news with the fellas, got an AirBnb that comes with a blunt object, and tells the guys about a man that was his own nemesis.     00:00 Cool Salt In The Pepper 00:56 Box Of Hats 02:52 Loudest Rooms Allowed 04:31 Video Dating Services 05:42 Guess What? It Sucked 07:47 But I Lurk 10:07 Maiden Voyage 12:19 Pharmacy In Your Head 14:14 Thought It Was Mine 16:41 Can't Remember 19:06 If I Gave You A Thousand Dollars 22:13 Just Me And The Boys 23:50 Staying On Murder Block 27:00 Fast Forwarding 28:58 Doing Everyone A Favor 30:55 You Can't Control The Weather 33:37 Hell Isle 34:54 Two Tokes Bike Ride At Sunset 37:40 Smashing Coffee Pots 40:55 Think I Have A Bug In There 43:32 The Confusing Aspect 47:11 That Your Wife Hates 49:45 Figuring It Out 52:47 He Always Had Kind Eyes 55:24 Crossed Him Off The List 58:01 The Real Skinner 01:01:22 The Word Engineer     Nathan Lund and Sam Tallent are Chubby Behemoth   MORE WIDE WORLD: @SamTallent   Pre-Order Sam's New Book - https://www.amazon.com/dp/0593978897/ref=sr_1_1?crid=3I4LOBQ02YIGW&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.k5eCApJdjwVfn7hSelWi5VdRMlVrzKa4zf68ficcjcg.tZZOiI0nB0n3kkWiGAbidMQy5yUS_MkvmEIaXp-LXjo&dib_tag=se&keywords=sam+tallent+brut&qid=1769522903&sprefix=sam+tallent+,aps,181&sr=8-1&dplnkId=90401c83-a6a0-4ad4-999e-ece570a5d320&nodl=1

We've been looking forward this weekend ever since BJ told us he's taking the RV out for its Maiden Voyage this weekend but sounds like there's a couple of problems. Might be only one night, if it even happens!

Herbie Hancock's Thrust (1974) is one of the most influential jazz-funk records ever made. Peter Martin and Adam Maness break down the full album, track-by-track: Mike Clark's displaced backbeats, why Paul Jackson is such an unusual bass player and possibly the greatest Rhodes solo of all time. Plus - Adam shares a story about learning "Spank-A-Lee" at 16, and Peter tells us about meeting Paul Jackson for the first time. And ... is "Actual Proof" ACTUALLY the best track on the album?-------------------------------Start your free Open Studio trial for ALLLLL your jazz lesson needs:https://openstudiojazz.com/yhi------------------------------Maiden Voyage: https://youtu.be/ZQ6ICxe2wjEHead Hunters: https://youtu.be/wM-_44deuSY------------------------------About You'll Hear It:In this popular music series, Adam and Peter break down the greatest albums of all time. Stevie Wonder, Michael Jackson, Joni Mitchell, D'Angelo: Jazz is the foundation of the most GENIUS music in recent history. These seasoned jazz pianists bring their deep musical knowledge to every joyful episode to help you hear the hidden qualities that make music AMAZING. You'll never hear music the same way again.-------------------------------Sign up for the You'll Read It newsletter for little known stories about the artists you love:https://youllhearit.com/newsletter-------------------------------00:00 Thrust - Herbie Hancock00:30 Herbie Before Thrust: Miles & The Headhunters03:01 Drummer Mike Clark Joins the Band03:35

SpaceTime Series 29 Episode 56 *Discovery of 27 new Tatooine type worlds reported on Star Wars Day Astronomers have discovered some 27 new planetary candidates orbiting in binary star systems using a new method to search for exoplanets which would otherwise be hard to find. *A new drill campaign for the Mars Curiosity Rover on the red planet NASA's Mars Curiosity rover has launched a new drill campaign at a site called Atacama on the red planet's Gale Crater.. *New Soyuz 5 maiden flight Russia's new-next generation launch vehicle the Soyuz 5 has successfully completed its maiden flight. *The Science Report A third of Australian's getting too little sleep. The extraordinary biodiversity hidden in deep underwater canyons off Western Australia's coast. Studies show domestic dogs brains shrunk by 46% compared to wolves by the Late Neolithic. Skeptics guide to the link between authoritarianism and the paranormal. Our Guests This Week: Associate Professor Ben Montet from the University of New South Wales Bepi Columbo mission MIXS principle investigator Emma Bunce University of Leicester Bepi Columbo mission SIMBIO-SYS principle investigator Gabriele Cremonese Bepi Columbo mission MPO-MAG investigator Daniel Heyner Technical University of Braunschweig   And our regular guests: Alex Zaharov-Reutt from techadvice.life Tim Mendham from Australian Skeptics

A choice, a trap, and a necklace.By HectorBidon. Listen to the ►Podcast at Steamy Stories.The next morning’s sun found its way in through our porthole once again. We had sorted ourselves out somewhat during the night. I was on my side, tangled in a bit of sheet. She was on her side, tangled in a bit of blanket. I could just make out the pale tan lines on her bottom and her back.We’d become cabin buddies of a different order. At the Jack-and-Ciara level. That’s probably what most people would have assumed all along, but I certainly hadn’t, and I didn’t think that she had either.And yet, here we were.I waited a while for her to wake up, but she didn’t. So I finally got up myself.We’d just passed through the entrance in the seawall at Ensenada and were coming up to our docking site. The pilot, or maybe it was the captain himself, was standing on a little deck that jutted out from the side of the ship to joy-stick our massive vessel precisely up to the pier.Molly was still in bed when I got back. She smiled and went to the bathroom, a little embarrassed to be still naked while I was already dressed. Her pubic hair, I noticed, was trim and attractive.She came out wearing a towel and had her coffee. We checked the day’s schedule. She was delighted to discover that they’d transferred Mrs. Pendergast’s excursion ticket to me.A little later that morning we went ashore. It was a strange sensation, stepping off the gangway into a foreign country. Somehow I expected every little thing to be different and exotic, but the first thing we encountered, sprouting up through a crack in the pavement, was a little tuft of grass. Nothing exotic at all, just plain old grass.Our excursion van was heralded by a woman with a clipboard, a younger, more boisterous, Mexican Denise. There were three other couples in our group and a single unaccompanied woman about Ciara’s age. I took a seat next to the window with Molly beside me with the unaccompanied woman next to her. Her name was Meryl. This was her first real vacation since her divorce. She was really excited to be having such an adventure.We drove through the streets of Ensenada, our guide giving us a bit of local color in her prettily accented English. The scene was at once familiar and strange: traffic and lane markings and stop lights just exactly like at home, but unintelligible store signs in unlikely colors painted directly on pastel stucco walls. Beyond the city were dusty, cactus-strewn hills not unlike the Catalina hinterland.Our destination was a site called the Bufadora, a cleft in the rocky sea cliff where ocean waves sent up enormous geyser-like sprays. The sprays were so high that we got wet even at our vantage point fifty feet above the water.The path back from the observation point was lined with gaudy souvenir shops, like the midway of a county fair. Meryl had tagged along with Molly and me. We stopped at one of the taco stands for lunch.“So how did you guys meet?”Molly didn’t volunteer an answer. "Just here on the cruise, actually,“ I said."Really? See, aren’t cruises great?” Molly gushed.After lunch we went into one of the souvenir shops and Meryl asked our opinion about all the little nick-nacks she wanted to buy. When we got back to the van, I ended up sitting in the middle.“The nicest thing.” she said. “is that every day you make new friends.”We drove back through town, then out into the desert in a different direction to a picturesque winery. We sat around a table on a palm-shaded patio and sampled the different vintages. Meryl chatted on about Simi Valley and the cruise and her ex and the weather and the ship and the people she’d met. She got me to go into the little gift shop with her to help pick out a couple bottles.Molly was quiet at dinner. I had to remind her that we’d made plans to see the comedy show with Meryl.“I’ve got a bit of a headache,” she said. “I think I’ll go back to the room.”Meryl was waiting in the forward theatre. She was sorry to hear about Molly’s headache and put her hand on my arm to convey her concern. The show turned out to be pretty adult-rated, pretty raunchy in fact. Meryl yucked it upAfter the show she suggested we take a spin about the deck. The ship had set sail again and we were just passing the exposed wreck that lies up against the sea wall. Somehow Meryl managed to tuck herself inside my arm.“Wouldn’t you just love to go dancing?” she cooed.“I, uh,  Actually, I’ve kind of got to go now.”“But the night is still young. Meryl rebutted. Let’s at least stop by my room first.”“I’ve got to check on Molly.” I insisted“We can open one of the tequilas.”“Thanks, but,"It’s just that, I was kind of hoping to get lucky tonight.”Christ Almighty. A guy tries to be a gentleman. I didn’t need an etiquette book for this one. I finally managed to pry myself away,When I got back to the room, Molly was in her pajamas, watching TV.“Is your headache any better?” I asked.She didn’t look up from the screen.I sat on the chair and twisted around to see what she was watching. A travelogue of some sort.“You didn’t miss much,” I said. “The show was kind of,”But she leaned in closer to the screen to make it clear that I was interrupting her program. Something about the way the locals made their tortillas.OK. I got the message. She didn’t like the fact that I’d gone to the show with Meryl. I went into the bathroom to pee. I’d only been trying to be polite to a fellow cruise member. Was that a crime? Molly had been there when we’d made the plans. I thought that she’d been trying to be friendly too. That we’d sort of taken Meryl under our wing.I came out of the bathroom a minute later, and sat down on the chair again. The secret to the tortillas, apparently, had something to do with lime juice.“I didn’t expect to see you back here tonight,” Molly said. In a sarcastic tone of voice. As if my presence was an imposition. As if she was sorry she’d ever offered to share the room in the first place.I didn’t even bother to answer. I got undressed, then crawled up onto my side of the bed. Where else was I supposed to go? I got under the blanket and turned toward the bulkhead. A guy tries to be a gentleman. And this is what he gets.I woke up first again, the next morning. I went up on deck. Did she really think that I’d found Meryl even the least bit attractive? She was a fellow shipmate, nothing more. I’d thought that we’d both been trying to be polite to her. Was that a crime?I brought back coffee and a croissant, but Molly was still asleep. Or pretending to be. I banged around a little, but she didn’t budge. Finally I got fed up and left.So here I was again, back to my usual routine, wandering down empty corridors, drifting up little-used gangways, poking around lonely corners where nobody else much ever cared to go. Doing what I probably would have been doing if I’d gotten my single in the first place.I came back to the room around lunch time, but Molly wasn’t there. I wandered up to the pool. Denise was there, chatting with some people. She waved. Meryl was there, stalking about, but I managed to slip away before she saw me. But no Molly.It was a long day. The ship had parked itself out in the middle of the ocean somewhere. Or maybe the rest of the world really had blown itself up and they just hadn’t told us. I eventually ended up back in the little coffee shop at the tail end of the ship. The sky seemed a lot flatter though, the seagulls a lot more listless, my algorithms a lot less interesting. Finally I got up again and trudged back down into the labyrinth.The casino was practically empty. The lower piano bar was closed. The little art gallery was still showing the same old photographs.The gift shop was open. The same lady was behind the counter. What was it that Molly had asked to see? A necklace. It must have been, that one. The lady brought it out. A pair of crystalline dolphins on a slender silver chain. They sparkled in the light.Molly still wasn’t in the room when I got back. This time our towel had been folded into a seal, sunning itself on the bedspread. I moved it a little closer to her pillow and arranged the necklace around its neck.There were still a couple hours until dinner. I thought it might be better if I wasn’t there when she got back.I got to dinner right on time. It was our last night on board, and the dining room was even more boisterous than usual.“Where’s Molly?” asked Ciara.“She had a little headache. She might not be joining us.”Valentin our waiter was really joshing it up, angling for a big end-of-trip tip. He was just taking the drink orders when Molly appeared. She was wearing a pink skirt, a whitish blouse,,  and the necklace. Her eye caught mine as she made her way around the table, but quickly shot away again.Ciara asked her how she was doing. The couple on my other side were there for once. Tom and somebody. He was in air conditioning and gave me the full rundown. It was too noisy for Molly and me to talk, but every time I looked, she was still wearing the necklace.It being our last night, the waiters were going to put on a little show. Just after they passed out the dessert plates they went into a huddle near the service entrance. Molly leaned over.“Do you want to go back to the room?”We got up.“Oh, are you guys going to the revue?” asked Ciara.Molly replied in the louder voice you had to use to make yourself heard. But the room was beginning to quiet down in a hush, as the waiters were taking their places, and so the whole table heard what she said.“Make-up sex.”The table burst into laughter. Molly continued her way out of the room, and I just followed sheepishly behind her.“Can you forgive me?” she asked as we got out into the hallway.“For letting everybody know where we’re going?”“For last night. I’m so sorry for the way I acted. It was my fault. It was all my fault.”“The worst part is, we wasted a whole day,” I remorsed.“We still have tonight.” She tried to assure me.“Yeah. We still have tonight.” I agreed.As soon as we got into the room we fell into each other’s arms.“I love the necklace,” she murmured.“It looks really nice on you.”We kissed and shuffled toward the bed.But my blood was pumping. I was thinking about our wasted day.“Let’s do something first, want to? I pleaded. It’s our last night. Let’s get our money’s worth. Let’s go to the show! Let’s go dancing! Let’s shoot for that royal flush! The bed will still be here when we get back. But let’s make up for some of the things we didn’t do today. Let’s paint the ship red. Okay? Want to? C'mon! Hup hup!”Jack and Ciara were surprised to see us at the theatre.“That was quick,” Ciara said with a look of astonishment.Molly blushed. I put my arm around her and pulled her tight. “You ain’t seen nothing yet.”The review was Motown classics, the Supremes, the Four Tops. “You can’t hurry love, no you’ll just have to wait, The whole auditorium was singing along. The girls pulled Jack and me up from our seats to dance in the aisle. "Sugar pie, honeybunch, you know that I love you,Afterwards, the night was balmy, perfect for a stroll on deck. We could see lights off in the distance, the rest of the world was still there after all! We ran into Meryl, wrapped in the arm of a dapper, middle-aged gentleman whose smile was just as smug as hers was. We exchanged pleasantries. She gave us both a little wink.Molly, perhaps I m clueless. Did you have any idea that Meryl was going to try to hit on me? I had to ask.Oh, my God! Molly stared at me. All day long, she was angling for you. I thought you were trying for a threesome, and my fake headache was me forcing you to choose one or the other.What? I thought you and I were just trying to be hospitable; you know, so she d have some friends to socialize with.Well, Molly confessed. I finally figured out that you were completely innocent, but it took me until late afternoon to dispel my worst presumptions.I went to the show, because we told her we d both join her, there. I explained. When you were bedridden with a headache, I assumed it fell on me to go alone, even though I really didn t want to be away from you.Ah, really? That s so sweet! Molly gushed. She gave me a deep kiss right there on the mezzanine. I assumed you went because you wanted another notch on your belt.  I m so, so sorry.Well, when the performance ended, I said I had to head back to you. She did try every diversion. I passed on all of them. Then she flatly told me she was hoping to get lucky with me. I told her I definitely could not accommodate that, and I walked straight back to our room.Oh, I was awful to you! Molly lamented. But I was also right about that slut s intentions, wasn t I? Molly paused, then added; When I finally got over my inner rage, I realized that you didn t come back smelling like cunt. Hell, you didn t even have lipstick smeared on your face.  This afternoon, I finally left my hiding spot, and saw you were heading to dinner, I went to the cabin and saw this beautiful necklace.  I literally cried. I don t deserve you. You don t deserve my juvenile drama. I d planned to skip the dinner, but when I saw the dolphin necklace, I had to come and grovel your forgiveness.You know, Molly I paused. Perhaps I was too clueless, yesterday. Perhaps you were too presuming? Do you think we can both help to balance each other?Oh, I love that! Yes, let s balance each other.The nightclubs were hopping. We wound our way from one to the other, dancing one dance in each. But then we decided to forgo the casino and just head back to the cabin. And sure enough, the bed was still there, right where we’d left it.We kissed. I ran my hands up along her sides, up inside her blouse. She undid my buttons and pulled open my shirt. I fiddled with her skirt and managed to slip it down over the swell of her hips. She unfastened my belt buckle and my button and my zipper. I slid my hands down inside her panties. She slid hers down inside my underpants. We pawed and shucked and kicked off everything that remained. And then she took off the very last thing that she was wearing, the crystalline necklace, and placed it carefully on the nightstand.I backed her down onto the bed. I kissed the pretty spot where the necklace had been, and the spot next to that, and the spot next to that. She lay back and closed her eyes and let herself be kissed.I settled myself down on top of her, stroking her full lovely body with my own, savoring her softness and her excitement, trying to fuse our unfortunate separateness into something more fulfilling. And somehow, in the midst of our kissing and our stroking, my penis must have slid up at just the right angle, and her hips must have been open to just the right degree, and we coupled, as adroitly as if that had been our conscious intention, as naturally as if we were two jungle cats whose lithe jungle bodies just instinctively knew how to fuck.And somewhere in the midst of our coupling we sweetly came, but it was not so much a climax as just a sweet vista point along the way. For just as we hadn’t consciously willed our engagement, neither did we ever willfully disengage, but just eventually nestled more comfortably down beside each other, still caressing, still softly kissing, still sweetly fused.The loudspeaker blasted us awake early the next morning. Our luggage needed to be out in the hallway for pickup by eight o'clock sharp!Molly wriggled a bit deeper under the blanket. "Uh,” she groaned. “Just five more minutes.”I remembered the look on her face, when had it been? just four days ago, when we first learned we might have to share the cabin together. She’d been just as uncertain as I had. But now it was hard to imagine any other arrangement. Her lying in bed beside me, trying to squeeze in a few more minutes of sleep, leaving it up to me to keep track of the time, I wouldn’t have had it any other way.We hadn’t begun to pack yet, but we’d kept things fairly organized. I gave her a generous five minutes, and then I gave her a little nudge. “C'mon, sleepyhead. Up and at um.”She groaned, but she dragged herself out of bed. We were both still naked. I slipped on a pair of boxers, and she put on a T-shirt. It rode up in back, though, so that her pretty bottom kept peeking out as she went around collecting her things and tucking them into her suitcase.“Do you kinda wish that the rest of the world really had blown itself up?” I asked.She was folding one of her bras. “Oh, I don’t know. We’d probably get tired of eating cheesecake eventually.”“They’d run out. Then we’d have to eat whatever it is that Valentin eats.”“He gets cheesecake sometimes, don’t you think? When they have some left over?”“I don’t know. He’s pretty skinny.”“I wonder why Meryl didn’t think of him.”“Yeah. Good question. Wrong table, I suppose.”“I suppose.”I crammed my sports coat in between my shirts and my underwear bag. She gave the zipper of her suitcase a final tug. “Besides,” she said. “Your algorithms would miss you.”I slipped on my trousers and rolled the bags out into the corridor. There were a surprising number of people walking by, and every single one of them gawked into the room as they passed. Nothing is more titillating to a person walking down a stateroom corridor than an open doorway.When I got the door closed again, Molly was sitting up on the bed with the sheet pulled up in front of her and a rather indignant look on her face. What a lot of nerve some people had!I couldn’t help but smile. “I wonder what they thought you were hiding back there.”She rolled her eyebrows.But I was feeling a little playful. The final day’s schedule was lying on the floor. I picked it up and pretended it was an official form.“Customs inspection, Miss, May I see what you’ve got behind that sheet?”She wasn’t so sure she wanted to show me. She coyly raised the sheet a little higher.“That shirt you’re wearing, Miss. Did you purchase it abroad?”She looked down behind the sheet. This old thing?.“Regulations, Miss; It may contain contraband fibers.” I held out my hand. “May I see it please?”She huffed. Bureaucrats! Without letting go of the sheet she wriggled one arm out of its sleeve and then the ot

A choice, a trap, and a necklace.By HectorBidon. Listen to the ►Podcast at Steamy Stories.The next morning’s sun found its way in through our porthole once again. We had sorted ourselves out somewhat during the night. I was on my side, tangled in a bit of sheet. She was on her side, tangled in a bit of blanket. I could just make out the pale tan lines on her bottom and her back.We’d become cabin buddies of a different order. At the Jack-and-Ciara level. That’s probably what most people would have assumed all along, but I certainly hadn’t, and I didn’t think that she had either.And yet, here we were.I waited a while for her to wake up, but she didn’t. So I finally got up myself.We’d just passed through the entrance in the seawall at Ensenada and were coming up to our docking site. The pilot, or maybe it was the captain himself, was standing on a little deck that jutted out from the side of the ship to joy-stick our massive vessel precisely up to the pier.Molly was still in bed when I got back. She smiled and went to the bathroom, a little embarrassed to be still naked while I was already dressed. Her pubic hair, I noticed, was trim and attractive.She came out wearing a towel and had her coffee. We checked the day’s schedule. She was delighted to discover that they’d transferred Mrs. Pendergast’s excursion ticket to me.A little later that morning we went ashore. It was a strange sensation, stepping off the gangway into a foreign country. Somehow I expected every little thing to be different and exotic, but the first thing we encountered, sprouting up through a crack in the pavement, was a little tuft of grass. Nothing exotic at all, just plain old grass.Our excursion van was heralded by a woman with a clipboard, a younger, more boisterous, Mexican Denise. There were three other couples in our group and a single unaccompanied woman about Ciara’s age. I took a seat next to the window with Molly beside me with the unaccompanied woman next to her. Her name was Meryl. This was her first real vacation since her divorce. She was really excited to be having such an adventure.We drove through the streets of Ensenada, our guide giving us a bit of local color in her prettily accented English. The scene was at once familiar and strange: traffic and lane markings and stop lights just exactly like at home, but unintelligible store signs in unlikely colors painted directly on pastel stucco walls. Beyond the city were dusty, cactus-strewn hills not unlike the Catalina hinterland.Our destination was a site called the Bufadora, a cleft in the rocky sea cliff where ocean waves sent up enormous geyser-like sprays. The sprays were so high that we got wet even at our vantage point fifty feet above the water.The path back from the observation point was lined with gaudy souvenir shops, like the midway of a county fair. Meryl had tagged along with Molly and me. We stopped at one of the taco stands for lunch.“So how did you guys meet?”Molly didn’t volunteer an answer. "Just here on the cruise, actually,“ I said."Really? See, aren’t cruises great?” Molly gushed.After lunch we went into one of the souvenir shops and Meryl asked our opinion about all the little nick-nacks she wanted to buy. When we got back to the van, I ended up sitting in the middle.“The nicest thing.” she said. “is that every day you make new friends.”We drove back through town, then out into the desert in a different direction to a picturesque winery. We sat around a table on a palm-shaded patio and sampled the different vintages. Meryl chatted on about Simi Valley and the cruise and her ex and the weather and the ship and the people she’d met. She got me to go into the little gift shop with her to help pick out a couple bottles.Molly was quiet at dinner. I had to remind her that we’d made plans to see the comedy show with Meryl.“I’ve got a bit of a headache,” she said. “I think I’ll go back to the room.”Meryl was waiting in the forward theatre. She was sorry to hear about Molly’s headache and put her hand on my arm to convey her concern. The show turned out to be pretty adult-rated, pretty raunchy in fact. Meryl yucked it upAfter the show she suggested we take a spin about the deck. The ship had set sail again and we were just passing the exposed wreck that lies up against the sea wall. Somehow Meryl managed to tuck herself inside my arm.“Wouldn’t you just love to go dancing?” she cooed.“I, uh,  Actually, I’ve kind of got to go now.”“But the night is still young. Meryl rebutted. Let’s at least stop by my room first.”“I’ve got to check on Molly.” I insisted“We can open one of the tequilas.”“Thanks, but,"It’s just that, I was kind of hoping to get lucky tonight.”Christ Almighty. A guy tries to be a gentleman. I didn’t need an etiquette book for this one. I finally managed to pry myself away,When I got back to the room, Molly was in her pajamas, watching TV.“Is your headache any better?” I asked.She didn’t look up from the screen.I sat on the chair and twisted around to see what she was watching. A travelogue of some sort.“You didn’t miss much,” I said. “The show was kind of,”But she leaned in closer to the screen to make it clear that I was interrupting her program. Something about the way the locals made their tortillas.OK. I got the message. She didn’t like the fact that I’d gone to the show with Meryl. I went into the bathroom to pee. I’d only been trying to be polite to a fellow cruise member. Was that a crime? Molly had been there when we’d made the plans. I thought that she’d been trying to be friendly too. That we’d sort of taken Meryl under our wing.I came out of the bathroom a minute later, and sat down on the chair again. The secret to the tortillas, apparently, had something to do with lime juice.“I didn’t expect to see you back here tonight,” Molly said. In a sarcastic tone of voice. As if my presence was an imposition. As if she was sorry she’d ever offered to share the room in the first place.I didn’t even bother to answer. I got undressed, then crawled up onto my side of the bed. Where else was I supposed to go? I got under the blanket and turned toward the bulkhead. A guy tries to be a gentleman. And this is what he gets.I woke up first again, the next morning. I went up on deck. Did she really think that I’d found Meryl even the least bit attractive? She was a fellow shipmate, nothing more. I’d thought that we’d both been trying to be polite to her. Was that a crime?I brought back coffee and a croissant, but Molly was still asleep. Or pretending to be. I banged around a little, but she didn’t budge. Finally I got fed up and left.So here I was again, back to my usual routine, wandering down empty corridors, drifting up little-used gangways, poking around lonely corners where nobody else much ever cared to go. Doing what I probably would have been doing if I’d gotten my single in the first place.I came back to the room around lunch time, but Molly wasn’t there. I wandered up to the pool. Denise was there, chatting with some people. She waved. Meryl was there, stalking about, but I managed to slip away before she saw me. But no Molly.It was a long day. The ship had parked itself out in the middle of the ocean somewhere. Or maybe the rest of the world really had blown itself up and they just hadn’t told us. I eventually ended up back in the little coffee shop at the tail end of the ship. The sky seemed a lot flatter though, the seagulls a lot more listless, my algorithms a lot less interesting. Finally I got up again and trudged back down into the labyrinth.The casino was practically empty. The lower piano bar was closed. The little art gallery was still showing the same old photographs.The gift shop was open. The same lady was behind the counter. What was it that Molly had asked to see? A necklace. It must have been, that one. The lady brought it out. A pair of crystalline dolphins on a slender silver chain. They sparkled in the light.Molly still wasn’t in the room when I got back. This time our towel had been folded into a seal, sunning itself on the bedspread. I moved it a little closer to her pillow and arranged the necklace around its neck.There were still a couple hours until dinner. I thought it might be better if I wasn’t there when she got back.I got to dinner right on time. It was our last night on board, and the dining room was even more boisterous than usual.“Where’s Molly?” asked Ciara.“She had a little headache. She might not be joining us.”Valentin our waiter was really joshing it up, angling for a big end-of-trip tip. He was just taking the drink orders when Molly appeared. She was wearing a pink skirt, a whitish blouse,,  and the necklace. Her eye caught mine as she made her way around the table, but quickly shot away again.Ciara asked her how she was doing. The couple on my other side were there for once. Tom and somebody. He was in air conditioning and gave me the full rundown. It was too noisy for Molly and me to talk, but every time I looked, she was still wearing the necklace.It being our last night, the waiters were going to put on a little show. Just after they passed out the dessert plates they went into a huddle near the service entrance. Molly leaned over.“Do you want to go back to the room?”We got up.“Oh, are you guys going to the revue?” asked Ciara.Molly replied in the louder voice you had to use to make yourself heard. But the room was beginning to quiet down in a hush, as the waiters were taking their places, and so the whole table heard what she said.“Make-up sex.”The table burst into laughter. Molly continued her way out of the room, and I just followed sheepishly behind her.“Can you forgive me?” she asked as we got out into the hallway.“For letting everybody know where we’re going?”“For last night. I’m so sorry for the way I acted. It was my fault. It was all my fault.”“The worst part is, we wasted a whole day,” I remorsed.“We still have tonight.” She tried to assure me.“Yeah. We still have tonight.” I agreed.As soon as we got into the room we fell into each other’s arms.“I love the necklace,” she murmured.“It looks really nice on you.”We kissed and shuffled toward the bed.But my blood was pumping. I was thinking about our wasted day.“Let’s do something first, want to? I pleaded. It’s our last night. Let’s get our money’s worth. Let’s go to the show! Let’s go dancing! Let’s shoot for that royal flush! The bed will still be here when we get back. But let’s make up for some of the things we didn’t do today. Let’s paint the ship red. Okay? Want to? C'mon! Hup hup!”Jack and Ciara were surprised to see us at the theatre.“That was quick,” Ciara said with a look of astonishment.Molly blushed. I put my arm around her and pulled her tight. “You ain’t seen nothing yet.”The review was Motown classics, the Supremes, the Four Tops. “You can’t hurry love, no you’ll just have to wait, The whole auditorium was singing along. The girls pulled Jack and me up from our seats to dance in the aisle. "Sugar pie, honeybunch, you know that I love you,Afterwards, the night was balmy, perfect for a stroll on deck. We could see lights off in the distance, the rest of the world was still there after all! We ran into Meryl, wrapped in the arm of a dapper, middle-aged gentleman whose smile was just as smug as hers was. We exchanged pleasantries. She gave us both a little wink.Molly, perhaps I m clueless. Did you have any idea that Meryl was going to try to hit on me? I had to ask.Oh, my God! Molly stared at me. All day long, she was angling for you. I thought you were trying for a threesome, and my fake headache was me forcing you to choose one or the other.What? I thought you and I were just trying to be hospitable; you know, so she d have some friends to socialize with.Well, Molly confessed. I finally figured out that you were completely innocent, but it took me until late afternoon to dispel my worst presumptions.I went to the show, because we told her we d both join her, there. I explained. When you were bedridden with a headache, I assumed it fell on me to go alone, even though I really didn t want to be away from you.Ah, really? That s so sweet! Molly gushed. She gave me a deep kiss right there on the mezzanine. I assumed you went because you wanted another notch on your belt.  I m so, so sorry.Well, when the performance ended, I said I had to head back to you. She did try every diversion. I passed on all of them. Then she flatly told me she was hoping to get lucky with me. I told her I definitely could not accommodate that, and I walked straight back to our room.Oh, I was awful to you! Molly lamented. But I was also right about that slut s intentions, wasn t I? Molly paused, then added; When I finally got over my inner rage, I realized that you didn t come back smelling like cunt. Hell, you didn t even have lipstick smeared on your face.  This afternoon, I finally left my hiding spot, and saw you were heading to dinner, I went to the cabin and saw this beautiful necklace.  I literally cried. I don t deserve you. You don t deserve my juvenile drama. I d planned to skip the dinner, but when I saw the dolphin necklace, I had to come and grovel your forgiveness.You know, Molly I paused. Perhaps I was too clueless, yesterday. Perhaps you were too presuming? Do you think we can both help to balance each other?Oh, I love that! Yes, let s balance each other.The nightclubs were hopping. We wound our way from one to the other, dancing one dance in each. But then we decided to forgo the casino and just head back to the cabin. And sure enough, the bed was still there, right where we’d left it.We kissed. I ran my hands up along her sides, up inside her blouse. She undid my buttons and pulled open my shirt. I fiddled with her skirt and managed to slip it down over the swell of her hips. She unfastened my belt buckle and my button and my zipper. I slid my hands down inside her panties. She slid hers down inside my underpants. We pawed and shucked and kicked off everything that remained. And then she took off the very last thing that she was wearing, the crystalline necklace, and placed it carefully on the nightstand.I backed her down onto the bed. I kissed the pretty spot where the necklace had been, and the spot next to that, and the spot next to that. She lay back and closed her eyes and let herself be kissed.I settled myself down on top of her, stroking her full lovely body with my own, savoring her softness and her excitement, trying to fuse our unfortunate separateness into something more fulfilling. And somehow, in the midst of our kissing and our stroking, my penis must have slid up at just the right angle, and her hips must have been open to just the right degree, and we coupled, as adroitly as if that had been our conscious intention, as naturally as if we were two jungle cats whose lithe jungle bodies just instinctively knew how to fuck.And somewhere in the midst of our coupling we sweetly came, but it was not so much a climax as just a sweet vista point along the way. For just as we hadn’t consciously willed our engagement, neither did we ever willfully disengage, but just eventually nestled more comfortably down beside each other, still caressing, still softly kissing, still sweetly fused.The loudspeaker blasted us awake early the next morning. Our luggage needed to be out in the hallway for pickup by eight o'clock sharp!Molly wriggled a bit deeper under the blanket. "Uh,” she groaned. “Just five more minutes.”I remembered the look on her face, when had it been? just four days ago, when we first learned we might have to share the cabin together. She’d been just as uncertain as I had. But now it was hard to imagine any other arrangement. Her lying in bed beside me, trying to squeeze in a few more minutes of sleep, leaving it up to me to keep track of the time, I wouldn’t have had it any other way.We hadn’t begun to pack yet, but we’d kept things fairly organized. I gave her a generous five minutes, and then I gave her a little nudge. “C'mon, sleepyhead. Up and at um.”She groaned, but she dragged herself out of bed. We were both still naked. I slipped on a pair of boxers, and she put on a T-shirt. It rode up in back, though, so that her pretty bottom kept peeking out as she went around collecting her things and tucking them into her suitcase.“Do you kinda wish that the rest of the world really had blown itself up?” I asked.She was folding one of her bras. “Oh, I don’t know. We’d probably get tired of eating cheesecake eventually.”“They’d run out. Then we’d have to eat whatever it is that Valentin eats.”“He gets cheesecake sometimes, don’t you think? When they have some left over?”“I don’t know. He’s pretty skinny.”“I wonder why Meryl didn’t think of him.”“Yeah. Good question. Wrong table, I suppose.”“I suppose.”I crammed my sports coat in between my shirts and my underwear bag. She gave the zipper of her suitcase a final tug. “Besides,” she said. “Your algorithms would miss you.”I slipped on my trousers and rolled the bags out into the corridor. There were a surprising number of people walking by, and every single one of them gawked into the room as they passed. Nothing is more titillating to a person walking down a stateroom corridor than an open doorway.When I got the door closed again, Molly was sitting up on the bed with the sheet pulled up in front of her and a rather indignant look on her face. What a lot of nerve some people had!I couldn’t help but smile. “I wonder what they thought you were hiding back there.”She rolled her eyebrows.But I was feeling a little playful. The final day’s schedule was lying on the floor. I picked it up and pretended it was an official form.“Customs inspection, Miss, May I see what you’ve got behind that sheet?”She wasn’t so sure she wanted to show me. She coyly raised the sheet a little higher.“That shirt you’re wearing, Miss. Did you purchase it abroad?”She looked down behind the sheet. This old thing?.“Regulations, Miss; It may contain contraband fibers.” I held out my hand. “May I see it please?”She huffed. Bureaucrats! Without letting go of the sheet she wriggled one arm out of its sleeve and then the ot

A choice, a trap, and a necklace.By HectorBidon. Listen to the ►Podcast at Steamy Stories.The next morning’s sun found its way in through our porthole once again. We had sorted ourselves out somewhat during the night. I was on my side, tangled in a bit of sheet. She was on her side, tangled in a bit of blanket. I could just make out the pale tan lines on her bottom and her back.We’d become cabin buddies of a different order. At the Jack-and-Ciara level. That’s probably what most people would have assumed all along, but I certainly hadn’t, and I didn’t think that she had either.And yet, here we were.I waited a while for her to wake up, but she didn’t. So I finally got up myself.We’d just passed through the entrance in the seawall at Ensenada and were coming up to our docking site. The pilot, or maybe it was the captain himself, was standing on a little deck that jutted out from the side of the ship to joy-stick our massive vessel precisely up to the pier.Molly was still in bed when I got back. She smiled and went to the bathroom, a little embarrassed to be still naked while I was already dressed. Her pubic hair, I noticed, was trim and attractive.She came out wearing a towel and had her coffee. We checked the day’s schedule. She was delighted to discover that they’d transferred Mrs. Pendergast’s excursion ticket to me.A little later that morning we went ashore. It was a strange sensation, stepping off the gangway into a foreign country. Somehow I expected every little thing to be different and exotic, but the first thing we encountered, sprouting up through a crack in the pavement, was a little tuft of grass. Nothing exotic at all, just plain old grass.Our excursion van was heralded by a woman with a clipboard, a younger, more boisterous, Mexican Denise. There were three other couples in our group and a single unaccompanied woman about Ciara’s age. I took a seat next to the window with Molly beside me with the unaccompanied woman next to her. Her name was Meryl. This was her first real vacation since her divorce. She was really excited to be having such an adventure.We drove through the streets of Ensenada, our guide giving us a bit of local color in her prettily accented English. The scene was at once familiar and strange: traffic and lane markings and stop lights just exactly like at home, but unintelligible store signs in unlikely colors painted directly on pastel stucco walls. Beyond the city were dusty, cactus-strewn hills not unlike the Catalina hinterland.Our destination was a site called the Bufadora, a cleft in the rocky sea cliff where ocean waves sent up enormous geyser-like sprays. The sprays were so high that we got wet even at our vantage point fifty feet above the water.The path back from the observation point was lined with gaudy souvenir shops, like the midway of a county fair. Meryl had tagged along with Molly and me. We stopped at one of the taco stands for lunch.“So how did you guys meet?”Molly didn’t volunteer an answer. "Just here on the cruise, actually,“ I said."Really? See, aren’t cruises great?” Molly gushed.After lunch we went into one of the souvenir shops and Meryl asked our opinion about all the little nick-nacks she wanted to buy. When we got back to the van, I ended up sitting in the middle.“The nicest thing.” she said. “is that every day you make new friends.”We drove back through town, then out into the desert in a different direction to a picturesque winery. We sat around a table on a palm-shaded patio and sampled the different vintages. Meryl chatted on about Simi Valley and the cruise and her ex and the weather and the ship and the people she’d met. She got me to go into the little gift shop with her to help pick out a couple bottles.Molly was quiet at dinner. I had to remind her that we’d made plans to see the comedy show with Meryl.“I’ve got a bit of a headache,” she said. “I think I’ll go back to the room.”Meryl was waiting in the forward theatre. She was sorry to hear about Molly’s headache and put her hand on my arm to convey her concern. The show turned out to be pretty adult-rated, pretty raunchy in fact. Meryl yucked it upAfter the show she suggested we take a spin about the deck. The ship had set sail again and we were just passing the exposed wreck that lies up against the sea wall. Somehow Meryl managed to tuck herself inside my arm.“Wouldn’t you just love to go dancing?” she cooed.“I, uh,  Actually, I’ve kind of got to go now.”“But the night is still young. Meryl rebutted. Let’s at least stop by my room first.”“I’ve got to check on Molly.” I insisted“We can open one of the tequilas.”“Thanks, but,"It’s just that, I was kind of hoping to get lucky tonight.”Christ Almighty. A guy tries to be a gentleman. I didn’t need an etiquette book for this one. I finally managed to pry myself away,When I got back to the room, Molly was in her pajamas, watching TV.“Is your headache any better?” I asked.She didn’t look up from the screen.I sat on the chair and twisted around to see what she was watching. A travelogue of some sort.“You didn’t miss much,” I said. “The show was kind of,”But she leaned in closer to the screen to make it clear that I was interrupting her program. Something about the way the locals made their tortillas.OK. I got the message. She didn’t like the fact that I’d gone to the show with Meryl. I went into the bathroom to pee. I’d only been trying to be polite to a fellow cruise member. Was that a crime? Molly had been there when we’d made the plans. I thought that she’d been trying to be friendly too. That we’d sort of taken Meryl under our wing.I came out of the bathroom a minute later, and sat down on the chair again. The secret to the tortillas, apparently, had something to do with lime juice.“I didn’t expect to see you back here tonight,” Molly said. In a sarcastic tone of voice. As if my presence was an imposition. As if she was sorry she’d ever offered to share the room in the first place.I didn’t even bother to answer. I got undressed, then crawled up onto my side of the bed. Where else was I supposed to go? I got under the blanket and turned toward the bulkhead. A guy tries to be a gentleman. And this is what he gets.I woke up first again, the next morning. I went up on deck. Did she really think that I’d found Meryl even the least bit attractive? She was a fellow shipmate, nothing more. I’d thought that we’d both been trying to be polite to her. Was that a crime?I brought back coffee and a croissant, but Molly was still asleep. Or pretending to be. I banged around a little, but she didn’t budge. Finally I got fed up and left.So here I was again, back to my usual routine, wandering down empty corridors, drifting up little-used gangways, poking around lonely corners where nobody else much ever cared to go. Doing what I probably would have been doing if I’d gotten my single in the first place.I came back to the room around lunch time, but Molly wasn’t there. I wandered up to the pool. Denise was there, chatting with some people. She waved. Meryl was there, stalking about, but I managed to slip away before she saw me. But no Molly.It was a long day. The ship had parked itself out in the middle of the ocean somewhere. Or maybe the rest of the world really had blown itself up and they just hadn’t told us. I eventually ended up back in the little coffee shop at the tail end of the ship. The sky seemed a lot flatter though, the seagulls a lot more listless, my algorithms a lot less interesting. Finally I got up again and trudged back down into the labyrinth.The casino was practically empty. The lower piano bar was closed. The little art gallery was still showing the same old photographs.The gift shop was open. The same lady was behind the counter. What was it that Molly had asked to see? A necklace. It must have been, that one. The lady brought it out. A pair of crystalline dolphins on a slender silver chain. They sparkled in the light.Molly still wasn’t in the room when I got back. This time our towel had been folded into a seal, sunning itself on the bedspread. I moved it a little closer to her pillow and arranged the necklace around its neck.There were still a couple hours until dinner. I thought it might be better if I wasn’t there when she got back.I got to dinner right on time. It was our last night on board, and the dining room was even more boisterous than usual.“Where’s Molly?” asked Ciara.“She had a little headache. She might not be joining us.”Valentin our waiter was really joshing it up, angling for a big end-of-trip tip. He was just taking the drink orders when Molly appeared. She was wearing a pink skirt, a whitish blouse,,  and the necklace. Her eye caught mine as she made her way around the table, but quickly shot away again.Ciara asked her how she was doing. The couple on my other side were there for once. Tom and somebody. He was in air conditioning and gave me the full rundown. It was too noisy for Molly and me to talk, but every time I looked, she was still wearing the necklace.It being our last night, the waiters were going to put on a little show. Just after they passed out the dessert plates they went into a huddle near the service entrance. Molly leaned over.“Do you want to go back to the room?”We got up.“Oh, are you guys going to the revue?” asked Ciara.Molly replied in the louder voice you had to use to make yourself heard. But the room was beginning to quiet down in a hush, as the waiters were taking their places, and so the whole table heard what she said.“Make-up sex.”The table burst into laughter. Molly continued her way out of the room, and I just followed sheepishly behind her.“Can you forgive me?” she asked as we got out into the hallway.“For letting everybody know where we’re going?”“For last night. I’m so sorry for the way I acted. It was my fault. It was all my fault.”“The worst part is, we wasted a whole day,” I remorsed.“We still have tonight.” She tried to assure me.“Yeah. We still have tonight.” I agreed.As soon as we got into the room we fell into each other’s arms.“I love the necklace,” she murmured.“It looks really nice on you.”We kissed and shuffled toward the bed.But my blood was pumping. I was thinking about our wasted day.“Let’s do something first, want to? I pleaded. It’s our last night. Let’s get our money’s worth. Let’s go to the show! Let’s go dancing! Let’s shoot for that royal flush! The bed will still be here when we get back. But let’s make up for some of the things we didn’t do today. Let’s paint the ship red. Okay? Want to? C'mon! Hup hup!”Jack and Ciara were surprised to see us at the theatre.“That was quick,” Ciara said with a look of astonishment.Molly blushed. I put my arm around her and pulled her tight. “You ain’t seen nothing yet.”The review was Motown classics, the Supremes, the Four Tops. “You can’t hurry love, no you’ll just have to wait, The whole auditorium was singing along. The girls pulled Jack and me up from our seats to dance in the aisle. "Sugar pie, honeybunch, you know that I love you,Afterwards, the night was balmy, perfect for a stroll on deck. We could see lights off in the distance, the rest of the world was still there after all! We ran into Meryl, wrapped in the arm of a dapper, middle-aged gentleman whose smile was just as smug as hers was. We exchanged pleasantries. She gave us both a little wink.Molly, perhaps I m clueless. Did you have any idea that Meryl was going to try to hit on me? I had to ask.Oh, my God! Molly stared at me. All day long, she was angling for you. I thought you were trying for a threesome, and my fake headache was me forcing you to choose one or the other.What? I thought you and I were just trying to be hospitable; you know, so she d have some friends to socialize with.Well, Molly confessed. I finally figured out that you were completely innocent, but it took me until late afternoon to dispel my worst presumptions.I went to the show, because we told her we d both join her, there. I explained. When you were bedridden with a headache, I assumed it fell on me to go alone, even though I really didn t want to be away from you.Ah, really? That s so sweet! Molly gushed. She gave me a deep kiss right there on the mezzanine. I assumed you went because you wanted another notch on your belt.  I m so, so sorry.Well, when the performance ended, I said I had to head back to you. She did try every diversion. I passed on all of them. Then she flatly told me she was hoping to get lucky with me. I told her I definitely could not accommodate that, and I walked straight back to our room.Oh, I was awful to you! Molly lamented. But I was also right about that slut s intentions, wasn t I? Molly paused, then added; When I finally got over my inner rage, I realized that you didn t come back smelling like cunt. Hell, you didn t even have lipstick smeared on your face.  This afternoon, I finally left my hiding spot, and saw you were heading to dinner, I went to the cabin and saw this beautiful necklace.  I literally cried. I don t deserve you. You don t deserve my juvenile drama. I d planned to skip the dinner, but when I saw the dolphin necklace, I had to come and grovel your forgiveness.You know, Molly I paused. Perhaps I was too clueless, yesterday. Perhaps you were too presuming? Do you think we can both help to balance each other?Oh, I love that! Yes, let s balance each other.The nightclubs were hopping. We wound our way from one to the other, dancing one dance in each. But then we decided to forgo the casino and just head back to the cabin. And sure enough, the bed was still there, right where we’d left it.We kissed. I ran my hands up along her sides, up inside her blouse. She undid my buttons and pulled open my shirt. I fiddled with her skirt and managed to slip it down over the swell of her hips. She unfastened my belt buckle and my button and my zipper. I slid my hands down inside her panties. She slid hers down inside my underpants. We pawed and shucked and kicked off everything that remained. And then she took off the very last thing that she was wearing, the crystalline necklace, and placed it carefully on the nightstand.I backed her down onto the bed. I kissed the pretty spot where the necklace had been, and the spot next to that, and the spot next to that. She lay back and closed her eyes and let herself be kissed.I settled myself down on top of her, stroking her full lovely body with my own, savoring her softness and her excitement, trying to fuse our unfortunate separateness into something more fulfilling. And somehow, in the midst of our kissing and our stroking, my penis must have slid up at just the right angle, and her hips must have been open to just the right degree, and we coupled, as adroitly as if that had been our conscious intention, as naturally as if we were two jungle cats whose lithe jungle bodies just instinctively knew how to fuck.And somewhere in the midst of our coupling we sweetly came, but it was not so much a climax as just a sweet vista point along the way. For just as we hadn’t consciously willed our engagement, neither did we ever willfully disengage, but just eventually nestled more comfortably down beside each other, still caressing, still softly kissing, still sweetly fused.The loudspeaker blasted us awake early the next morning. Our luggage needed to be out in the hallway for pickup by eight o'clock sharp!Molly wriggled a bit deeper under the blanket. "Uh,” she groaned. “Just five more minutes.”I remembered the look on her face, when had it been? just four days ago, when we first learned we might have to share the cabin together. She’d been just as uncertain as I had. But now it was hard to imagine any other arrangement. Her lying in bed beside me, trying to squeeze in a few more minutes of sleep, leaving it up to me to keep track of the time, I wouldn’t have had it any other way.We hadn’t begun to pack yet, but we’d kept things fairly organized. I gave her a generous five minutes, and then I gave her a little nudge. “C'mon, sleepyhead. Up and at um.”She groaned, but she dragged herself out of bed. We were both still naked. I slipped on a pair of boxers, and she put on a T-shirt. It rode up in back, though, so that her pretty bottom kept peeking out as she went around collecting her things and tucking them into her suitcase.“Do you kinda wish that the rest of the world really had blown itself up?” I asked.She was folding one of her bras. “Oh, I don’t know. We’d probably get tired of eating cheesecake eventually.”“They’d run out. Then we’d have to eat whatever it is that Valentin eats.”“He gets cheesecake sometimes, don’t you think? When they have some left over?”“I don’t know. He’s pretty skinny.”“I wonder why Meryl didn’t think of him.”“Yeah. Good question. Wrong table, I suppose.”“I suppose.”I crammed my sports coat in between my shirts and my underwear bag. She gave the zipper of her suitcase a final tug. “Besides,” she said. “Your algorithms would miss you.”I slipped on my trousers and rolled the bags out into the corridor. There were a surprising number of people walking by, and every single one of them gawked into the room as they passed. Nothing is more titillating to a person walking down a stateroom corridor than an open doorway.When I got the door closed again, Molly was sitting up on the bed with the sheet pulled up in front of her and a rather indignant look on her face. What a lot of nerve some people had!I couldn’t help but smile. “I wonder what they thought you were hiding back there.”She rolled her eyebrows.But I was feeling a little playful. The final day’s schedule was lying on the floor. I picked it up and pretended it was an official form.“Customs inspection, Miss, May I see what you’ve got behind that sheet?”She wasn’t so sure she wanted to show me. She coyly raised the sheet a little higher.“That shirt you’re wearing, Miss. Did you purchase it abroad?”She looked down behind the sheet. This old thing?.“Regulations, Miss; It may contain contraband fibers.” I held out my hand. “May I see it please?”She huffed. Bureaucrats! Without letting go of the sheet she wriggled one arm out of its sleeve and then the ot

A choice, a trap, and a necklace.By HectorBidon. Listen to the ►Podcast at Steamy Stories.The next morning’s sun found its way in through our porthole once again. We had sorted ourselves out somewhat during the night. I was on my side, tangled in a bit of sheet. She was on her side, tangled in a bit of blanket. I could just make out the pale tan lines on her bottom and her back.We’d become cabin buddies of a different order. At the Jack-and-Ciara level. That’s probably what most people would have assumed all along, but I certainly hadn’t, and I didn’t think that she had either.And yet, here we were.I waited a while for her to wake up, but she didn’t. So I finally got up myself.We’d just passed through the entrance in the seawall at Ensenada and were coming up to our docking site. The pilot, or maybe it was the captain himself, was standing on a little deck that jutted out from the side of the ship to joy-stick our massive vessel precisely up to the pier.Molly was still in bed when I got back. She smiled and went to the bathroom, a little embarrassed to be still naked while I was already dressed. Her pubic hair, I noticed, was trim and attractive.She came out wearing a towel and had her coffee. We checked the day’s schedule. She was delighted to discover that they’d transferred Mrs. Pendergast’s excursion ticket to me.A little later that morning we went ashore. It was a strange sensation, stepping off the gangway into a foreign country. Somehow I expected every little thing to be different and exotic, but the first thing we encountered, sprouting up through a crack in the pavement, was a little tuft of grass. Nothing exotic at all, just plain old grass.Our excursion van was heralded by a woman with a clipboard, a younger, more boisterous, Mexican Denise. There were three other couples in our group and a single unaccompanied woman about Ciara’s age. I took a seat next to the window with Molly beside me with the unaccompanied woman next to her. Her name was Meryl. This was her first real vacation since her divorce. She was really excited to be having such an adventure.We drove through the streets of Ensenada, our guide giving us a bit of local color in her prettily accented English. The scene was at once familiar and strange: traffic and lane markings and stop lights just exactly like at home, but unintelligible store signs in unlikely colors painted directly on pastel stucco walls. Beyond the city were dusty, cactus-strewn hills not unlike the Catalina hinterland.Our destination was a site called the Bufadora, a cleft in the rocky sea cliff where ocean waves sent up enormous geyser-like sprays. The sprays were so high that we got wet even at our vantage point fifty feet above the water.The path back from the observation point was lined with gaudy souvenir shops, like the midway of a county fair. Meryl had tagged along with Molly and me. We stopped at one of the taco stands for lunch.“So how did you guys meet?”Molly didn’t volunteer an answer. "Just here on the cruise, actually,“ I said."Really? See, aren’t cruises great?” Molly gushed.After lunch we went into one of the souvenir shops and Meryl asked our opinion about all the little nick-nacks she wanted to buy. When we got back to the van, I ended up sitting in the middle.“The nicest thing.” she said. “is that every day you make new friends.”We drove back through town, then out into the desert in a different direction to a picturesque winery. We sat around a table on a palm-shaded patio and sampled the different vintages. Meryl chatted on about Simi Valley and the cruise and her ex and the weather and the ship and the people she’d met. She got me to go into the little gift shop with her to help pick out a couple bottles.Molly was quiet at dinner. I had to remind her that we’d made plans to see the comedy show with Meryl.“I’ve got a bit of a headache,” she said. “I think I’ll go back to the room.”Meryl was waiting in the forward theatre. She was sorry to hear about Molly’s headache and put her hand on my arm to convey her concern. The show turned out to be pretty adult-rated, pretty raunchy in fact. Meryl yucked it upAfter the show she suggested we take a spin about the deck. The ship had set sail again and we were just passing the exposed wreck that lies up against the sea wall. Somehow Meryl managed to tuck herself inside my arm.“Wouldn’t you just love to go dancing?” she cooed.“I, uh,  Actually, I’ve kind of got to go now.”“But the night is still young. Meryl rebutted. Let’s at least stop by my room first.”“I’ve got to check on Molly.” I insisted“We can open one of the tequilas.”“Thanks, but,"It’s just that, I was kind of hoping to get lucky tonight.”Christ Almighty. A guy tries to be a gentleman. I didn’t need an etiquette book for this one. I finally managed to pry myself away,When I got back to the room, Molly was in her pajamas, watching TV.“Is your headache any better?” I asked.She didn’t look up from the screen.I sat on the chair and twisted around to see what she was watching. A travelogue of some sort.“You didn’t miss much,” I said. “The show was kind of,”But she leaned in closer to the screen to make it clear that I was interrupting her program. Something about the way the locals made their tortillas.OK. I got the message. She didn’t like the fact that I’d gone to the show with Meryl. I went into the bathroom to pee. I’d only been trying to be polite to a fellow cruise member. Was that a crime? Molly had been there when we’d made the plans. I thought that she’d been trying to be friendly too. That we’d sort of taken Meryl under our wing.I came out of the bathroom a minute later, and sat down on the chair again. The secret to the tortillas, apparently, had something to do with lime juice.“I didn’t expect to see you back here tonight,” Molly said. In a sarcastic tone of voice. As if my presence was an imposition. As if she was sorry she’d ever offered to share the room in the first place.I didn’t even bother to answer. I got undressed, then crawled up onto my side of the bed. Where else was I supposed to go? I got under the blanket and turned toward the bulkhead. A guy tries to be a gentleman. And this is what he gets.I woke up first again, the next morning. I went up on deck. Did she really think that I’d found Meryl even the least bit attractive? She was a fellow shipmate, nothing more. I’d thought that we’d both been trying to be polite to her. Was that a crime?I brought back coffee and a croissant, but Molly was still asleep. Or pretending to be. I banged around a little, but she didn’t budge. Finally I got fed up and left.So here I was again, back to my usual routine, wandering down empty corridors, drifting up little-used gangways, poking around lonely corners where nobody else much ever cared to go. Doing what I probably would have been doing if I’d gotten my single in the first place.I came back to the room around lunch time, but Molly wasn’t there. I wandered up to the pool. Denise was there, chatting with some people. She waved. Meryl was there, stalking about, but I managed to slip away before she saw me. But no Molly.It was a long day. The ship had parked itself out in the middle of the ocean somewhere. Or maybe the rest of the world really had blown itself up and they just hadn’t told us. I eventually ended up back in the little coffee shop at the tail end of the ship. The sky seemed a lot flatter though, the seagulls a lot more listless, my algorithms a lot less interesting. Finally I got up again and trudged back down into the labyrinth.The casino was practically empty. The lower piano bar was closed. The little art gallery was still showing the same old photographs.The gift shop was open. The same lady was behind the counter. What was it that Molly had asked to see? A necklace. It must have been, that one. The lady brought it out. A pair of crystalline dolphins on a slender silver chain. They sparkled in the light.Molly still wasn’t in the room when I got back. This time our towel had been folded into a seal, sunning itself on the bedspread. I moved it a little closer to her pillow and arranged the necklace around its neck.There were still a couple hours until dinner. I thought it might be better if I wasn’t there when she got back.I got to dinner right on time. It was our last night on board, and the dining room was even more boisterous than usual.“Where’s Molly?” asked Ciara.“She had a little headache. She might not be joining us.”Valentin our waiter was really joshing it up, angling for a big end-of-trip tip. He was just taking the drink orders when Molly appeared. She was wearing a pink skirt, a whitish blouse,,  and the necklace. Her eye caught mine as she made her way around the table, but quickly shot away again.Ciara asked her how she was doing. The couple on my other side were there for once. Tom and somebody. He was in air conditioning and gave me the full rundown. It was too noisy for Molly and me to talk, but every time I looked, she was still wearing the necklace.It being our last night, the waiters were going to put on a little show. Just after they passed out the dessert plates they went into a huddle near the service entrance. Molly leaned over.“Do you want to go back to the room?”We got up.“Oh, are you guys going to the revue?” asked Ciara.Molly replied in the louder voice you had to use to make yourself heard. But the room was beginning to quiet down in a hush, as the waiters were taking their places, and so the whole table heard what she said.“Make-up sex.”The table burst into laughter. Molly continued her way out of the room, and I just followed sheepishly behind her.“Can you forgive me?” she asked as we got out into the hallway.“For letting everybody know where we’re going?”“For last night. I’m so sorry for the way I acted. It was my fault. It was all my fault.”“The worst part is, we wasted a whole day,” I remorsed.“We still have tonight.” She tried to assure me.“Yeah. We still have tonight.” I agreed.As soon as we got into the room we fell into each other’s arms.“I love the necklace,” she murmured.“It looks really nice on you.”We kissed and shuffled toward the bed.But my blood was pumping. I was thinking about our wasted day.“Let’s do something first, want to? I pleaded. It’s our last night. Let’s get our money’s worth. Let’s go to the show! Let’s go dancing! Let’s shoot for that royal flush! The bed will still be here when we get back. But let’s make up for some of the things we didn’t do today. Let’s paint the ship red. Okay? Want to? C'mon! Hup hup!”Jack and Ciara were surprised to see us at the theatre.“That was quick,” Ciara said with a look of astonishment.Molly blushed. I put my arm around her and pulled her tight. “You ain’t seen nothing yet.”The review was Motown classics, the Supremes, the Four Tops. “You can’t hurry love, no you’ll just have to wait, The whole auditorium was singing along. The girls pulled Jack and me up from our seats to dance in the aisle. "Sugar pie, honeybunch, you know that I love you,Afterwards, the night was balmy, perfect for a stroll on deck. We could see lights off in the distance, the rest of the world was still there after all! We ran into Meryl, wrapped in the arm of a dapper, middle-aged gentleman whose smile was just as smug as hers was. We exchanged pleasantries. She gave us both a little wink.Molly, perhaps I m clueless. Did you have any idea that Meryl was going to try to hit on me? I had to ask.Oh, my God! Molly stared at me. All day long, she was angling for you. I thought you were trying for a threesome, and my fake headache was me forcing you to choose one or the other.What? I thought you and I were just trying to be hospitable; you know, so she d have some friends to socialize with.Well, Molly confessed. I finally figured out that you were completely innocent, but it took me until late afternoon to dispel my worst presumptions.I went to the show, because we told her we d both join her, there. I explained. When you were bedridden with a headache, I assumed it fell on me to go alone, even though I really didn t want to be away from you.Ah, really? That s so sweet! Molly gushed. She gave me a deep kiss right there on the mezzanine. I assumed you went because you wanted another notch on your belt.  I m so, so sorry.Well, when the performance ended, I said I had to head back to you. She did try every diversion. I passed on all of them. Then she flatly told me she was hoping to get lucky with me. I told her I definitely could not accommodate that, and I walked straight back to our room.Oh, I was awful to you! Molly lamented. But I was also right about that slut s intentions, wasn t I? Molly paused, then added; When I finally got over my inner rage, I realized that you didn t come back smelling like cunt. Hell, you didn t even have lipstick smeared on your face.  This afternoon, I finally left my hiding spot, and saw you were heading to dinner, I went to the cabin and saw this beautiful necklace.  I literally cried. I don t deserve you. You don t deserve my juvenile drama. I d planned to skip the dinner, but when I saw the dolphin necklace, I had to come and grovel your forgiveness.You know, Molly I paused. Perhaps I was too clueless, yesterday. Perhaps you were too presuming? Do you think we can both help to balance each other?Oh, I love that! Yes, let s balance each other.The nightclubs were hopping. We wound our way from one to the other, dancing one dance in each. But then we decided to forgo the casino and just head back to the cabin. And sure enough, the bed was still there, right where we’d left it.We kissed. I ran my hands up along her sides, up inside her blouse. She undid my buttons and pulled open my shirt. I fiddled with her skirt and managed to slip it down over the swell of her hips. She unfastened my belt buckle and my button and my zipper. I slid my hands down inside her panties. She slid hers down inside my underpants. We pawed and shucked and kicked off everything that remained. And then she took off the very last thing that she was wearing, the crystalline necklace, and placed it carefully on the nightstand.I backed her down onto the bed. I kissed the pretty spot where the necklace had been, and the spot next to that, and the spot next to that. She lay back and closed her eyes and let herself be kissed.I settled myself down on top of her, stroking her full lovely body with my own, savoring her softness and her excitement, trying to fuse our unfortunate separateness into something more fulfilling. And somehow, in the midst of our kissing and our stroking, my penis must have slid up at just the right angle, and her hips must have been open to just the right degree, and we coupled, as adroitly as if that had been our conscious intention, as naturally as if we were two jungle cats whose lithe jungle bodies just instinctively knew how to fuck.And somewhere in the midst of our coupling we sweetly came, but it was not so much a climax as just a sweet vista point along the way. For just as we hadn’t consciously willed our engagement, neither did we ever willfully disengage, but just eventually nestled more comfortably down beside each other, still caressing, still softly kissing, still sweetly fused.The loudspeaker blasted us awake early the next morning. Our luggage needed to be out in the hallway for pickup by eight o'clock sharp!Molly wriggled a bit deeper under the blanket. "Uh,” she groaned. “Just five more minutes.”I remembered the look on her face, when had it been? just four days ago, when we first learned we might have to share the cabin together. She’d been just as uncertain as I had. But now it was hard to imagine any other arrangement. Her lying in bed beside me, trying to squeeze in a few more minutes of sleep, leaving it up to me to keep track of the time, I wouldn’t have had it any other way.We hadn’t begun to pack yet, but we’d kept things fairly organized. I gave her a generous five minutes, and then I gave her a little nudge. “C'mon, sleepyhead. Up and at um.”She groaned, but she dragged herself out of bed. We were both still naked. I slipped on a pair of boxers, and she put on a T-shirt. It rode up in back, though, so that her pretty bottom kept peeking out as she went around collecting her things and tucking them into her suitcase.“Do you kinda wish that the rest of the world really had blown itself up?” I asked.She was folding one of her bras. “Oh, I don’t know. We’d probably get tired of eating cheesecake eventually.”“They’d run out. Then we’d have to eat whatever it is that Valentin eats.”“He gets cheesecake sometimes, don’t you think? When they have some left over?”“I don’t know. He’s pretty skinny.”“I wonder why Meryl didn’t think of him.”“Yeah. Good question. Wrong table, I suppose.”“I suppose.”I crammed my sports coat in between my shirts and my underwear bag. She gave the zipper of her suitcase a final tug. “Besides,” she said. “Your algorithms would miss you.”I slipped on my trousers and rolled the bags out into the corridor. There were a surprising number of people walking by, and every single one of them gawked into the room as they passed. Nothing is more titillating to a person walking down a stateroom corridor than an open doorway.When I got the door closed again, Molly was sitting up on the bed with the sheet pulled up in front of her and a rather indignant look on her face. What a lot of nerve some people had!I couldn’t help but smile. “I wonder what they thought you were hiding back there.”She rolled her eyebrows.But I was feeling a little playful. The final day’s schedule was lying on the floor. I picked it up and pretended it was an official form.“Customs inspection, Miss, May I see what you’ve got behind that sheet?”She wasn’t so sure she wanted to show me. She coyly raised the sheet a little higher.“That shirt you’re wearing, Miss. Did you purchase it abroad?”She looked down behind the sheet. This old thing?.“Regulations, Miss; It may contain contraband fibers.” I held out my hand. “May I see it please?”She huffed. Bureaucrats! Without letting go of the sheet she wriggled one arm out of its sleeve and then the ot

Strangers forced to share a cabin on a cruise ship.By HectorBidon. Listen to the ►Podcast at Steamy Stories.The waiting area outside the Long Beach cruise terminal was abuzz with bright new outfits and happy chatter. It was enough to make even the most reserved introvert start to feel a bit of excitement.I was standing with Jack and Ciara, two regulars of the social group. Jack was tall and rugged, something to do with landscaping; Ciara tall and willowy, worked in an office of some sort. They weren’t an official couple, as far as I knew, but they seemed to have hooked up for the New Year s Pacific cruise. That was sort of the way the group worked. Thirty somethings, mostly divorced, intent on maintaining the hard playing lifestyle of their twenties, looking for like-minded dating partners to do it with.Jack was explaining the different cruise drink payment plans. I smiled politely and nodded, thinking how different from theirs my life would be when I got to be their age.Denise bustled up in a pretty pastel pantsuit with her clipboard in her hand. She was a travel agent and the mother hen of the group, forty-something and no longer trying so hard to pretend she was any younger. She d put together this group and made a nice extra income for her troubles.“Hector,” she said, ushering me a step aside, “I’m afraid there’s been a mix up with your reservation. Somehow your single cabin didn’t show up on the final printout.” She gave me a concerned look. “They’re working on it,,  but we may have to double you up with someone.”This came as a bit of a rude surprise. One of the only reasons I’d finally agreed to come on the cruise in the first place had been her assurance that I’d be able to have a single. It wasn’t that I was antisocial really, but I had my limits.“You know Mrs. Pendergast, don’t you?”Mrs. Pendergast was an older woman, well into her sixties. She wasn’t a regular member of the group, but it amused her sometimes to hang with a younger crowd. The group let her tag along to some of their events. I was going to have to share a room with Mrs. Pendergast?“Apparently she got sick and had to cancel at the last minute. So we have an opening. She was sharing a room with, ah;” she double checked her forms; “a Ms. Crenshaw. I don’t know her, but I’m sure she’s very nice. It’s a double room, and you know how it is on a cruise. You don’t spend that much time in your room anyway.”I didn’t even try to return her smile.“They’re still working on your single, of course. I just wanted to let you know the fallback plan.”Not only losing my single, but having to spend the cruise being polite to an old lady? In Denise’s mind, that was what the social group was all about.People were already starting to go into the terminal building when Denise came back, this time with an attractive young woman at her side. I wondered if it was Denise’s daughter, there to see us off.“Hector,” she said, peering at me over the top of her glasses, “this is Molly Crenshaw. I’ve been explaining our predicament.”The girl gave me a weak smile. She was pretty, with long brown hair swept back, wearing white shorts and a light blue top. She didn’t look like she could be a day over twenty-one. Not at all what I had pictured as a travelling companion for Mrs. Pendergast.“It’s a double room,” Denise was explaining. “I’m sure they’ll be able to rig up a partition if need be. But this will be the first cruise for both of you. It will be nice to have a buddy to help you find your way around. I’m sure the two of you will hit it off.”Molly was still looking at me rather uncertainly. This apparently wasn’t exactly what she had signed up for, either. She looked back at Denise. “Well, if his other room got cancelled,Denise was delighted. The registration mix-up had been solved in an efficient and social-group-positive way. I couldn’t believe she was being so cavalier about putting a guy and a girl who didn’t even know each other into the same room together."They’re still working on my single though, right?”“As far as I know. You’ll be able to check with the Bursar once we get on board.”Denise had more than enough smile for the three of us. They called our area for boarding.“See you on board,” she said, bustling off with her clipboard.Going up the gangway onto the ship itself kind of blew me away. You entered onto the mezzanine level of what looked like the fanciest mall I’d ever seen. There was an atrium that rose several stories high with glass elevators gliding up and down and fancy shops and glittering lights on every different level. On the floor below us a fellow in a tuxedo was playing a grand piano. All of this right in the middle of the ship. Molly’s eyes were as wide as mine.They’d told us to have lunch while the luggage was being brought on. Molly and I had come aboard with a bunch of other social groupers, but they’d all buzzed off one way or another leaving the two of us by ourselves. We found a little sandwich and salad buffet.“So, your first cruise?” I asked. I was pretty sure I’d be able to get the room situation straightened out, but there was no harm in being polite.She assembled a forkful of salad. “Yes, Mrs. Pendergast is a patient at the clinic where I work. She’s pretty chatty, you know. She kept talking about this fantastic cruise she was going on. But she needed a travelling companion to come along and sort of look after her.” She shrugged. “ Mrs. Pendergast offered to cover the cost, if I d come with. I don’t know, she has a way of getting what she wants.”“Is she all right?” I asked.“Denise says she’s afraid she might be coming down with something. She’s a bit of a hypochondriac. But the tickets are already paid for, and I’m already here, so Denise said I should just come along on the cruise without her.” She gave her little shrug again and took a sip of iced tea. “Your first cruise too?”“I’m not really a member of the social group, actually. I went on a nature hike with them one time and ended up on Denise’s list. So now she sends me emails every time she has some big event. She was kind of persistent this time. I think they needed to sign up a certain number of people in order to get a discount or something.”Molly nodded and stabbed a crouton. “Well, it is a cruise. It should be fun. And it’ll be nice not to have to keep tabs on Mrs. Pendergast all the time. There’s gambling, you know. When we get far enough out to sea.”“You gamble?”“Of course. Poker, black jack. Machines mostly, but sometimes at the tables. I have a system. It’s a lot of fun.”After lunch I asked my way up to the Bursar’s office. Molly came along to make sure that everything worked out. The Bursar looked me up in his computer. Apparently, when Mrs. Pendergast had cancelled, they’d looked to fill the vacancy with someone from our same group. I was the only one in a single, so they moved me in to fill her spot and gave my room to someone else. He double checked, but there weren’t any other singles available. He apologized for the inconvenience and gave me my key card.I was flabbergasted.“Well,” said Molly, “we might as well go check it out at least.”We found our way down to the deck where the cabin was located. The room itself was not much bigger than a walk-in closet. A chair, a little night stand, a mirror on the bathroom door, a bed against the wall. That was it. We looked at each other.“Kind of smaller than I would have thought,” I said.“Yeah,” she agreed.I corralled a passing steward.“Um, we were supposed to be getting a double room?” I showed him the printout.“Yes, yes,” he said in his helpful foreign accent. “Very nice double cabin.”“But there’s only one bed.” I said.“Double bed,” he explained. Then he gestured toward the porthole on the wall. “Ocean view!” He smiled, happy to have been of service, and went on about his way.Molly didn’t look altogether convinced.I sighed. “Let me go talk to the Bursar again,But she was sizing things up. Sunshine was streaming in through the porthole. Our two suitcases had been placed in a little niche beside the bathroom door, side by side."All the other rooms are probably just as small,” she said. “On this level anyway. And they seem to have already given your other room away.” She looked at me. “Do you snore?”It wasn’t a question I was expecting. “I don’t think so. No one’s ever complained.”“Well, Mrs. Pendergast does, apparently. That’s the one thing I’ve been dreading the most.” She looked back at the room. “I guess this is just what double rooms are like on cruise ships. Maybe it’s not so bad. At least you don’t snore. We’re kind of on an adventure anyway. Maybe we should just try and make the best of it.”She made it sound as if sharing a room with a complete stranger of the opposite sex was no bigger a deal than sharing a table with him at lunch. She sat down on the edge of the bed and picked up the schedule of the day’s activities as if the issue had already been decided.“Shuffleboard lessons at three o'clock,” she noted. “Bingo at four thirty.”I sat down on the chair. So instead of getting a room of my own I was going to have to share this one? Surely there must be some other alternative. What if,  what if I asked Denise to ask Ciara to move in here with Molly and let me bunk with Jack? Ugh! I cringed at the thought.“A magic show tonight in the forward theatre.” Molly announced; reading more literature.I looked around. How would it even work? The room was so tiny. There was only the one bed.Molly was studying a map of the ship. “What do you think we should do first?” She’d not only accepted the fact that we’d be rooming together, she was ready to head out and start exploring.“Um,  why don’t you just go ahead on your own? I’ve still got a couple things I need to take care of first.”I couldn’t tell if she was a bit hurt that I didn’t want to join her. But she shrugged it off. “Well, OK. Then I guess we can just meet back up here later.”I didn’t really have anything I needed to take care of, I just wanted a little time to sort things out. I was pretty bummed that they’d given away my single. And I wasn’t sure how I felt about Molly’s matter-of-fact-ness. Was she really so used to sharing rooms with random guys?Still, if I did have to share a room with someone, Molly was probably no more objectionable than Jack or Mrs. Pendergast. She was more my age. She was just out of college and I had a few years on her. She seemed pretty easy going. If we’d been thrown together as partners at a workshop breakout session, I wouldn’t have objected.But sharing insights at a breakout session wasn’t exactly the same as sharing a cabin on a cruise ship. I’d had to share rooms with strangers before, but they’d always been guys. What you did was you put on your blinders, you put up your shields, you went about your business, you let them go about theirs. You tried to be polite. At least that’s the way it worked with guys. Did it work that way with girls too?I guess I’d find out.The ship must have cast off soon after we came on board, but so smoothly that we hadn’t even noticed. By the time I found my way up on deck we’d already cleared the harbor and were quite a ways out from land. I stood at the railing and watched the waves roll by. I wondered whether I might get seasick, but the deck was as firm and steady as any sidewalk on the mainland.The ship turned out to be a whole little city unto itself. There was a miniature golf course at one end and a climbing wall at the other. The top deck held two full-sized swimming pools, each already surrounded by sun bathers glistening in cocoa butter. The lower decks held lounges and theaters and eateries and nightclubs. There were shops and kiosks on every level; a sports bar, a wine bar, two piano bars, a margarita bar (“Hi, Jack! Hi, Ciara!”); and any number of different ways to get from any one place to any other: by stairs, by elevator, by main passageway, by side passageway.Later in the afternoon I sat down at a little coffee shop toward the stern of the ship and nursed a cup of lapsang souchong. Seagulls were gliding along in our tailwind. I’d been making good progress on a couple algorithms at work, and I went over some of the key steps in my mind. It was nice being out of the cubicle for a change, sitting in the sunshine, daydreaming instead of coding, watching the seagulls hover and veer.My thoughts eventually wandered back to my room situation. I still couldn’t understand why Molly was being so agreeable about sharing the cabin. It dawned on me that maybe she didn’t think she had any other choice. Maybe she thought that since she was only here as Mrs. Pendergast’s guest, she had to do whatever Denise asked.And so maybe she wasn’t really all that used to sharing rooms with random guys either. Maybe she was just doing what she thought was expected. A fellow shipmate, a sort-of member of the same social group she was sort of a member of, needed a place to bunk. She had an empty spot. Didn’t shipboard etiquette kind of dictate that she offer to share? But then, by the same token, what did shipboard etiquette expect of me?I finished my tea and ambled back toward the front of the ship. A raucous game of volleyball was taking place in one of the pools. Someone called my name.“Are you going back to the room? I forgot my card.”It was Molly. She gave her little shrug. She was wearing a bright yellow bikini. It was fairly conservative, the kind she could wear to the gym, but it called your attention to her shapely legs and her slender tummy. We made our way down the labyrinth of passageways toward our lower deck. The people we passed would have naturally assumed that we were together.“I figured out about dinner,” she said. “Everybody has an assigned time and an assigned table. Ours is in about an hour. We can go together if you want.”After a couple of wrong turns we finally found our corridor and our little room. It hadn’t gotten any bigger in the time we’d been away. But there was a fresh bath towel sitting on the bed, folded into a sort of soft-origami swan.“Look how cute,” Molly said. “The housekeepers must have been in.”She put her things on the nightstand and fiddled in her suitcase for some clothes. “I’m just going to take a quick shower first.” She went into the bathroom, taking the swan along with her. I sat on the foot of the bed and took a look at the schedule. The walls were thin enough that I could hear the water splashing.She came out wrapped in the towel. “It’s too cramped to get dressed in there,” she said, trying to sound matter-of-fact. She looked around the room, a bit awkwardly.So this was one of the guys-and-girls-sharing-a-cabin rules that I wasn’t really familiar with. What was I supposed to do while she got dressed? Step into the bathroom to give her some privacy? Or just ignore her, the way I would if I was sharing the room with a guy?She wasn’t completely sure how to play it either. She turned to face the mirror, but that only put her sideways to me. So she turned all the way around, facing the outer door. She tried to give the impression that changing clothes in front of a cabin mate wasn’t that big a deal. So I tried to follow her lead.I didn’t stare, and she had her back to me, but it was hard not to notice what she was doing. She started by putting on her bra, but as she was pulling it up, her towel slipped, revealing the two round, pretty cheeks of her bottom. She quickly pulled the towel back into place, and I quickly forced my eyes back to the schedule. So it was only with my peripheral vision that I was able to see her stepping into her panties and skirt and buttoning up her blouse.Finally she sat on the chair to fasten her sandals. Our eyes met again. She sighed, then admitted. “I work in a clinic. I often have to help clients get over themselves, when they have to disrobe for an exam, in front of someone they don t know. I think I have better empathy, now. Oh, Dinner is supposed to be smart casual.” she remarked.I took that to mean that my polo shirt didn’t quite cut it. I’d brought a couple button-down shirts, and so I went over and got one from my suitcase. She nodded approvingly and turned to the mirror, fiddling with her hair. I took off my polo shirt and put on the button one.The dining room was immense, with big round tables like in a reception hall. Molly and I were assigned to a table with some of the other people from our group. I let Molly sit next to Ciara. There was nobody on my other side, which was fine with me. Molly and Ciara found some girl stuff to talk about. The general conversation at the table seemed to be about motorcycles. Denise stopped by to see how everyone was doing.Molly had the chicken and I had the fish. We resisted the hard liquor, but we both had a glass of wine with our meal. Valentin, our engaging Bulgarian waiter, brought us the chit. We had both just assumed that wine was included in the meal, but he explained that it would be added to our room bill.“Will they charge it to Mrs. Pendergast?” Molly whispered, afraid they might.“We’ll figure it out,” I whispered back, signing for both of us.The magic show didn’t start until eight o'clock, so after dinner Molly suggested we just wander around. She showed me the little art gallery she’d discovered on deck six where it met the central atrium. Photographs of interesting doorways on old, rustic buildings. Just past the art gallery was a little gift shop. We went in, and Molly looked at the jewelry counter. She asked the lady to bring out a necklace that caught her eye. I leafed through the post cards, but I didn’t really have anyone to send one to.We still had forty-five minutes until the show, so I took Molly up to the miniature golf course. We didn’t bother keeping score. I made a couple lucky shots. Then, on the next-to-the-last hole, Molly’s shot went wild and bounced onto the next green over. It ricocheted off a bumper and coasted down, curving gently, right into the cup. A perfect hole in one into the wrong hole!“Whoa!” I said. “Remind me never to play you for money.”She raised her putter and blew on the end as if it were a smoking rifle barrel. “You should see me at pinball.”The mag

Strangers forced to share a cabin on a cruise ship.By HectorBidon. Listen to the ►Podcast at Steamy Stories.The waiting area outside the Long Beach cruise terminal was abuzz with bright new outfits and happy chatter. It was enough to make even the most reserved introvert start to feel a bit of excitement.I was standing with Jack and Ciara, two regulars of the social group. Jack was tall and rugged, something to do with landscaping; Ciara tall and willowy, worked in an office of some sort. They weren’t an official couple, as far as I knew, but they seemed to have hooked up for the New Year s Pacific cruise. That was sort of the way the group worked. Thirty somethings, mostly divorced, intent on maintaining the hard playing lifestyle of their twenties, looking for like-minded dating partners to do it with.Jack was explaining the different cruise drink payment plans. I smiled politely and nodded, thinking how different from theirs my life would be when I got to be their age.Denise bustled up in a pretty pastel pantsuit with her clipboard in her hand. She was a travel agent and the mother hen of the group, forty-something and no longer trying so hard to pretend she was any younger. She d put together this group and made a nice extra income for her troubles.“Hector,” she said, ushering me a step aside, “I’m afraid there’s been a mix up with your reservation. Somehow your single cabin didn’t show up on the final printout.” She gave me a concerned look. “They’re working on it,,  but we may have to double you up with someone.”This came as a bit of a rude surprise. One of the only reasons I’d finally agreed to come on the cruise in the first place had been her assurance that I’d be able to have a single. It wasn’t that I was antisocial really, but I had my limits.“You know Mrs. Pendergast, don’t you?”Mrs. Pendergast was an older woman, well into her sixties. She wasn’t a regular member of the group, but it amused her sometimes to hang with a younger crowd. The group let her tag along to some of their events. I was going to have to share a room with Mrs. Pendergast?“Apparently she got sick and had to cancel at the last minute. So we have an opening. She was sharing a room with, ah;” she double checked her forms; “a Ms. Crenshaw. I don’t know her, but I’m sure she’s very nice. It’s a double room, and you know how it is on a cruise. You don’t spend that much time in your room anyway.”I didn’t even try to return her smile.“They’re still working on your single, of course. I just wanted to let you know the fallback plan.”Not only losing my single, but having to spend the cruise being polite to an old lady? In Denise’s mind, that was what the social group was all about.People were already starting to go into the terminal building when Denise came back, this time with an attractive young woman at her side. I wondered if it was Denise’s daughter, there to see us off.“Hector,” she said, peering at me over the top of her glasses, “this is Molly Crenshaw. I’ve been explaining our predicament.”The girl gave me a weak smile. She was pretty, with long brown hair swept back, wearing white shorts and a light blue top. She didn’t look like she could be a day over twenty-one. Not at all what I had pictured as a travelling companion for Mrs. Pendergast.“It’s a double room,” Denise was explaining. “I’m sure they’ll be able to rig up a partition if need be. But this will be the first cruise for both of you. It will be nice to have a buddy to help you find your way around. I’m sure the two of you will hit it off.”Molly was still looking at me rather uncertainly. This apparently wasn’t exactly what she had signed up for, either. She looked back at Denise. “Well, if his other room got cancelled,Denise was delighted. The registration mix-up had been solved in an efficient and social-group-positive way. I couldn’t believe she was being so cavalier about putting a guy and a girl who didn’t even know each other into the same room together."They’re still working on my single though, right?”“As far as I know. You’ll be able to check with the Bursar once we get on board.”Denise had more than enough smile for the three of us. They called our area for boarding.“See you on board,” she said, bustling off with her clipboard.Going up the gangway onto the ship itself kind of blew me away. You entered onto the mezzanine level of what looked like the fanciest mall I’d ever seen. There was an atrium that rose several stories high with glass elevators gliding up and down and fancy shops and glittering lights on every different level. On the floor below us a fellow in a tuxedo was playing a grand piano. All of this right in the middle of the ship. Molly’s eyes were as wide as mine.They’d told us to have lunch while the luggage was being brought on. Molly and I had come aboard with a bunch of other social groupers, but they’d all buzzed off one way or another leaving the two of us by ourselves. We found a little sandwich and salad buffet.“So, your first cruise?” I asked. I was pretty sure I’d be able to get the room situation straightened out, but there was no harm in being polite.She assembled a forkful of salad. “Yes, Mrs. Pendergast is a patient at the clinic where I work. She’s pretty chatty, you know. She kept talking about this fantastic cruise she was going on. But she needed a travelling companion to come along and sort of look after her.” She shrugged. “ Mrs. Pendergast offered to cover the cost, if I d come with. I don’t know, she has a way of getting what she wants.”“Is she all right?” I asked.“Denise says she’s afraid she might be coming down with something. She’s a bit of a hypochondriac. But the tickets are already paid for, and I’m already here, so Denise said I should just come along on the cruise without her.” She gave her little shrug again and took a sip of iced tea. “Your first cruise too?”“I’m not really a member of the social group, actually. I went on a nature hike with them one time and ended up on Denise’s list. So now she sends me emails every time she has some big event. She was kind of persistent this time. I think they needed to sign up a certain number of people in order to get a discount or something.”Molly nodded and stabbed a crouton. “Well, it is a cruise. It should be fun. And it’ll be nice not to have to keep tabs on Mrs. Pendergast all the time. There’s gambling, you know. When we get far enough out to sea.”“You gamble?”“Of course. Poker, black jack. Machines mostly, but sometimes at the tables. I have a system. It’s a lot of fun.”After lunch I asked my way up to the Bursar’s office. Molly came along to make sure that everything worked out. The Bursar looked me up in his computer. Apparently, when Mrs. Pendergast had cancelled, they’d looked to fill the vacancy with someone from our same group. I was the only one in a single, so they moved me in to fill her spot and gave my room to someone else. He double checked, but there weren’t any other singles available. He apologized for the inconvenience and gave me my key card.I was flabbergasted.“Well,” said Molly, “we might as well go check it out at least.”We found our way down to the deck where the cabin was located. The room itself was not much bigger than a walk-in closet. A chair, a little night stand, a mirror on the bathroom door, a bed against the wall. That was it. We looked at each other.“Kind of smaller than I would have thought,” I said.“Yeah,” she agreed.I corralled a passing steward.“Um, we were supposed to be getting a double room?” I showed him the printout.“Yes, yes,” he said in his helpful foreign accent. “Very nice double cabin.”“But there’s only one bed.” I said.“Double bed,” he explained. Then he gestured toward the porthole on the wall. “Ocean view!” He smiled, happy to have been of service, and went on about his way.Molly didn’t look altogether convinced.I sighed. “Let me go talk to the Bursar again,But she was sizing things up. Sunshine was streaming in through the porthole. Our two suitcases had been placed in a little niche beside the bathroom door, side by side."All the other rooms are probably just as small,” she said. “On this level anyway. And they seem to have already given your other room away.” She looked at me. “Do you snore?”It wasn’t a question I was expecting. “I don’t think so. No one’s ever complained.”“Well, Mrs. Pendergast does, apparently. That’s the one thing I’ve been dreading the most.” She looked back at the room. “I guess this is just what double rooms are like on cruise ships. Maybe it’s not so bad. At least you don’t snore. We’re kind of on an adventure anyway. Maybe we should just try and make the best of it.”She made it sound as if sharing a room with a complete stranger of the opposite sex was no bigger a deal than sharing a table with him at lunch. She sat down on the edge of the bed and picked up the schedule of the day’s activities as if the issue had already been decided.“Shuffleboard lessons at three o'clock,” she noted. “Bingo at four thirty.”I sat down on the chair. So instead of getting a room of my own I was going to have to share this one? Surely there must be some other alternative. What if,  what if I asked Denise to ask Ciara to move in here with Molly and let me bunk with Jack? Ugh! I cringed at the thought.“A magic show tonight in the forward theatre.” Molly announced; reading more literature.I looked around. How would it even work? The room was so tiny. There was only the one bed.Molly was studying a map of the ship. “What do you think we should do first?” She’d not only accepted the fact that we’d be rooming together, she was ready to head out and start exploring.“Um,  why don’t you just go ahead on your own? I’ve still got a couple things I need to take care of first.”I couldn’t tell if she was a bit hurt that I didn’t want to join her. But she shrugged it off. “Well, OK. Then I guess we can just meet back up here later.”I didn’t really have anything I needed to take care of, I just wanted a little time to sort things out. I was pretty bummed that they’d given away my single. And I wasn’t sure how I felt about Molly’s matter-of-fact-ness. Was she really so used to sharing rooms with random guys?Still, if I did have to share a room with someone, Molly was probably no more objectionable than Jack or Mrs. Pendergast. She was more my age. She was just out of college and I had a few years on her. She seemed pretty easy going. If we’d been thrown together as partners at a workshop breakout session, I wouldn’t have objected.But sharing insights at a breakout session wasn’t exactly the same as sharing a cabin on a cruise ship. I’d had to share rooms with strangers before, but they’d always been guys. What you did was you put on your blinders, you put up your shields, you went about your business, you let them go about theirs. You tried to be polite. At least that’s the way it worked with guys. Did it work that way with girls too?I guess I’d find out.The ship must have cast off soon after we came on board, but so smoothly that we hadn’t even noticed. By the time I found my way up on deck we’d already cleared the harbor and were quite a ways out from land. I stood at the railing and watched the waves roll by. I wondered whether I might get seasick, but the deck was as firm and steady as any sidewalk on the mainland.The ship turned out to be a whole little city unto itself. There was a miniature golf course at one end and a climbing wall at the other. The top deck held two full-sized swimming pools, each already surrounded by sun bathers glistening in cocoa butter. The lower decks held lounges and theaters and eateries and nightclubs. There were shops and kiosks on every level; a sports bar, a wine bar, two piano bars, a margarita bar (“Hi, Jack! Hi, Ciara!”); and any number of different ways to get from any one place to any other: by stairs, by elevator, by main passageway, by side passageway.Later in the afternoon I sat down at a little coffee shop toward the stern of the ship and nursed a cup of lapsang souchong. Seagulls were gliding along in our tailwind. I’d been making good progress on a couple algorithms at work, and I went over some of the key steps in my mind. It was nice being out of the cubicle for a change, sitting in the sunshine, daydreaming instead of coding, watching the seagulls hover and veer.My thoughts eventually wandered back to my room situation. I still couldn’t understand why Molly was being so agreeable about sharing the cabin. It dawned on me that maybe she didn’t think she had any other choice. Maybe she thought that since she was only here as Mrs. Pendergast’s guest, she had to do whatever Denise asked.And so maybe she wasn’t really all that used to sharing rooms with random guys either. Maybe she was just doing what she thought was expected. A fellow shipmate, a sort-of member of the same social group she was sort of a member of, needed a place to bunk. She had an empty spot. Didn’t shipboard etiquette kind of dictate that she offer to share? But then, by the same token, what did shipboard etiquette expect of me?I finished my tea and ambled back toward the front of the ship. A raucous game of volleyball was taking place in one of the pools. Someone called my name.“Are you going back to the room? I forgot my card.”It was Molly. She gave her little shrug. She was wearing a bright yellow bikini. It was fairly conservative, the kind she could wear to the gym, but it called your attention to her shapely legs and her slender tummy. We made our way down the labyrinth of passageways toward our lower deck. The people we passed would have naturally assumed that we were together.“I figured out about dinner,” she said. “Everybody has an assigned time and an assigned table. Ours is in about an hour. We can go together if you want.”After a couple of wrong turns we finally found our corridor and our little room. It hadn’t gotten any bigger in the time we’d been away. But there was a fresh bath towel sitting on the bed, folded into a sort of soft-origami swan.“Look how cute,” Molly said. “The housekeepers must have been in.”She put her things on the nightstand and fiddled in her suitcase for some clothes. “I’m just going to take a quick shower first.” She went into the bathroom, taking the swan along with her. I sat on the foot of the bed and took a look at the schedule. The walls were thin enough that I could hear the water splashing.She came out wrapped in the towel. “It’s too cramped to get dressed in there,” she said, trying to sound matter-of-fact. She looked around the room, a bit awkwardly.So this was one of the guys-and-girls-sharing-a-cabin rules that I wasn’t really familiar with. What was I supposed to do while she got dressed? Step into the bathroom to give her some privacy? Or just ignore her, the way I would if I was sharing the room with a guy?She wasn’t completely sure how to play it either. She turned to face the mirror, but that only put her sideways to me. So she turned all the way around, facing the outer door. She tried to give the impression that changing clothes in front of a cabin mate wasn’t that big a deal. So I tried to follow her lead.I didn’t stare, and she had her back to me, but it was hard not to notice what she was doing. She started by putting on her bra, but as she was pulling it up, her towel slipped, revealing the two round, pretty cheeks of her bottom. She quickly pulled the towel back into place, and I quickly forced my eyes back to the schedule. So it was only with my peripheral vision that I was able to see her stepping into her panties and skirt and buttoning up her blouse.Finally she sat on the chair to fasten her sandals. Our eyes met again. She sighed, then admitted. “I work in a clinic. I often have to help clients get over themselves, when they have to disrobe for an exam, in front of someone they don t know. I think I have better empathy, now. Oh, Dinner is supposed to be smart casual.” she remarked.I took that to mean that my polo shirt didn’t quite cut it. I’d brought a couple button-down shirts, and so I went over and got one from my suitcase. She nodded approvingly and turned to the mirror, fiddling with her hair. I took off my polo shirt and put on the button one.The dining room was immense, with big round tables like in a reception hall. Molly and I were assigned to a table with some of the other people from our group. I let Molly sit next to Ciara. There was nobody on my other side, which was fine with me. Molly and Ciara found some girl stuff to talk about. The general conversation at the table seemed to be about motorcycles. Denise stopped by to see how everyone was doing.Molly had the chicken and I had the fish. We resisted the hard liquor, but we both had a glass of wine with our meal. Valentin, our engaging Bulgarian waiter, brought us the chit. We had both just assumed that wine was included in the meal, but he explained that it would be added to our room bill.“Will they charge it to Mrs. Pendergast?” Molly whispered, afraid they might.“We’ll figure it out,” I whispered back, signing for both of us.The magic show didn’t start until eight o'clock, so after dinner Molly suggested we just wander around. She showed me the little art gallery she’d discovered on deck six where it met the central atrium. Photographs of interesting doorways on old, rustic buildings. Just past the art gallery was a little gift shop. We went in, and Molly looked at the jewelry counter. She asked the lady to bring out a necklace that caught her eye. I leafed through the post cards, but I didn’t really have anyone to send one to.We still had forty-five minutes until the show, so I took Molly up to the miniature golf course. We didn’t bother keeping score. I made a couple lucky shots. Then, on the next-to-the-last hole, Molly’s shot went wild and bounced onto the next green over. It ricocheted off a bumper and coasted down, curving gently, right into the cup. A perfect hole in one into the wrong hole!“Whoa!” I said. “Remind me never to play you for money.”She raised her putter and blew on the end as if it were a smoking rifle barrel. “You should see me at pinball.”The mag

Strangers forced to share a cabin on a cruise ship.By HectorBidon. Listen to the ►Podcast at Steamy Stories.The waiting area outside the Long Beach cruise terminal was abuzz with bright new outfits and happy chatter. It was enough to make even the most reserved introvert start to feel a bit of excitement.I was standing with Jack and Ciara, two regulars of the social group. Jack was tall and rugged, something to do with landscaping; Ciara tall and willowy, worked in an office of some sort. They weren’t an official couple, as far as I knew, but they seemed to have hooked up for the New Year s Pacific cruise. That was sort of the way the group worked. Thirty somethings, mostly divorced, intent on maintaining the hard playing lifestyle of their twenties, looking for like-minded dating partners to do it with.Jack was explaining the different cruise drink payment plans. I smiled politely and nodded, thinking how different from theirs my life would be when I got to be their age.Denise bustled up in a pretty pastel pantsuit with her clipboard in her hand. She was a travel agent and the mother hen of the group, forty-something and no longer trying so hard to pretend she was any younger. She d put together this group and made a nice extra income for her troubles.“Hector,” she said, ushering me a step aside, “I’m afraid there’s been a mix up with your reservation. Somehow your single cabin didn’t show up on the final printout.” She gave me a concerned look. “They’re working on it,,  but we may have to double you up with someone.”This came as a bit of a rude surprise. One of the only reasons I’d finally agreed to come on the cruise in the first place had been her assurance that I’d be able to have a single. It wasn’t that I was antisocial really, but I had my limits.“You know Mrs. Pendergast, don’t you?”Mrs. Pendergast was an older woman, well into her sixties. She wasn’t a regular member of the group, but it amused her sometimes to hang with a younger crowd. The group let her tag along to some of their events. I was going to have to share a room with Mrs. Pendergast?“Apparently she got sick and had to cancel at the last minute. So we have an opening. She was sharing a room with, ah;” she double checked her forms; “a Ms. Crenshaw. I don’t know her, but I’m sure she’s very nice. It’s a double room, and you know how it is on a cruise. You don’t spend that much time in your room anyway.”I didn’t even try to return her smile.“They’re still working on your single, of course. I just wanted to let you know the fallback plan.”Not only losing my single, but having to spend the cruise being polite to an old lady? In Denise’s mind, that was what the social group was all about.People were already starting to go into the terminal building when Denise came back, this time with an attractive young woman at her side. I wondered if it was Denise’s daughter, there to see us off.“Hector,” she said, peering at me over the top of her glasses, “this is Molly Crenshaw. I’ve been explaining our predicament.”The girl gave me a weak smile. She was pretty, with long brown hair swept back, wearing white shorts and a light blue top. She didn’t look like she could be a day over twenty-one. Not at all what I had pictured as a travelling companion for Mrs. Pendergast.“It’s a double room,” Denise was explaining. “I’m sure they’ll be able to rig up a partition if need be. But this will be the first cruise for both of you. It will be nice to have a buddy to help you find your way around. I’m sure the two of you will hit it off.”Molly was still looking at me rather uncertainly. This apparently wasn’t exactly what she had signed up for, either. She looked back at Denise. “Well, if his other room got cancelled,Denise was delighted. The registration mix-up had been solved in an efficient and social-group-positive way. I couldn’t believe she was being so cavalier about putting a guy and a girl who didn’t even know each other into the same room together."They’re still working on my single though, right?”“As far as I know. You’ll be able to check with the Bursar once we get on board.”Denise had more than enough smile for the three of us. They called our area for boarding.“See you on board,” she said, bustling off with her clipboard.Going up the gangway onto the ship itself kind of blew me away. You entered onto the mezzanine level of what looked like the fanciest mall I’d ever seen. There was an atrium that rose several stories high with glass elevators gliding up and down and fancy shops and glittering lights on every different level. On the floor below us a fellow in a tuxedo was playing a grand piano. All of this right in the middle of the ship. Molly’s eyes were as wide as mine.They’d told us to have lunch while the luggage was being brought on. Molly and I had come aboard with a bunch of other social groupers, but they’d all buzzed off one way or another leaving the two of us by ourselves. We found a little sandwich and salad buffet.“So, your first cruise?” I asked. I was pretty sure I’d be able to get the room situation straightened out, but there was no harm in being polite.She assembled a forkful of salad. “Yes, Mrs. Pendergast is a patient at the clinic where I work. She’s pretty chatty, you know. She kept talking about this fantastic cruise she was going on. But she needed a travelling companion to come along and sort of look after her.” She shrugged. “ Mrs. Pendergast offered to cover the cost, if I d come with. I don’t know, she has a way of getting what she wants.”“Is she all right?” I asked.“Denise says she’s afraid she might be coming down with something. She’s a bit of a hypochondriac. But the tickets are already paid for, and I’m already here, so Denise said I should just come along on the cruise without her.” She gave her little shrug again and took a sip of iced tea. “Your first cruise too?”“I’m not really a member of the social group, actually. I went on a nature hike with them one time and ended up on Denise’s list. So now she sends me emails every time she has some big event. She was kind of persistent this time. I think they needed to sign up a certain number of people in order to get a discount or something.”Molly nodded and stabbed a crouton. “Well, it is a cruise. It should be fun. And it’ll be nice not to have to keep tabs on Mrs. Pendergast all the time. There’s gambling, you know. When we get far enough out to sea.”“You gamble?”“Of course. Poker, black jack. Machines mostly, but sometimes at the tables. I have a system. It’s a lot of fun.”After lunch I asked my way up to the Bursar’s office. Molly came along to make sure that everything worked out. The Bursar looked me up in his computer. Apparently, when Mrs. Pendergast had cancelled, they’d looked to fill the vacancy with someone from our same group. I was the only one in a single, so they moved me in to fill her spot and gave my room to someone else. He double checked, but there weren’t any other singles available. He apologized for the inconvenience and gave me my key card.I was flabbergasted.“Well,” said Molly, “we might as well go check it out at least.”We found our way down to the deck where the cabin was located. The room itself was not much bigger than a walk-in closet. A chair, a little night stand, a mirror on the bathroom door, a bed against the wall. That was it. We looked at each other.“Kind of smaller than I would have thought,” I said.“Yeah,” she agreed.I corralled a passing steward.“Um, we were supposed to be getting a double room?” I showed him the printout.“Yes, yes,” he said in his helpful foreign accent. “Very nice double cabin.”“But there’s only one bed.” I said.“Double bed,” he explained. Then he gestured toward the porthole on the wall. “Ocean view!” He smiled, happy to have been of service, and went on about his way.Molly didn’t look altogether convinced.I sighed. “Let me go talk to the Bursar again,But she was sizing things up. Sunshine was streaming in through the porthole. Our two suitcases had been placed in a little niche beside the bathroom door, side by side."All the other rooms are probably just as small,” she said. “On this level anyway. And they seem to have already given your other room away.” She looked at me. “Do you snore?”It wasn’t a question I was expecting. “I don’t think so. No one’s ever complained.”“Well, Mrs. Pendergast does, apparently. That’s the one thing I’ve been dreading the most.” She looked back at the room. “I guess this is just what double rooms are like on cruise ships. Maybe it’s not so bad. At least you don’t snore. We’re kind of on an adventure anyway. Maybe we should just try and make the best of it.”She made it sound as if sharing a room with a complete stranger of the opposite sex was no bigger a deal than sharing a table with him at lunch. She sat down on the edge of the bed and picked up the schedule of the day’s activities as if the issue had already been decided.“Shuffleboard lessons at three o'clock,” she noted. “Bingo at four thirty.”I sat down on the chair. So instead of getting a room of my own I was going to have to share this one? Surely there must be some other alternative. What if,  what if I asked Denise to ask Ciara to move in here with Molly and let me bunk with Jack? Ugh! I cringed at the thought.“A magic show tonight in the forward theatre.” Molly announced; reading more literature.I looked around. How would it even work? The room was so tiny. There was only the one bed.Molly was studying a map of the ship. “What do you think we should do first?” She’d not only accepted the fact that we’d be rooming together, she was ready to head out and start exploring.“Um,  why don’t you just go ahead on your own? I’ve still got a couple things I need to take care of first.”I couldn’t tell if she was a bit hurt that I didn’t want to join her. But she shrugged it off. “Well, OK. Then I guess we can just meet back up here later.”I didn’t really have anything I needed to take care of, I just wanted a little time to sort things out. I was pretty bummed that they’d given away my single. And I wasn’t sure how I felt about Molly’s matter-of-fact-ness. Was she really so used to sharing rooms with random guys?Still, if I did have to share a room with someone, Molly was probably no more objectionable than Jack or Mrs. Pendergast. She was more my age. She was just out of college and I had a few years on her. She seemed pretty easy going. If we’d been thrown together as partners at a workshop breakout session, I wouldn’t have objected.But sharing insights at a breakout session wasn’t exactly the same as sharing a cabin on a cruise ship. I’d had to share rooms with strangers before, but they’d always been guys. What you did was you put on your blinders, you put up your shields, you went about your business, you let them go about theirs. You tried to be polite. At least that’s the way it worked with guys. Did it work that way with girls too?I guess I’d find out.The ship must have cast off soon after we came on board, but so smoothly that we hadn’t even noticed. By the time I found my way up on deck we’d already cleared the harbor and were quite a ways out from land. I stood at the railing and watched the waves roll by. I wondered whether I might get seasick, but the deck was as firm and steady as any sidewalk on the mainland.The ship turned out to be a whole little city unto itself. There was a miniature golf course at one end and a climbing wall at the other. The top deck held two full-sized swimming pools, each already surrounded by sun bathers glistening in cocoa butter. The lower decks held lounges and theaters and eateries and nightclubs. There were shops and kiosks on every level; a sports bar, a wine bar, two piano bars, a margarita bar (“Hi, Jack! Hi, Ciara!”); and any number of different ways to get from any one place to any other: by stairs, by elevator, by main passageway, by side passageway.Later in the afternoon I sat down at a little coffee shop toward the stern of the ship and nursed a cup of lapsang souchong. Seagulls were gliding along in our tailwind. I’d been making good progress on a couple algorithms at work, and I went over some of the key steps in my mind. It was nice being out of the cubicle for a change, sitting in the sunshine, daydreaming instead of coding, watching the seagulls hover and veer.My thoughts eventually wandered back to my room situation. I still couldn’t understand why Molly was being so agreeable about sharing the cabin. It dawned on me that maybe she didn’t think she had any other choice. Maybe she thought that since she was only here as Mrs. Pendergast’s guest, she had to do whatever Denise asked.And so maybe she wasn’t really all that used to sharing rooms with random guys either. Maybe she was just doing what she thought was expected. A fellow shipmate, a sort-of member of the same social group she was sort of a member of, needed a place to bunk. She had an empty spot. Didn’t shipboard etiquette kind of dictate that she offer to share? But then, by the same token, what did shipboard etiquette expect of me?I finished my tea and ambled back toward the front of the ship. A raucous game of volleyball was taking place in one of the pools. Someone called my name.“Are you going back to the room? I forgot my card.”It was Molly. She gave her little shrug. She was wearing a bright yellow bikini. It was fairly conservative, the kind she could wear to the gym, but it called your attention to her shapely legs and her slender tummy. We made our way down the labyrinth of passageways toward our lower deck. The people we passed would have naturally assumed that we were together.“I figured out about dinner,” she said. “Everybody has an assigned time and an assigned table. Ours is in about an hour. We can go together if you want.”After a couple of wrong turns we finally found our corridor and our little room. It hadn’t gotten any bigger in the time we’d been away. But there was a fresh bath towel sitting on the bed, folded into a sort of soft-origami swan.“Look how cute,” Molly said. “The housekeepers must have been in.”She put her things on the nightstand and fiddled in her suitcase for some clothes. “I’m just going to take a quick shower first.” She went into the bathroom, taking the swan along with her. I sat on the foot of the bed and took a look at the schedule. The walls were thin enough that I could hear the water splashing.She came out wrapped in the towel. “It’s too cramped to get dressed in there,” she said, trying to sound matter-of-fact. She looked around the room, a bit awkwardly.So this was one of the guys-and-girls-sharing-a-cabin rules that I wasn’t really familiar with. What was I supposed to do while she got dressed? Step into the bathroom to give her some privacy? Or just ignore her, the way I would if I was sharing the room with a guy?She wasn’t completely sure how to play it either. She turned to face the mirror, but that only put her sideways to me. So she turned all the way around, facing the outer door. She tried to give the impression that changing clothes in front of a cabin mate wasn’t that big a deal. So I tried to follow her lead.I didn’t stare, and she had her back to me, but it was hard not to notice what she was doing. She started by putting on her bra, but as she was pulling it up, her towel slipped, revealing the two round, pretty cheeks of her bottom. She quickly pulled the towel back into place, and I quickly forced my eyes back to the schedule. So it was only with my peripheral vision that I was able to see her stepping into her panties and skirt and buttoning up her blouse.Finally she sat on the chair to fasten her sandals. Our eyes met again. She sighed, then admitted. “I work in a clinic. I often have to help clients get over themselves, when they have to disrobe for an exam, in front of someone they don t know. I think I have better empathy, now. Oh, Dinner is supposed to be smart casual.” she remarked.I took that to mean that my polo shirt didn’t quite cut it. I’d brought a couple button-down shirts, and so I went over and got one from my suitcase. She nodded approvingly and turned to the mirror, fiddling with her hair. I took off my polo shirt and put on the button one.The dining room was immense, with big round tables like in a reception hall. Molly and I were assigned to a table with some of the other people from our group. I let Molly sit next to Ciara. There was nobody on my other side, which was fine with me. Molly and Ciara found some girl stuff to talk about. The general conversation at the table seemed to be about motorcycles. Denise stopped by to see how everyone was doing.Molly had the chicken and I had the fish. We resisted the hard liquor, but we both had a glass of wine with our meal. Valentin, our engaging Bulgarian waiter, brought us the chit. We had both just assumed that wine was included in the meal, but he explained that it would be added to our room bill.“Will they charge it to Mrs. Pendergast?” Molly whispered, afraid they might.“We’ll figure it out,” I whispered back, signing for both of us.The magic show didn’t start until eight o'clock, so after dinner Molly suggested we just wander around. She showed me the little art gallery she’d discovered on deck six where it met the central atrium. Photographs of interesting doorways on old, rustic buildings. Just past the art gallery was a little gift shop. We went in, and Molly looked at the jewelry counter. She asked the lady to bring out a necklace that caught her eye. I leafed through the post cards, but I didn’t really have anyone to send one to.We still had forty-five minutes until the show, so I took Molly up to the miniature golf course. We didn’t bother keeping score. I made a couple lucky shots. Then, on the next-to-the-last hole, Molly’s shot went wild and bounced onto the next green over. It ricocheted off a bumper and coasted down, curving gently, right into the cup. A perfect hole in one into the wrong hole!“Whoa!” I said. “Remind me never to play you for money.”She raised her putter and blew on the end as if it were a smoking rifle barrel. “You should see me at pinball.”The mag

Strangers forced to share a cabin on a cruise ship.By HectorBidon. Listen to the ►Podcast at Steamy Stories.The waiting area outside the Long Beach cruise terminal was abuzz with bright new outfits and happy chatter. It was enough to make even the most reserved introvert start to feel a bit of excitement.I was standing with Jack and Ciara, two regulars of the social group. Jack was tall and rugged, something to do with landscaping; Ciara tall and willowy, worked in an office of some sort. They weren’t an official couple, as far as I knew, but they seemed to have hooked up for the New Year s Pacific cruise. That was sort of the way the group worked. Thirty somethings, mostly divorced, intent on maintaining the hard playing lifestyle of their twenties, looking for like-minded dating partners to do it with.Jack was explaining the different cruise drink payment plans. I smiled politely and nodded, thinking how different from theirs my life would be when I got to be their age.Denise bustled up in a pretty pastel pantsuit with her clipboard in her hand. She was a travel agent and the mother hen of the group, forty-something and no longer trying so hard to pretend she was any younger. She d put together this group and made a nice extra income for her troubles.“Hector,” she said, ushering me a step aside, “I’m afraid there’s been a mix up with your reservation. Somehow your single cabin didn’t show up on the final printout.” She gave me a concerned look. “They’re working on it,,  but we may have to double you up with someone.”This came as a bit of a rude surprise. One of the only reasons I’d finally agreed to come on the cruise in the first place had been her assurance that I’d be able to have a single. It wasn’t that I was antisocial really, but I had my limits.“You know Mrs. Pendergast, don’t you?”Mrs. Pendergast was an older woman, well into her sixties. She wasn’t a regular member of the group, but it amused her sometimes to hang with a younger crowd. The group let her tag along to some of their events. I was going to have to share a room with Mrs. Pendergast?“Apparently she got sick and had to cancel at the last minute. So we have an opening. She was sharing a room with, ah;” she double checked her forms; “a Ms. Crenshaw. I don’t know her, but I’m sure she’s very nice. It’s a double room, and you know how it is on a cruise. You don’t spend that much time in your room anyway.”I didn’t even try to return her smile.“They’re still working on your single, of course. I just wanted to let you know the fallback plan.”Not only losing my single, but having to spend the cruise being polite to an old lady? In Denise’s mind, that was what the social group was all about.People were already starting to go into the terminal building when Denise came back, this time with an attractive young woman at her side. I wondered if it was Denise’s daughter, there to see us off.“Hector,” she said, peering at me over the top of her glasses, “this is Molly Crenshaw. I’ve been explaining our predicament.”The girl gave me a weak smile. She was pretty, with long brown hair swept back, wearing white shorts and a light blue top. She didn’t look like she could be a day over twenty-one. Not at all what I had pictured as a travelling companion for Mrs. Pendergast.“It’s a double room,” Denise was explaining. “I’m sure they’ll be able to rig up a partition if need be. But this will be the first cruise for both of you. It will be nice to have a buddy to help you find your way around. I’m sure the two of you will hit it off.”Molly was still looking at me rather uncertainly. This apparently wasn’t exactly what she had signed up for, either. She looked back at Denise. “Well, if his other room got cancelled,Denise was delighted. The registration mix-up had been solved in an efficient and social-group-positive way. I couldn’t believe she was being so cavalier about putting a guy and a girl who didn’t even know each other into the same room together."They’re still working on my single though, right?”“As far as I know. You’ll be able to check with the Bursar once we get on board.”Denise had more than enough smile for the three of us. They called our area for boarding.“See you on board,” she said, bustling off with her clipboard.Going up the gangway onto the ship itself kind of blew me away. You entered onto the mezzanine level of what looked like the fanciest mall I’d ever seen. There was an atrium that rose several stories high with glass elevators gliding up and down and fancy shops and glittering lights on every different level. On the floor below us a fellow in a tuxedo was playing a grand piano. All of this right in the middle of the ship. Molly’s eyes were as wide as mine.They’d told us to have lunch while the luggage was being brought on. Molly and I had come aboard with a bunch of other social groupers, but they’d all buzzed off one way or another leaving the two of us by ourselves. We found a little sandwich and salad buffet.“So, your first cruise?” I asked. I was pretty sure I’d be able to get the room situation straightened out, but there was no harm in being polite.She assembled a forkful of salad. “Yes, Mrs. Pendergast is a patient at the clinic where I work. She’s pretty chatty, you know. She kept talking about this fantastic cruise she was going on. But she needed a travelling companion to come along and sort of look after her.” She shrugged. “ Mrs. Pendergast offered to cover the cost, if I d come with. I don’t know, she has a way of getting what she wants.”“Is she all right?” I asked.“Denise says she’s afraid she might be coming down with something. She’s a bit of a hypochondriac. But the tickets are already paid for, and I’m already here, so Denise said I should just come along on the cruise without her.” She gave her little shrug again and took a sip of iced tea. “Your first cruise too?”“I’m not really a member of the social group, actually. I went on a nature hike with them one time and ended up on Denise’s list. So now she sends me emails every time she has some big event. She was kind of persistent this time. I think they needed to sign up a certain number of people in order to get a discount or something.”Molly nodded and stabbed a crouton. “Well, it is a cruise. It should be fun. And it’ll be nice not to have to keep tabs on Mrs. Pendergast all the time. There’s gambling, you know. When we get far enough out to sea.”“You gamble?”“Of course. Poker, black jack. Machines mostly, but sometimes at the tables. I have a system. It’s a lot of fun.”After lunch I asked my way up to the Bursar’s office. Molly came along to make sure that everything worked out. The Bursar looked me up in his computer. Apparently, when Mrs. Pendergast had cancelled, they’d looked to fill the vacancy with someone from our same group. I was the only one in a single, so they moved me in to fill her spot and gave my room to someone else. He double checked, but there weren’t any other singles available. He apologized for the inconvenience and gave me my key card.I was flabbergasted.“Well,” said Molly, “we might as well go check it out at least.”We found our way down to the deck where the cabin was located. The room itself was not much bigger than a walk-in closet. A chair, a little night stand, a mirror on the bathroom door, a bed against the wall. That was it. We looked at each other.“Kind of smaller than I would have thought,” I said.“Yeah,” she agreed.I corralled a passing steward.“Um, we were supposed to be getting a double room?” I showed him the printout.“Yes, yes,” he said in his helpful foreign accent. “Very nice double cabin.”“But there’s only one bed.” I said.“Double bed,” he explained. Then he gestured toward the porthole on the wall. “Ocean view!” He smiled, happy to have been of service, and went on about his way.Molly didn’t look altogether convinced.I sighed. “Let me go talk to the Bursar again,But she was sizing things up. Sunshine was streaming in through the porthole. Our two suitcases had been placed in a little niche beside the bathroom door, side by side."All the other rooms are probably just as small,” she said. “On this level anyway. And they seem to have already given your other room away.” She looked at me. “Do you snore?”It wasn’t a question I was expecting. “I don’t think so. No one’s ever complained.”“Well, Mrs. Pendergast does, apparently. That’s the one thing I’ve been dreading the most.” She looked back at the room. “I guess this is just what double rooms are like on cruise ships. Maybe it’s not so bad. At least you don’t snore. We’re kind of on an adventure anyway. Maybe we should just try and make the best of it.”She made it sound as if sharing a room with a complete stranger of the opposite sex was no bigger a deal than sharing a table with him at lunch. She sat down on the edge of the bed and picked up the schedule of the day’s activities as if the issue had already been decided.“Shuffleboard lessons at three o'clock,” she noted. “Bingo at four thirty.”I sat down on the chair. So instead of getting a room of my own I was going to have to share this one? Surely there must be some other alternative. What if,  what if I asked Denise to ask Ciara to move in here with Molly and let me bunk with Jack? Ugh! I cringed at the thought.“A magic show tonight in the forward theatre.” Molly announced; reading more literature.I looked around. How would it even work? The room was so tiny. There was only the one bed.Molly was studying a map of the ship. “What do you think we should do first?” She’d not only accepted the fact that we’d be rooming together, she was ready to head out and start exploring.“Um,  why don’t you just go ahead on your own? I’ve still got a couple things I need to take care of first.”I couldn’t tell if she was a bit hurt that I didn’t want to join her. But she shrugged it off. “Well, OK. Then I guess we can just meet back up here later.”I didn’t really have anything I needed to take care of, I just wanted a little time to sort things out. I was pretty bummed that they’d given away my single. And I wasn’t sure how I felt about Molly’s matter-of-fact-ness. Was she really so used to sharing rooms with random guys?Still, if I did have to share a room with someone, Molly was probably no more objectionable than Jack or Mrs. Pendergast. She was more my age. She was just out of college and I had a few years on her. She seemed pretty easy going. If we’d been thrown together as partners at a workshop breakout session, I wouldn’t have objected.But sharing insights at a breakout session wasn’t exactly the same as sharing a cabin on a cruise ship. I’d had to share rooms with strangers before, but they’d always been guys. What you did was you put on your blinders, you put up your shields, you went about your business, you let them go about theirs. You tried to be polite. At least that’s the way it worked with guys. Did it work that way with girls too?I guess I’d find out.The ship must have cast off soon after we came on board, but so smoothly that we hadn’t even noticed. By the time I found my way up on deck we’d already cleared the harbor and were quite a ways out from land. I stood at the railing and watched the waves roll by. I wondered whether I might get seasick, but the deck was as firm and steady as any sidewalk on the mainland.The ship turned out to be a whole little city unto itself. There was a miniature golf course at one end and a climbing wall at the other. The top deck held two full-sized swimming pools, each already surrounded by sun bathers glistening in cocoa butter. The lower decks held lounges and theaters and eateries and nightclubs. There were shops and kiosks on every level; a sports bar, a wine bar, two piano bars, a margarita bar (“Hi, Jack! Hi, Ciara!”); and any number of different ways to get from any one place to any other: by stairs, by elevator, by main passageway, by side passageway.Later in the afternoon I sat down at a little coffee shop toward the stern of the ship and nursed a cup of lapsang souchong. Seagulls were gliding along in our tailwind. I’d been making good progress on a couple algorithms at work, and I went over some of the key steps in my mind. It was nice being out of the cubicle for a change, sitting in the sunshine, daydreaming instead of coding, watching the seagulls hover and veer.My thoughts eventually wandered back to my room situation. I still couldn’t understand why Molly was being so agreeable about sharing the cabin. It dawned on me that maybe she didn’t think she had any other choice. Maybe she thought that since she was only here as Mrs. Pendergast’s guest, she had to do whatever Denise asked.And so maybe she wasn’t really all that used to sharing rooms with random guys either. Maybe she was just doing what she thought was expected. A fellow shipmate, a sort-of member of the same social group she was sort of a member of, needed a place to bunk. She had an empty spot. Didn’t shipboard etiquette kind of dictate that she offer to share? But then, by the same token, what did shipboard etiquette expect of me?I finished my tea and ambled back toward the front of the ship. A raucous game of volleyball was taking place in one of the pools. Someone called my name.“Are you going back to the room? I forgot my card.”It was Molly. She gave her little shrug. She was wearing a bright yellow bikini. It was fairly conservative, the kind she could wear to the gym, but it called your attention to her shapely legs and her slender tummy. We made our way down the labyrinth of passageways toward our lower deck. The people we passed would have naturally assumed that we were together.“I figured out about dinner,” she said. “Everybody has an assigned time and an assigned table. Ours is in about an hour. We can go together if you want.”After a couple of wrong turns we finally found our corridor and our little room. It hadn’t gotten any bigger in the time we’d been away. But there was a fresh bath towel sitting on the bed, folded into a sort of soft-origami swan.“Look how cute,” Molly said. “The housekeepers must have been in.”She put her things on the nightstand and fiddled in her suitcase for some clothes. “I’m just going to take a quick shower first.” She went into the bathroom, taking the swan along with her. I sat on the foot of the bed and took a look at the schedule. The walls were thin enough that I could hear the water splashing.She came out wrapped in the towel. “It’s too cramped to get dressed in there,” she said, trying to sound matter-of-fact. She looked around the room, a bit awkwardly.So this was one of the guys-and-girls-sharing-a-cabin rules that I wasn’t really familiar with. What was I supposed to do while she got dressed? Step into the bathroom to give her some privacy? Or just ignore her, the way I would if I was sharing the room with a guy?She wasn’t completely sure how to play it either. She turned to face the mirror, but that only put her sideways to me. So she turned all the way around, facing the outer door. She tried to give the impression that changing clothes in front of a cabin mate wasn’t that big a deal. So I tried to follow her lead.I didn’t stare, and she had her back to me, but it was hard not to notice what she was doing. She started by putting on her bra, but as she was pulling it up, her towel slipped, revealing the two round, pretty cheeks of her bottom. She quickly pulled the towel back into place, and I quickly forced my eyes back to the schedule. So it was only with my peripheral vision that I was able to see her stepping into her panties and skirt and buttoning up her blouse.Finally she sat on the chair to fasten her sandals. Our eyes met again. She sighed, then admitted. “I work in a clinic. I often have to help clients get over themselves, when they have to disrobe for an exam, in front of someone they don t know. I think I have better empathy, now. Oh, Dinner is supposed to be smart casual.” she remarked.I took that to mean that my polo shirt didn’t quite cut it. I’d brought a couple button-down shirts, and so I went over and got one from my suitcase. She nodded approvingly and turned to the mirror, fiddling with her hair. I took off my polo shirt and put on the button one.The dining room was immense, with big round tables like in a reception hall. Molly and I were assigned to a table with some of the other people from our group. I let Molly sit next to Ciara. There was nobody on my other side, which was fine with me. Molly and Ciara found some girl stuff to talk about. The general conversation at the table seemed to be about motorcycles. Denise stopped by to see how everyone was doing.Molly had the chicken and I had the fish. We resisted the hard liquor, but we both had a glass of wine with our meal. Valentin, our engaging Bulgarian waiter, brought us the chit. We had both just assumed that wine was included in the meal, but he explained that it would be added to our room bill.“Will they charge it to Mrs. Pendergast?” Molly whispered, afraid they might.“We’ll figure it out,” I whispered back, signing for both of us.The magic show didn’t start until eight o'clock, so after dinner Molly suggested we just wander around. She showed me the little art gallery she’d discovered on deck six where it met the central atrium. Photographs of interesting doorways on old, rustic buildings. Just past the art gallery was a little gift shop. We went in, and Molly looked at the jewelry counter. She asked the lady to bring out a necklace that caught her eye. I leafed through the post cards, but I didn’t really have anyone to send one to.We still had forty-five minutes until the show, so I took Molly up to the miniature golf course. We didn’t bother keeping score. I made a couple lucky shots. Then, on the next-to-the-last hole, Molly’s shot went wild and bounced onto the next green over. It ricocheted off a bumper and coasted down, curving gently, right into the cup. A perfect hole in one into the wrong hole!“Whoa!” I said. “Remind me never to play you for money.”She raised her putter and blew on the end as if it were a smoking rifle barrel. “You should see me at pinball.”The mag

Welcome to Geeks Corner! This week, there is a lot of ground to cover. Originally, the show was going to be focused mostly on the Disney California Adventure Food & Wine Festival. However, there were some other announcements that came out. So, the show also covers Thomas Mazloum becoming the Disney Experiences Chairman and Jill Estorino becoming President of the Disneyland Resort. There is also discussion about the Disney Adventure and Kathryn Hahn as Mother Gothel in the live-action Tangled. The show also includes a game of Where's Mr. Daps? We hope you enjoy this week's episode of Geeks Corner! Join the conversation in the comments or over at Daps Magic HQ! We'll see you 'round the corner!THE WEEK IN GEEKThomas Mazloum Promoted to Chairman, Disney Experiences https://dapsmagic.com/2026/03/disneyland-resort-president-thomas-mazloum-promoted-to-chairman-of-disney-experiences/Jill Estorino Named President, Disneyland Resort https://dapsmagic.com/2026/03/jill-estorino-named-new-president-of-disneyland-resort/ Food & Wine Festival Returns to Disney California Adventure https://dapsmagic.com/disney-california-adventure-food-and-wine-festival/ Disney Adventure Departs on Maiden Voyage https://dapsmagic.com/guides/dapstravels/disney-adventure/ Disney Confirms Kathryn Hahn as Mother Gothel https://dapsmagic.com/2026/03/disney-confirms-kathryn-hahn-is-mother-gothel/

Rudy Van Gelder no tocó en ningún disco. Pero está en todos ellos. Ingeniero de grabación, técnico obsesivo, guardián celoso de su arte, Van Gelder construyó el sonido que el mundo entero reconoció como jazz moderno. Sin él, el jazz del siglo XX habría sido, simplemente, otro. Playlist: – The Sidewinder, Lee Morgan; – Walkin', Miles Davis Sextet; – The Sermon, Jimmy Smith; – Idle Moments, Grant Green; – Midnight Blue, Kenny Burrell; – Cheese Cake, Dexter Gordon; – Song for My Father, Horace Silver; – Recado Bossa Nova, Hank Mobley; – Warm-Up and Dialogue Between Lee and Rudy, Art Blakey & The Jazz Messengers; – RVG (with Donald Vega & Russell Malone), Ron Carter. Hit Parade RVG: 1. St. Thomas, Sonny Rollins, Saxophone Colossus (Prestige, 1956). 2. Blue Train, John Coltrane, Blue Train (Blue Note, 1957). 3. My Funny Valentine, Miles Davis, Cookin' with the Miles Davis Quintet (Prestige, 1957). 4. Ruby, My Dear, Thelonious Monk, Monk's Music (Riverside, 1957). 5. Moanin', Art Blakey & The Jazz Messengers, Moanin' (Blue Note, 1958). 6. Remember, Hank Mobley, Soul Station (Blue Note, 1960). 7. Speak No Evil, Wayne Shorter, Speak No Evil (Blue Note, 1964). 8. A Love Supreme, Pt. 1: Acknowledgement, John Coltrane, A Love Supreme (Impulse!, 1964). 9. Maiden Voyage, Herbie Hancock, Maiden Voyage (Blue Note, 1965). 10. Suite Sioux, Freddie Hubbard, Red Clay (CTI, 1970).

This week we learn about 22 year old Charles Darwin's first trip out to sea on the HMS Beagle and his unlikely friendship with captain Robert FitzRoy sparked his theory of evolution. A listener email tells us the lengths one Serbian chimp went to find a girlfriend.Come find us at Emerald City Comic Con! Artist Alley Table R-07 Episode Tabs:Darwin Correspondence Projecthttps://www.darwinproject.ac.ukListener Tabs:Sami the Chimphttps://www.beozoovrt.rs/heroji-vrta/sami/?lang=srEmail your closed tab submissions to: 500opentabs@gmail.comSupport us on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/500OpenTabs500 Open Tabs Wiki: https://500-open-tabs.fandom.com/wiki/500_Open_Tabs_Wiki500 Open Roads (Google Maps episode guide): https://maps.app.goo.gl/Tg9g2HcUaFAzXGbw7Continue the conversation by joining us on Discord! https://discord.gg/8px5RJHk7aGet 40% off an annual subscription to Nebula by going to nebula.tv/500opentabsSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Ryan Estes sits down with Don Lucoff, founder of DL Media and Artistic Director of the Denver Jazz Fest. Don has spent nearly four decades in jazz as a publicist, producer, and festival programmer, working with legendary artists and labels like Impulse and Blue Note. Now he is helping build a national caliber jazz festival right here in Denver. The State of Jazz Don reflects on how dramatically jazz media coverage has changed. There was a time when major outlets regularly reviewed jazz records and featured artists on national television. Today, most of that coverage has vanished. Yet jazz itself has not disappeared. It continues to shape modern music. Artists like Kendrick Lamar have collaborated with jazz musicians such as Kamasi Washington and Robert Glasper. The influence is everywhere. As Don puts it, jazz can sell everything but itself. It is deeply embedded in popular culture, even if it is no longer center stage in mainstream media. Why Denver Is a Jazz City Denver has a stronger jazz pedigree than many people realize. The Front Range is home to major jazz education programs at the University of Northern Colorado, University of Denver, University of Colorado Boulder, Metropolitan State University of Denver, and Colorado State University. These institutions consistently produce world class players. Historically, Five Points was known as the Harlem of the West, a vital stop for touring jazz musicians crossing the country. Add the Beat Generation passing through town and you have a city that has long been part of America's cultural and musical story. Inside Denver Jazz Fest The Denver Jazz Fest spans 15 venues across Denver and includes performances in Boulder County. It blends national headliners with respected local artists, creating a citywide celebration. This year's lineup includes Pat Metheny, Branford Marsalis, Bob James, and John Beasley. The festival also honors the centenary of Miles Davis and John Coltrane with special tribute performances, including a presentation of A Love Supreme by Denver saxophonist Keith Oxman. The goal is inclusivity and accessibility. Whether you are a lifelong jazz fan or just jazz curious, there is a show for you. Where to Start Listening For new listeners, Don recommends classics from the Blue Note catalog such as Lee Morgan's Search for the New Land, Herbie Hancock's Maiden Voyage, Wayne Shorter's Speak No Evil, and Grant Green's Idle Moments. From Impulse, he points to John Coltrane's Crescent and A Love Supreme, Alice Coltrane's Journey in Satchidananda, and Pharoah Sanders' Thembi. These records are not homework. They are entry points into a vast and vibrant tradition. Final Takeaway Don's career proves one thing. You may not get rich in jazz, but you can build a life around passion, community, and great music. Denver Jazz Fest is more than a series of concerts. It is a statement that this city values artistry, education, and cultural history. Learn more and get tickets at denverjazz.org. See you there.

Maiden Voyage!!

Con Carlos López I Nos adentramos en uno de los discos más influyentes del jazz moderno. Una joya absoluta que más de medio siglo después, continúa siendo referencia imprescindible para músicos y amantes de este género. Una obra que redefinió el jazz modal, con composiciones que evocan el mar, el movimiento y la introspección. Herbie Hancock, acompañado por un quinteto legendario, construyó un sonido elegante, expansivo y profundamente evocador que sigue marcando a diferentes generaciones. Si te gusta el jazz, o quieres descubrir uno de esos discos que siempre vuelven, este episodio es para ti. Te invito a escucharlo y a dejarte llevar por una increíble travesía sonora.

Con Carlos López I Nos adentramos en uno de los discos más influyentes del jazz moderno. Una joya absoluta que más de medio siglo después, continúa siendo referencia imprescindible para músicos y amantes de este género. Una obra que redefinió el jazz modal, con composiciones que evocan el mar, el movimiento y la introspección. Herbie Hancock, acompañado por un quinteto legendario, construyó un sonido elegante, expansivo y profundamente evocador que sigue marcando a diferentes generaciones. Si te gusta el jazz, o quieres descubrir uno de esos discos que siempre vuelven, este episodio es para ti. Te invito a escucharlo y a dejarte llevar por una increíble travesía sonora.

jeudi

"When you do your homework... when you can speak to the facts... they stop and they listen." In this episode of Inspiring Women, Laurie McGraw sits down with Kristy Whitehurst, the powerhouse behind the employee benefits strategy at Genuine Parts Company (GPC). Managing the well-being of over 60,000 members across a global landscape is no small feat, yet Kristy has navigated this complex "puzzle" for over two decades. Kristy opens up about her unconventional start—from a degree in dietetics to becoming a leading voice in HR. She shares the raw reality of rising through the ranks in a male-dominated industry, the nerve-wracking moment of her first executive presentation, and why "owning your mistakes" is the ultimate catalyst for growth. Whether you are looking to scale the corporate ladder, master the art of data-driven persuasion, or find the balance between professional passion and personal life, Kristy's "Maiden Voyage" into the podcast world provides a blueprint for sustainable, high-impact leadership. In this episode, we discuss: The strategy of managing benefits for a global workforce of 60,000+. How to command respect and "stop the room" in male-dominated boardrooms. The "Puzzle of Benefits": Balancing rising costs with employee retention. Why asking the "simple" questions is a leader's greatest superpower. Navigating corporate evolution, M&A, and the future of AI in healthcare. The importance of mentorship and watching how the "greats" prepare for the big moments.

Legend of the Seas Adds New Maiden Voyage is the lead story on Wednesday Travel and Cruise Industry Podcast, January 28, 2026 with Chillie Falls. Also today, MSC's New HQ Opens In Miami; Bob W Opens New Properties; Loggerhead Released; Fly Early for NCL Cruise; Ferry Sinks in the Philippines; and lots more LIVE at 11 AM EST. #wednesdaytravelandcruiseindustrypodcast #travelandcruiseindustrynews #podcast #cruisenews #travelnews #cruise #travel #chilliescruises #chilliefalls #whill_us CLICK HERE for video feed Thanks for visiting my channel. NYTimes The Daily, the flagship NYT podcast with a massive audience. "Vacationing In The Time Of Covid" https://nyti.ms/3QuRwOS To access the Travel and Cruise Industry News Podcast; https://cms.megaphone.fm/channel/trav... or go to https://accessadventure.net/ To subscribe: http://bit.ly/chi-fal I appreciate super chats or any other donations to support my channel. For your convenience, please visit: https://paypal.me/chillie9264?locale.... Chillie's Cruise Schedule: https://www.accessadventure.net/chillies-trip-calendar/ For your mobility needs, contact me, Whill.inc/US, at (844) 699-4455 use SRN 11137 or call Scootaround at 1.888.441.7575. Use SRN 11137. YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/ChilliesCruises Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/chillie.falls X: https://x.com/ChillieFalls Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to Happer and Schaefer, your new morning show on 1620 The Zone. Connor Happer and Mike Schaefer formerly introduce themselves and address the new changes to the lineup.

This Maiden Voyage is a reissue of our very first episode from 2021 where we talked about dog farts and poetry. Enjoy.

This is the maiden voyage of the Icaron - Earth's first S-Class Battle Station. This demonstration flight has been certified as routine by all relevant oversight bodies. Systems have been tested, personnel vetted, and contingencies reviewed. Passengers are reminded that the Icaron represents the highest standard of planetary defense engineering.Please remain seated.We are:Brennan Lee MulliganErika IshiiAabria IyengarLou Wilson Flight of the Icaron was produced by Fortunate Horse and Worlds Beyond NumberEdit and Sound Design by Brian Flaherty from Many Sided Mediahttps://www.manysidedmedia.com/Score by Will Savinohttps://wsavino.com/Sound Effect library courtesy of artlist.io Director of Operations: Melanie BowmanSocial Media Manager: Shannon HLorekeeper and Transcriptionist: Jack Morgan E.F. Lavandowska Special Thanks to: Amanda Freberg at Big Giant Head and the team at LaservisionCharacter Art Alecia Doyleyhttps://tallnquirky.carrd.co/Ship Art by Britt Andersonhttps://brittajj26.com/Graphics by Lu Tomkiewiczhttps://www.lumadethis.com/ You can find transcripts of all our episodes on our Patreon. Just navigate to the post for the episode and the transcript will be attached.

Frank, Scotti, and Jeremy all just recently got off the maiden voyage on Celebrity Cruises' new ship, The Celebrity Excel. This was Frank and Scotti's first time on Royal Caribbean Group's luxury line & Jeremy's first time sailing in almost a decade. Join us on this virtual walkthrough as we talk through all the different venues aboard this beautiful ship, as well as all the dining and entertainment options! Interested in coming on a future episode and recapping your cruise? Fill out the following form: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://form.jotform.com/252443162720146⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Check out our new website: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.cruiseconversationspodcast.com⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Use our code "CC15" for 15% off your order at ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠The Cruise Maps⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Ready to book a cruise with Cruise Conversations?⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Fill out our form or send us a text at (704) 313-8556 for latest pricing!⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Have a question or topic suggestions for a future episode? DM us on Instagram ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠@CruiseConversations⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ or send us an email at cruiseconversations@gmail.com.Follow along on social media!⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Facebook⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Instagram⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Tik Tok⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠

We just stepped off the Disney Destiny… and we're ready to tell you everything. From the moment we boarded the maiden voyage to the final walk off in Fort Lauderdale, we're breaking down our full trip report of Disney Cruise Line's newest ship. If you want real experiences, dining reactions, show reviews, and honest impressions—this is the Destiny episode you've been waiting for.   This week on Rope Drop On Deck, Michelle and Doug deliver their complete Disney Destiny maiden voyage trip report! After last week's teaser, we're diving deep into what it's actually like to sail the newest DCL ship. We cover first moments onboard, stateroom impressions, dining, entertainment, characters, lounges, Castaway Cay, and all the surprises the Destiny has to offer. If you're planning a cruise on the Disney Destiny—or just want to hear what worked, what didn't, and what stood out from the Wish/Treasure class—this episode is packed with details you won't want to miss. Word of the day thanks to Back To The Mouse.  

Alyssa and I recently spent 7 nights onboard the Disney Destiny between a preview cruise and the Maiden Voyage! In this week's episode, we are bringing you our thoughts on our experience and our full review of Disney Cruise Line's newest ship, the Disney Destiny. I hope you enjoy! Don't forget to connect with the show on Twitter and Instagram @theDCLdude, or on Facebook at facebook.com/dcldudepodcast. You can also check out my blog at www.thedcldude.com. If you have any ideas for future episodes, I'd love to hear them! Finally, if you're thinking about booking a Disney Cruise, don't go it alone! Send me an email at wes@mickeyworldtravel.com for a FREE quote and find out how to get some onboard credit to spend on your cruise!

A brand-new Disney ship beckons, and Wesley answered the call. Welcome aboard a look at the Disney Destiny's maiden voyage, with sky-high expectations and the magic of a ship that tells its story through every surface. From a shockingly luxurious pre-cruise stay at Pier Sixty-Six with early check-in, poolside setup, and frozen grapes, to a blissfully efficient embarkation at Port Everglades, the tone was set before Wesley ever touched the Grand Hall's carpet. And yes, that Grand Hall hits different: layered lighting, dimensional railings, and a Black Panther centerpiece that feels more regal than fan-service.We dig into the ship's most talked-about spaces. The Sanctum became a go-to spot: open, cozy, and made for lingering. Haunted Mansion Parlor is exquisitely themed, a must-see once; DeVille's dazzles but suffers from early-sailing capacity crunch; Cask and Cannon surprised with great mini churros and pre-dinner vibes. Saga proved versatile for karaoke, game shows, and the standout Marvel comedy show, With Great Power—hosted by the ship's storytellers Gamble and Zayah, and paced like a theme-park live act with clever improv and a cheeky finale. It's labeled 18+, but the tone feels closer to PG-13, raising smart questions about family access and small-venue demand.We also compare stateroom function and storage to earlier classes, share practical packing strategies for a family of five, and talk about how Destiny's design cohesion sets it apart from “floating mall” competitors. The biggest friction point? Hype-driven crowd patterns and adults-only programming that can split families on short sailings. The likely cure is time—and better tools like virtual queues and clearer event labeling.If you love Imagineering details, layered storytelling, and lounges that feel like worlds, Destiny will pull you in. If you're chasing every hot venue, plan ahead, pick your must-dos, and be ready to pivot. Subscribe, share, and leave a review to help fellow Disney cruisers find us—and tell us: which new Destiny space tops your list?----Adventures & Mousecapades is a passion project from Alicea & Nathan Novak - two Seattleites addicted to The Mouse. We are not affiliated with Disney, nor are we travel agents. Opinions are our own.Instagram, Threads, Facebook, Twitter: @ourmousecapadesOurMousecapades.compodcast@ourmousecapades.com

LET'S SET SAIL on the Disney Destiny's Maiden Voyage! In this episode, we recount our favorite experiences and ultimately reveal our honest thoughts on DCL's brand-new ship. Consider supporting us on our FourthWall for Bonus Episodes, Merch, and More! www.fyapod.com CREATED & HOSTED BY Ryan Bergara & Byron Marin EDITOR Byron Marin EXECUTIVE PRODUCERS Ryan Bergara Byron Marin Social: http://www.instagram.com/fyapod http://www.instagram.com/ryanbergara http://www.instagram.com/byronamarin FYA Logo by Arthur Kierce (@theonekierce) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoicesSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

LET'S SET SAIL on the Disney Destiny's Maiden Voyage! In this episode, we recount our favorite experiences and ultimately reveal our honest thoughts on DCL's brand-new ship. Consider supporting us on our FourthWall for Bonus Episodes, Merch, and More! www.fyapod.com CREATED & HOSTED BY Ryan Bergara & Byron Marin EDITOR Byron Marin EXECUTIVE PRODUCERS Ryan Bergara Byron Marin Social: http://www.instagram.com/fyapod http://www.instagram.com/ryanbergara http://www.instagram.com/byronamarin FYA Logo by Arthur Kierce (@theonekierce) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The time has come! Destiny awaits! Disney Cruise Line's newest ship, the Disney Destiny will make her official debut this week with the Christening ceremony scheduled for Monday evening (11/10) at 6:30PM ET, followed by a three-night christening cruise to the Bahamas. This will will be the first time that photos and videos from INSIDE the ship will be permitted to be shared, so we're about to learn a LOT about what Disney Cruise Line has been up to. To get you prepared, I've come up with my top-five reasons why you should be excited for the Disney Destiny! Be sure to follow my social media pages next week as I spend almost 7 consecutive nights onboard between a 3-night preview cruise and the 4-night Maiden Voyage. I can't wait to share my thoughts and experiences with you! Thanks so much for tuning in! Don't forget to connect with the show on Twitter and Instagram @theDCLdude, or on Facebook at facebook.com/dcldudepodcast. You can also check out my blog at www.thedcldude.com. If you have any ideas for future episodes, I'd love to hear them! Finally, if you're thinking about booking a Disney Cruise, don't go it alone! Send me an email at wes@mickeyworldtravel.com for a FREE quote and find out how to get some onboard credit to spend on your cruise!

We analyze the severe consequences of passenger misconduct at sea, welcome the latest Disney ship showcasing a unique dual theme, and cover the maiden launch of a new Sphere-class vessel.Major cruise operators, including Carnival Cruise Line and Margaritaville at Sea, are implementing stricter guest conduct policies in response to increasing unruly behavior. We detail the serious penalties now in force, which include $500 fines for fighting, immediate disembarkation without a refund, and potential lifetime travel bans that extend across sister brands within corporate families like Carnival Corporation.Next, dive into the newest Wish-class ship, the Disney Destiny, which officially joined the fleet. This LNG-powered vessel features an exclusive Heroes & Villains theme across its décor, entertainment, and dining. Highlights include the Broadway-style production of Hercules, the interactive Pride Lands: Feast of The Lion King dinner, and specialty adult lounges like The Sanctum, inspired by Doctor Strange. The ship is slated to begin operations on November 20, 2025.Finally, we celebrate the launch of the Sphere-class Star Princess, which embarked on its maiden 11-night voyage from Barcelona on October 4, 2025. Discover the ship's key amenities, including the Princess Arena featuring new theatrical productions like Meridian and Illuminate: A Spectacle of Joy, alongside its extensive global itineraries spanning the Caribbean, Panama Canal, and Alaska starting May 10, 2026

On today’s show: How We All Got Lost in a Carpark... A man who never wears undies?! How Jono and Ben nearly sank a celebrity’s boat Jono’s shocking eye patch interaction One of us got tricked into spending over $700! We talk to the official captain of the Pirate Ship Pacifica Plus, our intense first ride on Rainbow’s End’s newest attraction! Instagram: @THEHITSBREAKFASTFacebook: The Hits Breakfast with Jono, Ben & MeganSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

SVP and Stanford Steve go LIVE for the first time in SVPod history to break down all the action from Week 7 of the college football season. Starting with the story of the day, the Indiana Hoosiers. Is Curt Cignetti's squad the BEST in the country? Stanford Steve may have a strong opinion on that. But what about Ohio State? The Buckeyes cruised to a ranked win over Illinois on the road. Alabama also looked the part on the road, and Georgia found a way, with a little help, in the plains to beat Auburn. Plus, Texas takes down Oklahoma in a convincing Red River win, Tennessee and Ole Miss survive, Penn State continues to fall apart and more, including SVP's recap of Nebraska's win over Maryland and his live reactions to Arizona falling short against BYU. | SVPod Approximate timecodes: (0:00) Intro (1:50) Indiana-Oregon recap (7:47) Indiana is a top __ team in the country (10:29) Auburn was a heartbreaker (20:04) Georgia always signs up for 60 (23:27) Texas Tech is GOOD good (28:03) USC cruises over Michigan (32:12) LSU-South Carolina recap (36:00) Ole Miss held on against Wazzu (39:40) What a win for Pitt (43:05) Texas A&M-Florida recap (45:36) Tennessee survives Arkansas (48:41) Ohio State's defense is unbelievable (52:38) Red River recap (59:17) Alabama won a big one at Mizzou (1:03:05) Maryland blew another 4Q lead… (1:05:24) Where does Penn State go from here? (1:12:57) Winners & Board update (1:15:05) Steve's Eugene recap (1:22:15) More CFB Wk 7 reactions (1:24:39) Thanks for tuning in Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

How are we viewing Caley's maiden voyage at Offensive Coordinator is officially in the books. ITL breaks down what worked, what didn't, and what it tells us moving forward. Figgy's Mixtape: From sports to wild social stories, Figgy runs through all the things that had the internet going nuts this weekend.

Join Jonesy & Amanda for an EXCLUSIVE (unaired) episode!See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Start Artist Song Time Album Year 1 Flagship 1 0:01:13 Flagship Heart Is The Center 7:37 Maiden Voyage 2005 0:08:49 Flagship You Are 6:48 Maiden Voyage 2005 0:15:38 Flagship The Throne 8:38 Maiden Voyage 2005 1 Flagship 2 0:24:54 Flagship Wind City 7:28 Maiden Voyage 2005 0:32:22 Flagship Ground Zero 9:36 Maiden Voyage 2005 2 […]

Returning to the Film Stories podcast is writer/director/producer Chris Columbus, as his new movie - The Thursday Murder Club - arrives in cinemas, with Netflix release due at the end of August 2025. He talks Simon through the movie, and where it was when he came to it. They also chat about Hugh Grant's hair in Nine Months, films he's produced such as Didi and Patti Cake$, and we get a bit of a guided tour of his office, too... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Ian was a guest on the inaugural run of the Amtrak "Mardi Gras Service" run to Mobile and back, and brothers and sisters, that rocked

Today we're going on an aquatic journey with Herbie Hancock's Maiden Voyage. Herbie calls the title track the best tune he's ever written.  We dive deep into the music to explore what makes this tune, and this album, great. The roots of Maiden Voyage date back in 1963, when Herbie began hearing rumors that Miles Davis wanted to hear him play. He didn't believe it at first -- Miles was at the height of his celebrity by this point. But soon he got a call. He went over to Miles's house and played with him, George Coleman, Tony Williams and Ron Carter for three days. On the third day, Miles asks the group to come to studio to record Seven Steps to Heaven. Herbie says, "Does that mean I'm in the band?" Miles says, "You're making the record, mother f**cker!" After two years playing in what many call the one of the greatest jazz ensembles of all time, Herbie would release Maiden Voyage in 1965. Along with George, Tony and Ron, plus saxophonist Freddie Hubbard. Although it is one of his simplest tunes -- with a rhythm inspired by a cologne commercial -- Maiden Voyage would become a favorite and a standard among jazz musicians. In this episode, you'll hear:- Adam and Peter pick apart the greatest moments from the album, including some perfect solos- The story of the commercial roots of this jazz standard- Where the record got its aquatic theme- Why a great song starts with a great bassline (just ask Ron Carter)- How this record could have been even better ... if it weren't for that piano sound- Where we land on Van Gelder Sound controversy-----Keyboards? Albums we haven't covered. "Boomer" talk. We know you have opinions about this show. Help us make You'll Hear It better by sharing your feedback with us and answering a short survey. You could win one of three $100 Amazon gift cards! Visit youllhearitsurvey.com to learn more and fill out the survey.Want more Herbie Hancock content? Learn why Herbie's greatest era is not even jazz on last season's episode on Headhunters.

Send us a textJoin us for an exciting episode of Living the Dream with Curveball as we dive into the world of music with the dynamic band, The Perfect Storm. Comprising Ethan, James, and Maddie, this talented trio shares their journey from jamming as a cover band during the pandemic to crafting their debut album, *Maiden Voyage*. They discuss their eclectic sound that blends pop, rock, and country influences, and reveal the inspirations behind their music, including their favorite artists and personal experiences. 

Chelsea Halfpenny is starring as Tracy in the brand new musical Maiden Voyage at Southwark Playhouse Elephant. Written by Mindi Dickstein and Carmel Dean, the show brings to life the true story of the first all-female sailing crew in the Whitbread Round the World Race.Chelsea started out her career in the world of television, playing roles in Casualty and Emmerdale. She made her West End debut as Judy in 9to5 at the Savoy Theatre and went on to star as Jenna in the UK & Ireland tour of Waitress. On screen, Chelsea has also played roles in Grantchester, The Good Ship Murder, Vera and Inventing The Ripper. Recorded as rehearsals for Maiden Voyage were coming to an end, in this episode Chelsea discusses why she was drawn to the show, what it's like to be part of an original cast and why she fell in love with the score. She also talks about her path into theatre and how she conquered singing 'Get Out And Stay Out' and 'She Used To Be Mine' in 9to5 and Waitress. Maiden Voyage runs at the Southwark Playhouse Elephant 19th July - 23rd August. Visit www.southwarkplayhouse.co.uk for info and tickets. This podcast is hosted by Andrew Tomlins @AndrewTomlins32 Thanks for listening! Email: andrew@westendframe.co.uk Visit westendframe.co.uk for more info about our podcasts. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Uncle debuts a brand new beer pitcher that was created by the Fates in Landers. More TikTak shop talk leads to some great ideas. Topics include: Uncle's TikTak, youth interests, demographics, gaming, live social media posts, cross posting videos, Chewbacca pajamas video, wardrobe and costumes, cantina music, jizz genre, Ewok Yub Nub song, Star Wars in the movie theater, beer from the side of the street, cold weather, the Bubbler pitcher formed by fire in Landers, drop glasses, beer review, flat beer, no questions for free beer, new Karate Kid movie, Return of the Jedi, Star Trek movie, drop glass display case, Val Kilmer death, coming Revolutions, herbivorizing predators, guys in the sky, going through the brain, Tropicana casino bird mug, Las Vegas, roadkill beers, confession phone lines, apology line, ordained call center employees, mob scams, dollar bets update

The extraterrestrial comedy podcast where we probe a semi-famous but probably not famous photo of a ghost under a bed. It is said that if you see this photo and do not share it you will die, but will you? We cover a few accounts whereby people have allegedly seen the photo before meeting a grim fate before connecting some dots to sleep paralysis and shared innate fears. Alongside that it is pondered as to whether owls are scary… Mr Moonwalker is unavailable and so Jon and Stef have stepped in again as guest hosts.Patreon:https://www.patreon.com/butitwasaliensStore:https://butitwasaliens.co.uk/shop/Probe us:Email: butitwasaliens@gmail.comInstagram/Threads @ ButItWasAliensTwitter @ ButItWasAliensFacebook: @ ButItWasAliens - join Extraterrestrial TowersMusic: Music created via Garageband. Additional music via: https://freepd.com - thank you most kindly good people. Around 31 minutes in there was also a few second segment from the Maiden Voyage track from Rare's Sea of Thieves published via Microsoft and composed via Robin Beanland who is a genius (played whilst discussing the game for a few seconds).Sources:Snopes summary: https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/ghost-under-bed/Reddit posts of something under the bed:https://www.reddit.com/r/Paranormal/comments/wwm8f3/serious_question_how_many_of_you_here_experienced/?chainedPosts=t3_lrf162https://www.reddit.com/r/Paranormal/comments/7z8bfi/who_or_what_was_under_my_bed/?chainedPosts=t3_lrf162https://www.reddit.com/r/ParanormalEncounters/comments/1edbtmi/ghost_under_bed_and_also_seems_to_be_a_mist_over/?chainedPosts=t3_lrf162https://www.reddit.com/r/Paranormal/comments/i4k3ar/when_i_was_in_kindergarten_my_friend_and_i_saw_a/?chainedPosts=t3_lrf162Live Science links between sleep paralysis, incubus and sudden unexpected death: https://www.livescience.com/61227-incubus-phenomenon.html

April 8, 1838. The Great Western, designed to be the first ever steam ship built to cross the Atlantic Ocean, embarks on its maiden voyage from Bristol, England, to New York City. This episode originally aired in 2022.Support the show! Join Into History for ad-free listening and more.History Daily is a co-production of Airship and Noiser.Go to HistoryDaily.com for more history, daily.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

It's time for a ramble! This week, Ashley, Lauren, and Naz talk Severance and White Lotus. Ashley and Lauren fill us in on their family trip to Orlando (where Lauren won “Aunt of the Century”), Naz gives us all the details of her birthday festivities, and Ashley breaks down what we know about the Golden Bachelor contestants hitting Paradise.Listen to more podcasts like this: https://wavepodcastnetwork.comLeave Us a Voicemail and tell us what you don't get! Call (609) 365 -1885‬Send us a message on our Instagram at @idontgetitpodcast or join us over in our private Facebook group!Hero Bread is offering 10% off your order. Go to hero.co and use code IDGI at checkout.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Pelicruise: https://app.tern.travel/trips/X6BO3IAh1aW3sc2hIB2Fhg/landing_page

In this week's episode, Landon and Bridget join me to discuss their family's experience on the December 2024 Maiden Voyage of the Disney Treasure. From all the new lounges and main dining restaurants, to the stateroom gifts, we cover all the exciting things about experiencing a new ship for the first time. Hope you enjoy! Don't forget to connect with the show on Twitter and Instagram @theDCLdude, or on Facebook at facebook.com/dcldudepodcast. You can also check out my new blog at www.thedcldude.com. If you have any ideas for future episodes, I'd love to hear them! Finally, if you're thinking about booking a Disney Cruise, don't go it alone! Send me an email at wes@mickeyworldtravel.com for a FREE quote and find out how to get some onboard credit to spend on your cruise!

BID ON YOUR TEAM'S BONUS EPISODE RIGHT HERE You may not have heard, but there's a new man in charge in Fayetteville -- John Calipari. The former Kentucky coach made headlines during Final Four weekend by taking the Razorbacks job. After reshuffling the roster via the transfer portal, can Calipari make an instant impact and bring the Arkansas back to the Final Four? Gary Parrish and Matt Norlander put the Arkansas Razorbacks underneath the microscope in the latest episode of Summer Shootaround. Eye on College Basketball is available for free on the Audacy app as well as Apple Podcasts, Spotify and wherever else you listen to podcasts.  Follow our team: @EyeonCBBPodcast @GaryParrishCBS @MattNorlander @Kyle_Boone @DavidWCobb @NataTheScribe Visit the betting arena on CBSSports.com for all the latest in sportsbook reviews and sportsbook promos for betting on college basketball. You can listen to us on your smart speakers! Simply say, "Alexa, play the latest episode of the Eye on College Basketball podcast," or "Hey, Google, play the latest episode of the Eye on College Basketball podcast." Email the show for any reason whatsoever: ShoutstoCBS@gmail.com Visit Eye on College Basketball's YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCeFb_xyBgOekQPZYC7Ijilw For more college hoops coverage, visit https://www.cbssports.com/college-basketball/ To hear more from the CBS Sports Podcast Network, visit https://www.cbssports.com/podcasts/ To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices