Blurb

Chapter 1 - Anthony

That’s a filthy habit,” I say and make sure she sees the kink in my eyebrows.

“Well, then it’ll keep all my other filthy habits company, won’t it?” she said, and gave me a defiant smile. It was our standard in-joke. Our already-a-married-couple routine that I could never admit actually irritated the hell out of me. She blew a band of smoke off to the side and let her lips stay pouted.

“Reckless behavior is cute when you’re a teenager, Ellie, but not so much at our age,” I said at her attempt to be funny. She scowled, stubbed the cigarette out and flopped restlessly down onto the bed.

“Unpacked already?” I asked.

“Nah, I’ll do it later.”

I had already told myself that I would let little things like this pass. Any marriage needs to be able to survive things like this. Any marriage must have compromise. And me grinning and bearing the fact that Ellie sometimes behaved like an overgrown 5-year-old was just one of those compromises.

“Ok, well, just don’t leave it too late,” I said. Then she gave me that look. I decided to be the better man and let it go. We were here to have fun, after all. We were here on a vacation. If she needed to get stuff like this out of her system, then fine, let her do it. She was only 25. Young in a sense, sure. But old enough.

I wasn’t some kind of monster; I understood her need to still get out there and experience the world. Hell, I was even paying for it. A two-week luxury holiday on a cruise ship that she had jokingly called a ‘farewell to her old life’. Look, I’m a grown man, so I pretended at the time that that didn’t sting. But I had to be realistic, too. Ellie was the perfect woman, in every way. But there was one glaring problem that needed to be resolved before we committed to one another properly, and if we didn’t resolve it on this little vacation, then I wasn’t sure what other options we had.

The agreement was that she got to let her hair down a little before the wedding and I got a few more months to save for the house down payment the following year. Fine. But I still couldn’t escape the feeling that with this vacation we had both quietly put each other on probation. I would be looking to see if she was truly willing to take our marriage seriously and actually had it in her to be a mother and wife, and she would be …well, that part wasn’t as clear to me yet.

I lifted a pile of folded shirts from my bag and carefully carried them over to the cupboard. She was rolling around on the bed, getting everything badly crinkled. Now she had a brochure in her hand that she had fished from the nightstand, and was looking at it with interest.

“Oh look, salsa!” she squealed.

“No way,” I said, placed the shirts neatly down and turned to face her.

She was grinning.

“Oh come on, please? Look, they have this fun class this evening, we can go. It says it’s fine for beginners… it’s at 8, come on let’s go!”

“But I can’t dance,” I said and started packing my trousers away.

“But that’s the point! They teach you. It says here that afterwards it’s just a normal party and you dance what you’ve learnt and have fun,” she said, kicking her legs up like a schoolgirl.

“Even worse,” I grumbled. This time she didn’t have to give me a look.

“Sorry, sorry, you’re right, it’s just …can we try something else maybe? Something less nerve-wracking? I swear I saw a wine tasting thing, what about that?”

She sighed and flipped through the glossy brochure.

“You know, if I’m going to give up a vice for this trip, the least you could do is pick one up.”

I smiled. She really was a pretty woman.

“Ok, ok, fine.”

I took a deep breath, closed the cupboard door and sat next to her on the bed. It was just after 5. On the one hand, I was almost certain a dance class would be unbearably awkward and embarrassing for everyone involved. But on the other, it might prove enough of a distraction this evening so we didn’t have to …have sex.

Don’t get me wrong, sex with Ellie is lovely. She’s the perfect woman, in that regard, and I have no complaints. But I was tired. It had been a long drive over to the harbor and a lot of stress boarding and unpacking. I just wanted to relax now.

“Do we need to wear any special footwear?” I said and leant forward to give her a peck on her forehead.

“So that’s a yes?” she laughed and sprang off the bed. Christ, I hated when she was like this. Treating me like I was the designated anti-fun ogre, when in truth, she was the one who forced me into that role because without fail, she was unwilling to commit to a damn thing in this world, and follow through with it.

“Of course. We’re on vacation, aren’t we?” I said, and jumped up to do a little impromptu salsa twirl in our room.

I let her fuss over me and kiss my head and dance around the room a little, hands linked to mine. She was one of those women that actually looked completely different depending on whether she smiled or not. When she laughed, her whole face opened up and glowed. Her eyes were a soft, hazy green, like sea glass, and her hair was that kind of grey-blonde that looked like a stronger color that had just been through a few washes. I loved seeing her flat, cold face light up like that. When I proposed to her, I told her that I would gladly make that my life’s purpose: to make her smile. And I meant it.

Ellie had a troubled past, and she was still learning that not every pleasure had to nearly kill her to be worth pursuing… but I digress. I had promised her that if she agreed to quit smoking for these two weeks, I’d quit ‘criticizing’ the other dozen bad habits she had. I didn’t want to rush her. I wanted her to see the value of personal growth for its own sake. I would give her time, and I’d give her all the opportunity she needed. And after she realized that an empty existence of drinking and bingeing and smoking weren’t as satisfying as she thought, I’d be there, waiting for her to start a proper life together.

I walked around the room and took inventory.

“If this room was just in a regular hotel, they’d never be able to charge what they do,” I said and looked down at the complimentary toiletries on the counter.

“But it’s not in a regular hotel,” she said. “It’s floating in the middle of the ocean.”

I peeked around the bathroom wall to see her fish out a sundress and leave the rest of her bag crumpled and unpacked, right in the middle of the bed.

“Fair enough,” I said and went to poke my head out the tiny round window. But there was the truth right there: Ellie’s spontaneous ocean liner adventure came with a cost. Nearly 50% extra, from my quick calculations, and for a room that showed no signs of having more than one power outlet.

I walked into the main room again and saw her standing expectantly, stripped down to her bra and panties and holding the sundress in her hands. She smiled at me smiling.

“That’s …that’s very pretty. Did I buy you that?” I asked. She did a slow twirl.

“Nope, I bought it especially for our trip…” she said, and sauntered up to me. I placed gentle hands over her soft curves and leaned in for a kiss.

“As you can see, though, I didn’t quite lose all my Christmas weight so I just had to bring my fat rolls along for a vacation, too!”

I pulled her in close, gave her neck a kiss and smiled.

“Shh, that’s my fiancé you’re talking about”

She was right of course. She had put on a few pounds with the stress of the last year, but I didn’t care. In fact, I loved the womanly softness the extra weight gave her hips and belly. It’ll sound awful, but there was something deeply satisfying about knowing that she was finally eating properly, that she was well-fed. I wanted her to relax and let me take care of her.

Her face was lit up with that big smile again. She really did love going on ‘adventures’. She stood up on her tip toes and leaned in for a deep kiss. I placed a tender hand at the base of her skull and cradled her there, sharing a sweet, silent moment with her.

“We should go out on deck and have a look at those little shops we saw coming in,” I said, smoothing down her hair.

“I don’t care about the little shops,” she grinned, and tried to kiss me again. I laughed.

“What about having an adventure, hm? What about all those activities you wanted to do?”

“Fuck the activities,” she said and snaked her hands along my sides, a devilish look on her face.

“That’s no way for a lady to speak, where are your manners?” I teased.

“Fuck manners,” she said naughtily. “And fuck me…”

Here she grabbed my hips and pulled me hard against her crotch, grinding into me. Ok. Fine. Sex and salsa. I did say I would compromise, I guess. I leaned in for another kiss and let her unbutton my trousers.

Her greedy little tongue kissed me absentmindedly as her hands worked to peel my clothing off. I stood, letting her do her thing. I plonked her bag off the bed and lay down, beckoning her to join me. But she didn’t. Instead, she gave her hair a flick and started to wiggle her hips a little, stripper style. It wasn’t our usual thing, but we were on holiday, I guess. I leant my head back into my hands and watched her with a smile. She peered at me from out under a lock of hair, then slinked off her bra and then her panties.

Ellie had the perfect breasts. They were the softest, fullest things in the universe, smooth and pink and perfect and so plump on the bottom they were nearly spherical.

I smiled.

“Baby, you don’t have to do this…”

“I know,” she said quickly, and ran her hands up and down her body.

She could easily see the effect this had on me. Women like Ellie have learnt that they need to degrade themselves to be loved, but I would teach her that none of this stuff was necessary. Her body was beautiful and pure just the way it was. Besides, I didn’t like thinking about where she had learnt to do any of this stuff in the first place.

“Stop teasing and get over here,” I growled.

She giggled as I pulled her down to the bed and kissed her, my hand finding its way down between her milky thighs. She was already a little wet. My fingers stroked gently around that sweet little slit, before going in a little deeper, to those places I knew made her moan the loudest. She grew wetter. I will never understand why our standard sex routine was supposed to suddenly become something more magical simply because we made love on a different bed, but I could see how quickly she was responding to me, so, I guess it was worth coming all the way out here.

After she was completely wet and receptive, I lay back and let her hop on top of me, and I gently slid my cock into her, watching the expression on her face twitch and change as her hips lowered to take all of me in. We had been together a good few years, but I never got tired of that feeling. All her weight relaxed fully on to my groin, she smiled broadly and began to swivel her hips, her clit playing against the base of my cock. I held her hips and smiled back up at her. This was still one of my favorite ways of making her smile.

She arched her back and let her hair tumble down her back, the tips grazing against my fingertips. I squeezed and rolled her full ass cheeks in my hands and let her ride me. This was our favorite position, the one that always made her come, no matter what. But as for me…

“You OK, baby…?” she breathed into my ear.

“I’m good,” I said. She just shouldn’t ask. I hated it when she fucking asked. Everything was already half over once she asked.

She let her head fall back again and groaned. I could feel inside how her body was tightening up to an orgasm, and I dutifully lifted my hips up into her to stroke her off the edge. She came easily, but quietly. She froze on top of me, clawed a little at my chest and then, once her breathing came to normal again, she glanced down at me and smiled.

“Mmm…”

“Was that good?” I said and twirled my hips against her, still deep inside.

“Uh huh,” she said, nibbled her lower lip and then started grinding again.

“You wanna keep going?”

“Uh huh.”

I could feel myself going limp inside her, but I picked up the pace and drove the tip of my cock deep up and into her. I felt the shudder as it travelled down her spine. Perching up on the balls of her feet, she spread her hands wide over my chest and balanced there, lowering just a few inches at a time down onto me again, stroking my cock with each up thrust and sliding slowly back down onto it again. It was hot. She was hot. But it just wasn’t working.

“Baby? You OK?” she said, and glanced down.

I grabbed her and pulled her off. Asking like that, with that particular tone of voice, totally killed the mood, but looking down at me like I was some injured puppy really sealed the deal.

“I’m good, I’m fine, just tired,” I said, and guided her to lay next to me. My hands slipped between her thighs again, hoping at least another orgasm for her would take the attention off of me. She had a concerned little frown on her face, and reached out her hand to stroke my brow. Now that was what I found the most infuriating of all. Not that my cock chose the worst possible times to stop working. Not the agonizing stress of it all. But the pity. I gently pushed her hand away.

“Just tired baby, really,” I said and pushed a smile. She smiled back and tried to act casual.

“What about you though?” I said and tried to glide my fingers back over that now juicy spot between her legs.

She shrugged.

“Don’t worry, baby, I’m good” she said and curled up against me. “That was nice though,” she said. For some reason, those words seemed to burn the most. I said nothing. After a few moments, she sighed loudly and got up, smoothed her hair out and rummaged around for her underwear. She was just going to put it all back on again. Without even taking a shower. The same bra and panties she had just been wearing.

“Shall we head out?” she said with a simple smile. “I’ll just get my shoes.”

I watched as she flitted around the room with this and that. I made a mental note to complain about the size of this room to management later. That the bathroom was no way what the online photos suggested it would be. And that the tiny little round window was actually in the worst possible position, just sitting stupidly right over the bed; why would anybody design a room like that? And then have the nerve to call it ‘luxury’ and charge a fortune to stay in it?

“Ellie, I’m going to hang back a little, OK? I’m kind of beat.”

She turned around and glared at me, one earring still in hand.

“But you said you’d come.”

“I know, I’m sorry, I’m just not feeling it.”

“And the salsa?”

“Yeah, I’ll join you later, baby. Maybe I just need a quick nap or something…”

She didn’t do much to hide her disappointment. In fact, her face was rapidly losing its glow.

“Oh please, you’re not going to come later,” she said, slumping. And just like that the spell of our brand new vacation probation was over. It always came down to this: she wanted to go this way; I wanted to go that way.

“What? Of course I will. I’ll join you later. You just head out and take a took around and--”

“You’re just stalling. If you don’t want to come, don’t. Nobody’s forcing you,” she said and stabbed in her earring.

“Ellie, please let’s not fight…” I said, and threw my hand over to cover my eyes. At least the damn bed was comfortable; I’d give them that.

“I’m done fighting,” she snapped. “But I don’t want you to come if you don’t want to come. Just forget it. I’ll go alone.”

I groaned. We hadn’t even spent 24 hours on this stupid holiday yet and we were already bickering.

She quickly blustered out the entrance and closed it behind her. It made a soft pffft as the air cylinder on top let the heavy door fall back into place slowly.

I had decided. The room wasn’t romantic or adventuresome. It was cheap. It was tacky. I looked at the mess on the floor with a sigh. Ellie’s things, strewn all over. I knelt down and started to unpack her things for her, and carefully order them in the cupboard, next to mine.

Chapter 2 - Ellie

I stormed up and down the decks for a while. Every time we had an argument like this, things became clearer and clearer to me. It was hard to pin down at first. Hard to even notice. But I was beginning to finally understand.

It’s not that Anthony was super responsible and serious. It’s not just that I was used to high excitement and he was the more sober, more rational, more sane one of us and I just needed to adjust. It wasn’t even because of his anxiety. No. As I stomped up and down those boards outside under the open, fading blue of the sky, the fact was inescapable: it was because Anthony and I didn’t please one another. That and the fact that he was a controlling bully.

I reached the far end of the deck and turned around to do another lap after glancing at the sky. It was easy to see night coming on here, floating far out in the open sea. The long horizon was still packed with bunched clouds, but high overhead it was clear and starting to darken to deep blue. The first year I met Anthony, I didn’t notice how much work it was to simply enjoy his company. All of the second year, I felt like we were waiting for him to finish studying for the bar exam until we were allowed to have fun. The third year, we had learnt to schedule the pleasurable activities in on a shared calendar.

And now we were here. He probably thought that he could just optimize by giving me one good holiday every few years so I’d shut up about our relationship the rest of the time. That it would make me forget about all the other little things. The passive aggressive curfew on week nights. Him helpfully suggesting I give up eating carbs every three months. The hidden camera in our home that he claimed was for my ‘safety’.

I crossed my arms against the growing chill and walked on. In a few hours, the place would be buzzing with parties. I was here on this ‘pleasure cruise’ and my fiancée was taking a nap from the sheer effort of forcing himself to sleep with me.

I tried to ignore the smiling waiters standing outside a freshly laid out buffet on the beck below ours. I tried to claw onto the remnants of the good mood I had boarded with, but the more I walked on, the more my mood soured. I’d just stay out all night, that’s what. I’d stay out until I felt like a living human being again, till I was sure I at least had a pulse again.

I turned around and paced back again and fumed some more.

It wasn’t just about the sex, no matter what he said. He always tried to bring it down to that. To shut down everything because he honestly thought that I cared about him not getting it up once in a while as much as he did. It didn’t matter how many times I’d tell him that none of that bothered me at all, he still sulked. It was all so exhausting. I was exhausted.

And I was bored.

I reached into my handbag and pulled out a secret cigarette. Pleased it hadn’t been crushed on transit, I placed it on my lower lip and thought for a moment. Then I lit it, took a long, easy drag and blew the smoke out into the darkness. The agreement was that he would try to enjoy himself with me, just for once, and that he forget about work for a second, and just be with me. And in return I wouldn’t smoke or embarrass us both or get into one of my ‘moods’. Well, if he wasn’t going to honor his part of the deal, then why should I honor mine?

I took another drag.

Just as I was about to blow another band of smoke, something knocked me hard from behind and sent me staggering forward and bumping clumsy onto the railings. I watched as my cigarette flipped free of my fingers and went floating silently down into the darkness below.

Damn. I spun to see a wincing face peeking off the railings with me.

“What the hell?” I shouted.

“Aw shit, I’m so sorry!” he said. He was a young guy, maybe just a few years younger than me, and he was standing in front of me, his hands outstretched in apology. He had closely cropped hair and was wearing dark jeans and a tight black shirt rolled up over his biceps. He was so tall I needed to lift my gaze form the center of his chest to look him square in the eye. He immediately went over to the railings and peered over with a look of horror on his face.

“Man overboard, huh?” he said.

He looked kind of rough. A little dangerous. Maybe even drunk. When he lifted his face to mine again, I could see that his eyes were an icy cold blue. Clean looking, even. The only part of him that looked clean, mind you.

“That was my last cigarette, you know,” I said drily, and folded my arms across my chest again. He turned around to look at me apologetically, but with that stupid smile still playing on his lips. He put his hand to his heart.

“Honest mistake ma’am, really, I’m sorry. I feel your loss.” Then he started patting down his pockets but flashed me another sheepish smile. “Seems I’ve left my own back inside. Can I fetch you another? Will you just… OK, you wait here and I’ll go back in and get you another cigarette and then we’ll be even, OK?”

I found it hard to share his excitement. He took one look at my grumpy face, licked his lower lip and smiled as though he had come up with the most amazing plan ever.

“OK, OK, fine, two cigarettes, but that’s my final offer,” he said and grinned.

Yup, definitely drunk.

I waved him off.

“It’s OK, really. I need to quit smoking anyway. It’s a filthy habit.”

His eyes twinkled.

“Well, of course it is, aren’t all the best habits?”

I couldn’t help but laugh. He smiled. He was clearly a brute, a big stupid bro, already tipsy so early in the evening …but he was kind of good looking.

“Look, you can quit anytime, right? Quit later. You’re basically owed one cigarette anyway, so quit after one more. Makes sense. In fact, it’ll be my honor to know that the last cigarette you had on this earth was mine.”

He had his hand on his heart again. He was the kind of guy you bump into on the dance floor in a club. The guy wearing too much cologne, talking too loudly, and dancing too close. But he was cute. A little sketchy, but cute.

“Last two, you mean,” I said with a shy smile.

“Two, yeah, absolutely,” he said and returned the smile.

“OK, fine.”

There was something contagious about his smile, which was irritating since I had already decided that Anthony had ruined my whole evening.

“OK! You wait here, don’t go anywhere. Look, I’ll leave my ice bucket with you as a guarantee.”

“Your…?”

“My ice bucket,” he said and suddenly brandished a small steel cup of ice cubes at me. I hadn’t noticed when he set it behind him after he bumped into me. He thrust it into my hands with mock seriousness and I took it.

“But …why …let me just come with you?” I said, and handed the bucket back to him.

He grinned.

“Older ladies are always so forward, I love it,” he said and did that thing with his lips again.

I scoffed.

“Older lady?”

He looked chastised.

“It’s only …aw shit, I said a stupid thing, didn’t I? It’s a party, I don’t think you’d …let’s just say it’s not the place for, uh, for nice women like you,” he said, grin still plastered all over his face.

Though I was trying as hard as I could, it seemed hard to really get mad at him. At worst, he was just some kind of idiot. A hot idiot, but still. I know that I had left my party days behind me. And I know I was about to throw my life away marrying a man who asked me if there was any history of genetic diseases in my family on the second date. But god, was I already in ‘older lady’ territory? He had to be joking. I was 25.

“Well, older ladies like me have seen everything, so don’t worry, I’ll pretend not to be too shocked,” I said, rolled my eyes and turned to walk in the direction he had been running. Would he ever stop smiling? He seemed to hesitate to put his hand on my arm and stop me.

“No, I mean, I’m serious, you can’t come with me,” he said.

I lifted my eyebrows at him. He looked like the naughty, freckled kid at the back of every classroom who pulls on the girls’ pigtails and never does his homework. Except with muscles. And …an ice bucket? So what if I was dead curious about this ‘party’? So what if I was technically here with my fiancée, and that salsa was starting in a few minutes? He was just a guy. And it was just two cigarettes.

He thrust his hand out at me.

“Todd,” he said. “Todd McGregor. Navy SEAL.”

“You’re a Navy SEAL?” I asked, stunned. He was laughing.

“Well …kind of. Almost. I mean, not really. I’m a trainee. We’re actually just on our way to our buds training in Coronado, when we get to California.”

“Buds?”

“Yeah, BUDS. Stands for Basic Underwater Demolition Seal training,” he said, chest puffed.

“Oh.”

“Yeah.”

“And a bunch of you are going? You’re having a party?”

He looked coy, but at least we were walking again. I hadn’t semi-flirted with anyone like this in a very, very long time. It felt …strange.

“Yeah, a bunch of us, you could say that. We’re done with the prep school and now it’s the big leagues. Twenty-four weeks of pure hell and if I’m one of the lucky few, I’ll survive and get to do it all over again for my troop training,” he said and smiled warmly.

I had to admit, being a SEAL trainee bumped him up a little in my esteem. Suddenly, the sketchy brush cut hair looked a little less Nazi and a little more clean cut military man.

“So, they’ll be training you to …fight and stuff? Are you going to be running around in combat boots and like, doing obstacle courses?” I said and laughed. I realized too late that I sounded way, way meaner than I intended. He thought for a moment and then smiled easily at me all the same.

“Well honestly, me? Going on my track record? I’ll probably be hiding out and crying in the bathrooms.”

“No way! You look pretty tough to me. I bet you could do all kinds of impressive things.” Here he stopped walking, took a good look at me, gave me a mischievous smile and then carried on.

“Well, the spirit’s willing, but the flesh, you know…” he said and gave me a wink. Butterflies kicked a little in my stomach. Yup. There was absolutely no mistaking that. He was definitely, positively, one hundred percent coming on to me. I could feel blood rush to my face as we approached a large door, behind which some dull, thumping music emanated.

“This is it? Your big secret party?”

The ice cubes rattles in the cup as he held it against his chest and nodded.

“You gonna invite me in or what?”

He looked embarrassed, and rubbed the back of his neck, unable to make eye contact.

“Well …see …hey, I didn’t get your name.”

“It’s Ellie.”

“Just Ellie?”

“Yeah just Ellie. Ellie King.”

“Ok, well, Miss Ellie King, as you can see, notwithstanding the incident with your, uh, your cigarette, you can clearly see that I’m an upstanding civilian and a gentleman, however…” I was giggling at the ridiculous voice he had on, and the way he closed his eyes to enunciate. Oh, he was drunk all right. Maybe even a little more than drunk. “However I can’t claim the same for my comrades who are, shall I say, feeling a little enthusiastic this evening…”

His icy blue eyes glinted in the darkness as the sounds of the cruise ship started to come alive all around us. Night had fallen and the chill in the air had settled.

“Well, fair is fair, buddy. If you make me wait any longer for my two cigarettes, I might just decide to make it three.”

He held his hand over his mouth and pretended to be shocked.

“Miss, you do drive a hard bargain.”

“Oh come on, let me in. I’m on vacation, I needed that cigarette, and you owe me a smoke break, fair and square.”

He thought for a while, bit down on his fist and nodded solemnly.

“Can’t argue with that” he said and put his hand on the door handle and paused. All at once, raucous cheers erupted from behind the door followed by peals of male laughter. Intriguing. He waited and tried not to smile as he gave me a stern look, unable to bring himself to open the door.

“I’m warning you …this is not going to be pretty.”

I laughed and reached for the door, and flung it open myself. It didn’t escape my attention that I brushed against him as I walked inside, curious to see just how raucous a party could be that an old hag like myself shouldn’t be allowed to even see it.

It was like those scenes in old Westerns where someone busts open the saloon doors, the honkey tonk stops playing and everyone swivels on their seats to give the newcomer the beady eye. It seemed to be a large, private conference room, done in the same style as all the rooms onboard but roomier, with all the chairs pushed far to the edges of the walls and the lights dimmed. About a dozen tall men, all shirtless, stopped to watch as I entered. The smell of alcohol was thick on the air, and I swear, I could almost smell them, too. I quickly turned to look behind me, and there was Todd, awkward smile still on his face and his hand still on the door.

“Hey, assholes,” he said, and shut the door, sending in a waft of fresh air that cut through the smoke cloud inside. “This is my friend Ellie. Don’t eat her, OK? She just needs some smokes.”

The music was turned back up and I took a few steps toward the crowd, which now parted a little to give me a glimpse of one of them bent over the table, pants pulled down, ass in the air, beer still in his hand. I couldn’t help smiling at the absurdity of the situation.

“For Christ sake, Adam, get up,” one of them laughed and kicked his foot. None of them were in any kind of uniform, but they were still all of a type: all tall, all broadly built over the chest and shoulders, with the same closely cropped haircuts as Todd. The oblivious one bent over the table twisted around to see what the fuss was. A cigarette clung to his lower lip and he took a moment to register my presence, then he quickly staggered to his feet and yanked up his trousers again, giving me a full view of his naked body and everyone else in the room a good laugh. A guy, dark haired and heavier set, was standing over him with something curious in his hand.

“What are you…?” I asked.

They all looked like a bunch of school boys busted lighting shoplifted firecrackers behind the bicycle sheds. The entire room buzzed with a kind of good-natured merriment, only the presence of so much exposed skin gave the whole thing a dangerous air, like I had stepped in just as the party was about to get out of hand. The stocky guy held up a glowing piece of metal and showed it carefully to me. I joined the group and had a closer look. It seemed to be a series of artfully bent and knotted paper clips, twisted around to crudely form a wonky anchor shape, with a little tale for a handle, which he held between his forefinger and thumb. The metal was glowing a menacing orange.

“This? Oh this is nothing. Just that it’s Adam’s turn to pledge allegiance to our squad. If he can stop flapping his dick at the guests for a second,” he said and waved the twisted metal around a little. The room was filled with indistinct laughing and cheering.

Jesus. It was only just gone sundown and I was pretty sure these people had been drinking for hours.

“Care to do the honors? Miss …what did you say your name was?” the stocky guy said, and handed me the glowing metal.

“It’s Ellie.”

“Well, Ellie, Adam here would just about cream his pants if a pretty girl like you were the one to do it, so go on, he’d love you forever, and I sure as hell am tired of looking at his hairy ass,” he said and laughed loudly, then gave Adam a playful slap on the rump. Everyone joined him in roaring with laughter, then Adam bashfully bend forward again into the same position, naked ass turned upwards, cigarette still miraculously clinging to his lower lip.

Everyone cheered.

Now I understood. It was a brand. I looked down at the twisted metal in my hand, unsure of whether to laugh or wince in horror. I saw a few dribbling candles perched on the table in front of me. The dozens of empty beer bottles strewn everywhere. It was some sort of hazing. Some drunken bonding ritual. This was the kind of thing you saw on the news, when kids died doing some dumb shit in a fraternity and then everyone wrung their hands at the state of the youth. The metal still felt hot in my hand. Everyone was watching for my reaction. I looked down at the pasty butt cheeks of the drunk boy in front of me. Approximately ten minutes ago I had felt trapped in the stuffy waiting room called ‘being engaged’ and now it was like I had stumbled in on another world. It was awful. And kind of gross. And really, really immature.

Then why did it suddenly feel like my vacation was finally getting started?

I smiled, handed the thing back and shrugged.

“No thanks. Anyway, I think it’s gone cold.”

“Aw, Ellie girl, no! And I was all strapped in and ready to go! Don’t leave me hanging,” said Adam, and flashed me the brightest, naughtiest smile. It wasn’t my imagination. They really were all hot.

“Bend over buddy, I’m going in,” said the stocky guy again and hovered metal over bare skin.

“Aw, fuck, Tom, I swear to god I’m gonna beat your ass if you dawdle with it. Just put it on and take it off again, don’t draw it out, don’t fucking linger…”

The crowd erupted into shouts and jaunts.

“This is going to hurt you more than it’ll hurt me,” the stocky guy said. The definition on his abs was truly astonishing. He was baby faced from the neck up, and vaguely human shaped tree stump from the neck down.

“Pipe down, or I’m just using the candle as is,” said the first guy, who got to work again passing the metal over the flame till it glowed orange again. I felt a hand touch the small of my spine, and turned to see Todd. He gestured his head to the side and I followed him to the back of the room, where he crouched down and rummaged in his jacket till he had found a box of cigarettes.

“Let’s get out of here before they get any more ideas, huh?” he said and gave me a saucy wink. While the crowd knotted around the spectacle, Todd and I slunk out again, leaving the bucket of ice on the table and quietly closing the door behind us. My back against the closed door, I took a deep breath of fresh outside air and found myself laughing.

“What the hell is going on in there?” I asked, still giggling, when I noticed for the first time that we were holding hands. I quickly yanked free and stopped laughing.

“Let’s go for a walk before they realize we’re gone,” he said.

Seemed like a good idea.

We walked off quickly down the corridor and back to the stern, and with swift fingers he pulled out a cigarette, lit it with a match, flicked the burnt match away and then gently handed me the cigarette. It wasn’t the kind of chivalry I was used to, but it thrilled me all the same. I took it and we walked on briskly.

“Very brave of you, running away before your friends could mutilate your butt cheeks,” I said, still laughing under my breath. It had been a long time since I had been in a party that wild, and all at once I realized that even though I hadn’t thought of it for years, I missed that kind of thing. The camaraderie. The energy.

“Before?” he said and widened his eyes. I looked at him and laughed.

“Oh my god. No way. They already…?”

He made a hilarious puppy dog face and pouted his lower lip out. I squealed with laughter.

“No! They already marked you! That’s the worst thing I’ve ever heard,” I said, but I couldn’t stop laughing at the face he was making.

“Sadly so,” he said, and I had trouble tearing my gaze away from how twinkly his eyes seemed out here in the open air of the deck.

“On your …on your butt?” I asked and took another drag.

He said nothing.

“Oh my god, you’re actually blushing!” I said and poked his ribs.

“Shut up. No I’m not. I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

We reached the end of the ship and came to rest at the railings again.

“Come on, show me.”

He snapped his neck so quickly to look at me I thought he’d give himself whiplash.

“Haven’t you seen enough bare butt for today…?” he said and took a drag, then flicked the stump over the edge and into the water.

“I want to see. I’ll trade you a cigarette.”

“You don’t have any!”

“Yeah, but you still owe me one, so...”

“He was laughing hard now. A good-natured, easy laugh that did strange things to the pit of my stomach. This guy was clearly a charmer. I bet he was the kind of guy that bedded a new woman every night. And yet, I was finding it hard to resist laughing along with him.

Then I saw him. A few yards ahead, walking in the crowd in the opposite direction: Anthony. He was dressed. Looking for me.

Shit.

I took one last hurried puff, tossed the cigarette overboard and gave Todd a nervous smile.

“Hey, um, I have to go,” I said, nervously noticing that Anthony hadn’t spotted me yet.

“Go? But what about my enthralling butt cheeks?”

I playfully slapped his arm. “I’m serious. I have a salsa class to go to. I’ll um …I’ll see you around,” I said and gestured to the ship. He looked a little hurt but nodded, his smile fading somewhat.

I ran up to Anthony and his face lit up a little when he saw me. Mercifully, he seemed not to have noticed whom I was talking to.

“You came after all,” I said. I hadn’t put in nearly enough enthusiasm into that line, and it came across as the admonishment it was. But he nodded anyway and kissed me.

“Ellie, have you been…?”

I frowned.

“Just one, god, yes. But I was desperate. It was just one.”

His expression was so harsh I recoiled from it.

“Look, Anthony, if we’re getting snippy with each other, let’s talk about all the whiskey you put away before we came out here.”

He looked stunned. It was a low blow, I admit. But it was also true.

We walked on in silence to the room where the salsa class would be held.

I was the one with the filthy habit, you see, and he was the one who was under stress and needing relaxation. I was undisciplined. Untidy. Forgetful and immature. He was just a grown man enjoying his superior taste in fine spirits. It felt like a constant effort to remind myself that he had flaws too, that despite what he said, I wasn’t so bad. And unlike smoking, Anthony’s drinking hurt more than just him. I tried not to think about all that now. We were on vacation. He wouldn’t do anything, not with the walls as thin as they were and not with people to see any black eyes in the morning…

And so that was my evening. Anthony actually decided to come out and live a little just like I had wanted. Too bad the thing I felt like I wanted suddenly seemed like the worst thing in the whole world.

Chapter 3 - Todd

I’ve spent 20-day hour days running, swimming, and hauling my carcass through combat conditioning that at the time felt worse only for the fact that you got to survive it, sleep 4 hours and then repeat the same thing the next day.

I can do 37 pushups in a minute and can hold my breath under water for twice the time a normal man can. I can sleep on rocks and wake up ready to load a rifle, rappel down a mountain and disarm anyone I find on the other side. I was in the early stages of conditioning my body to be an all-terrain, all-purpose, finely tuned human machine capable of surviving and thriving in extreme combat situations.

But holy fuck if I still couldn’t handle my alcohol.

I groaned and decided not to open my eyes yet. My head wasn’t pounding so much as splitting at the sides where I felt sure my brain was trying to escape me and the abuse I’d put it through. My mouth was dry. I felt hollow inside, and dizzy even though I was lying down. And the burn. Dear god, the burn on my ass.

I groaned again, peeled open my eyelids and clawed at the bed sheets for support as I tried to raise my head. Even lifting my cheek off the pillow for a second gave me a sickening lurch in my guts so that I was sure I’d throw up if I moved again. I collapsed back down and squeezed my eyes tight. The light felt bright enough to be the sun exploding on my retina, but in all probability, it was only something like late morning, maybe 10:00 AM at most.

Digging deep, I hauled myself up, blinked hard and scratched the sleep from my eyes. I was in my room, half tangled in bed sheets. I was naked but still had one shoe on. A quick scan of my memory showed that my recollections of the past evening cut out sometime after I went back to the party with the squad.

I sat up straight.

The girl.

Now I remembered.

I looked down at my soft cock resting in my lap. I scanned the room. Nope. She hadn’t come home with me. I stood and cracked my neck. She had been keen, but not that keen. Still, it was an entertaining thought.

Then I noticed the bathroom door was shut. I heard the toilet flush and the faint flow of water in the basin. I wracked my brain to think of who could be in there, and just as I was gearing up to imagine it might possibly be her, out stepped Charlie, slamming the door and standing before me in nothing but a white pair of men’s boxer shorts.

“Fuck. It’s you.”

“Morning sunshine,” she said. “Got your beauty sleep?”

She sidled over to the bedside table, scratched around at some things there and plucked up a burnt out joint and a lighter. Then she plopped down next to me, feet spread wide, smile even wider, and got to work lighting it up.

“Christ, can you not?” I groaned and slumped back down into the blankets.

The relationship between Charlie and I is kind of hard to explain. In fact, I’d like to not have to call it a ‘relationship’ at all. When she first enlisted with our group, she was one of three women who were all low-key gunning to be the ‘first female SEALS’ and all that shit. Since they opened the whole playing field up last year, a few women had tried but nobody had made it through yet. No biggie. Most men don’t make it through either. Only Charlie seemed to take the whole thing personally, and had made it her full time life’s mission to prove to everyone how wrong they were to think she couldn’t do it. As far as I could tell, nobody hassled her even one bit, but she was always high strung, always looking to finish an argument nobody started, always lippy about something.

Anyway, we all thought she was gay, truly. The other two certainly were. But after they quit, she was the only one left and then she really went psycho. Don’t get me wrong, Charlie is hardcore. I’d trust her with anything, she’s solid, and I wouldn’t pick a fight with her any day of the week. The rest of the troop felt the same way. But that didn’t mean any of them wanted to risk treating her like a girl and ask her out or something.

I’m sorry, that’s crude, but you see, things got difficult. Maybe she wanted to show that she was just one of the guys or something. I don’t know why that meant she needed to sexually harass me 24/7, but hey, I’m a big boy, I guess I could take it. Funny thing is, she is kind of hot. Like, I can see it all there. The boxes are more than well ticked, if you know what I mean.

Through my gritty eyes I peered over at her on the bed and she just sat there, tits out, and you know, she was kind of pretty when she wasn’t going all out with her grating GI Jane bullshit. She had this tight, hard belly and one of those belly buttons that go straight up and down, like a little cut. She had blonde, wiry curls that she always pulled back into tight braids and knotted at the base of her skull, but when she let it loose like this, you could almost forget what an annoying ball-breaker she could be.

“Want some?” she said and extended the lit stump to me. I groaned.

“Don’t you ever sleep?”

She laughed.

“I’ll sleep when I’m dead, baby.” She took a puff, then killed the stump in a glass on the bedside table and started scrabbling around on the floor.

“Did you…?”

“Sleep in here last night? Sure did. That asshole Adam locked me out of my room and since your pansy ass was out cold, I came in here.”

“Did we…?”

She snorted as she laughed.

“Baby, if I decide to take advantage of you in your sleep, you’ll sure as hell know about it.”

I was not in the mood for this shit. I stood again, clutching the sheets at my groin and staggering over to the mirror to take a look at my roasted backside.

“So stupid. So, so stupid. How could I be so fucking stupid?” I moaned as I stroked trembling hands over the blistered burn in the shape of an anchor on my butt cheek. It had swollen and now looked more like an upside-down mushroom. It had seemed hilarious the night before. Now the pain and stupidity of it all was sobering me up fast. Charlie tilted her head to ogle me and nodded her approval.

“Can’t say it’s an improvement, bud.”

“Charlie? Can you just clear out of my room for a second? I just wanna sleep this off,” I said and tried to fold myself back into my bed.

She looked a little perturbed, her hip cocked sharply to the side.

“Look,” she said, a little snippy, “I didn’t come around here looking for you, you know.”

“Yeah, I know. Whatever, I’m just hung-over as hell.”

“I’m serious, Todd, you can stop acting like I’m about to corner you any second. Way to dent a girl’s ego.”

My brain felt like it had been dry roasted, crumbled and poured back into my skull.

“Relax, would you Charlie? I never said anything.”

“Your asshole friends are the ones who keep thinking it’s a good idea to set us up, not me.”

“Ok.”

“Ok what? You don’t have to be such a bitch about it. You know, any guy on the squad would kill for a chance to fuck the only remaining woman left on this year’s enlisting.”

I grit my teeth, sat up in bed and gave her a long stare.

“You know, dating isn’t a martial art, Charlie. I’m allowed to not want to, you know.”

She rolled her eyes as she threw on a tank top, without a bra underneath. She found her shoes and then turned to leave.

“I cannot believe I’m having such a dumb conversation,” she muttered.

I couldn’t either. Like I said, stuff between Charlie and me was weird, to put it mildly. She wasn’t wrong either. There were at least three guys on the team I knew who would drop everything this second to even get a glimpse of those small, fierce little breasts of hers. But that didn’t change anything for me. Maybe I’m not like most guys in this regard, but if it doesn’t feel right, I just don’t do it. And things with Charlie never, ever felt right. Charlie always seemed so angry. Always a little on edge. It would have been a funny thing to admit out loud, but I didn’t like feeling like a conquest to her. I knew we had a history, but that was all a long time ago.

“Hey, don’t be mad,” I said as she opened the door to leave.

“I’m not mad, why would I be mad?” she said and looked down at me in bed.

“Just …I’m just tired OK? I’ll catch up with everyone later. We’ll sit by the pool and stuff.”

She nodded and silently closed the door. I tried to bury my head into the pillows and sleep again, but it was no use. I stood up, swallowed a painkiller and splashed my face with some cold water. Maybe the abomination on my ass would scab up and heal. These days didn’t they have ways to fix stuff like that, with lasers or something?

I winced as I peeled on a fresh pair of shorts, then threw on a t-shirt, cracked my knuckles and gave the mess in the room one last look. It wouldn’t look like it to anyone else, but this was my own personal form of luxury at the moment. Once I got started down my military career, order and cleanliness would become the norm. But for now, I was saying a final farewell to my old life and as it happened, that old life came with a lot of mess.

I rubbed my temple with my fingers and decided on my morning ahead: I’d find the guys, if any of them were awake, and head over for some breakfast and as many cups of fresh black coffee as I could get my hands on. Then I’d swim the rest of the day. That’s it. They had dunked us into enough icy, salty water during our prep phase, and I had swum enough lengths now that I would be content with a little doggy paddle and a nap on a lilo, and I’d fight anyone who had something to say about it.

I locked up my room and went out for a walk. There couldn’t have been a more perfect day. The air was so clear and blue it almost sparkled and the sun, even though it was still creeping up slowly in the sky, was already bright hot, its rays not hindered by a single cloud. The ship was a beauty, and most people were up and busy, settling beside the pool or taking a swim. I didn’t want Charlie to be mad at me. I got it, really I did. I knew why she had to be tough and all that. What I didn’t understand was why she was trying at all.

I would never have admitted it to anyone, but for me the Navy was …the last resort. It was my safety net. I knew It was nothing to cry about, but I enlisted months ago because I just didn’t know what else to do. I was tired of thinking. Tired of making decisions. Navy training is hard, no doubt about it. But not as hard as the alternative. I can carry shit and run and fight on barely any food and even less sleep. Frankly, it’s all the other shit that stumps me. The navy was tough, but it was structured. When you were done carrying one load, they always had the next load lined up for you. In any case, Charlie didn’t have to do any of that. Charlie was a woman. She was smart, and she had other options.

I walked all the way from my room, up a few flights and then onto the uppermost deck so I could get a better view of things. It might have been done up in chrome and gleaming white, but under all that this was a sophisticated ship. I hung over the bars and hoped the sea breeze would wash away my hangover. It was nothing but blue all above and blue all around.

Then I saw her. Sunbathing next to the pool, blue bikini top above, and blue bikini bottom below. It was perfect.

Instantly forgetting my day’s plan and my pounding headache, I walked over to her deck chair and looked down at her, my man-shaped shadow covering her woman-shaped body and causing her to open her eyes and glance up at me. She lifted her sunglasses off her nose and, easy as you please, gave me a bright, sunny smile almost from ear to ear.

“Why, hello,” she said.

Fuck. She was hotter than I remembered. I nodded and smiled.

“Catching some sun?” I asked, and pulled up a chair to sit beside her.

She pulled her glasses down again.

“Yup. It’s what I’m here for! Good night last night?”

Right on cue we both exchanged glances and then started laughing. It was strange how easy it was to laugh with her.

“Sorry, sorry, I won’t be such a pain in the ass about it,” she said, and lifted her glasses again to give me some side eye.

“Haha, very funny. If I wasn’t so hung-over I’d have a witty comeback for you, I swear.”

“And I’m sure I would have been very impressed with it,” she said without skipping a beat.

I did my best to look at her without looking. After weeks of prep training and slumming it with the gang, her body seemed almost alien to me.

So soft.

She had full, round breasts and a soft little circle of fat ringing her deep belly button. Her skin was milky white, its texture reminding me almost exactly of the smooth inside curves of a teacup. Last night she had seemed pretty. Kind of sweet. But now, in her bikini, it was kind of hard to ignore how distractingly feminine she was. She wasn’t overweight, not by a long shot. In fact, in the bright morning sun I could see just how small she really was, how narrow her wrists were and how delicate the little notches in her collarbone. I tore my eyes away and fixed them ahead on the flat, sapphire blue ocean in front of us. I just had to remind myself that not every human female had a drum tight belly and a biceps from doing pull-ups with a two-hundred-pound marine clinging to their feet.

“Ok, so here’s the plan. This evening there’s a thing, like a fancy dress thing, and we’re going to go and--”

“Wait, a thing?”

“Yeah, a thing.”

“I’m sorry and which body part will they be disfiguring this time round?” she said and smiled sideways at me.

Had I really let this beautiful woman meet that hoard of thugs I called my troupe? Last night, her hair had seemed almost silvery. She had seemed sad, it was dark, and she sincerely looked a little …grey. But now I could see it perfectly: she just had the weirdest shade of blonde hair. She was probably my age.

“It’s not with the crew, don’t worry.”

“No?”

“No. This will just be you and I. No body parts mutilated. Unless you’re into that kind of thing.”

It was bold, I know. But success! She was laughing again, and then I was laughing. My head barely hurt at all anymore. Man, if I could just sit and laugh with this girl all day I’d call this whole trip an achievement.

“I, um …that’s really sweet, but I don’t think that’s a good idea,” she said, her smile dimming.

“A good idea? Of course it’s a good idea. I still owe you a cigarette anyway, remember? And maybe I’ll even let you talk me into showing you my new body art.”

She squirmed in her seat a little, laying her book down to cover her middle.

“Really, I can’t,” she said, taking her glasses off. Her eyes were like no-color. Just like a green that almost wasn’t. It made me sad. Or maybe I was just sad because she seemed to be turning me down.

“It’s my horrible butt again, isn’t it?” I said, trying to funny, but this time her laugh was a little strained.

“Actually, I’m here with my …boyfriend,” she said, and watched my face to see my reaction.

Fuck. There’s always a fucking boyfriend.

“Well, unless fancy dress parties are against his religion or something, bring him along!” I said. But she was still shaking her head.

“Not against his religion, no, but I don’t think he’d be interested.”

“Why not?” I tried to push the creeping sense of disappointment out of mind.

“Well …he’s a bit of a serious guy, and we’re both just here to …you know, relax.”

I nodded.

“No I get it. I get it. Not everyone can handle the rigors of a full-scale fancy dress party.”

She smiled warmly but her eyes looked sad again.

“I’m sorry. You actually seem really cool though…”

Immediately I was struck with the wild thought of what would happen if I just reached over right now, and just touched her. Just leaned forward, touched my lips to hers and then waited.

“Eh, you’re not too bad yourself.” My headache was back. I lay back down in my deck chair and reformulated my morning plan. “So, uh, where is your boyfriend anyway?”

“Sleeping, I think.”

“Rough night, huh?”

“I wish. He actually went to bed early. But I guess he’s been tired for a long time. He’s a lawyer, you know, and they work such long hours, so I don’t blame him…”

“A lawyer?”

“Yeah, it’s really tough for him.”

“Huh. And what do you do?”

She twisted around on her chair and faced me. I almost couldn’t keep my eyes off the way her breasts and the softness around her belly softly dipped as she did this.

“Can we not talk about all that lame stuff? I’m on vacation,” she said with a naughty smile.

I laughed.

“Yeah, you’re… you’re right. I always hate it when people ask that kind of thing, too.”

“Yeah, let’s just talk about something else. Something real.”

“Something real?”

“Yeah …I don’t know,” she said and stretched her legs out long like a cat and narrowed her eyes to the sun. “Like, don’t you like how whenever you meet a new person, it’s like you’re meeting a new version of yourself? Like you see yourself how they see you, and it’s as if you get a whole new personality. You can start again, you know? Ok, you probably think I’m just a crazy person.”

“No, no, I understand exactly what you mean. Start again. I get it.”

“You can try out being someone else, you know?”

I watched as families and couples walked the deck, a brigade of blow-up plastic and stripy towels and see-through sarongs. Tiny white caps of waves flitted far away on the sea, but too far away for anyone to care. The day was still as perfect as it started, and the breeze felt so silky against my skin. Why did she have to ruin everything by having a damn boyfriend?

“So …maybe then you could pretend, just for now, that you don’t have a boyfriend?” I said quietly. It was more than bold. It was insane. She’d walk off now for sure, or slap me or give me a scowl and call me scum. But she didn’t. She lay motionless on the deck chair, her eyes soft and unfocused.

“To be honest, that might happen soon anyway. This trip was meant to be …I don’t know, a second chance for us. But I don’t know anymore.”

There was a full, easy silence for a moment.

“Hey, Ellie? It would be really cool if you joined me this evening. Jokes aside. And you can bring your guy as well if you like, or, you know …not.”

She smiled. It was a polite, nervous smile. But I could see through it. Her gaze lingered just a little too long on mine. Our eyes held contact for just a few split seconds more than necessary.

And in that time I saw everything I needed to. I saw the briefest glimpse of something deeply, madly hungry in her. It was unmistakable. She wanted it, no doubt in my mind. She was there with him, but she wasn’t really with him. No woman looks at a man like that, no matter how briefly, if she’s truly satisfied.

Or at least that’s what my hung-over brain thought it saw. I stood, cracked my neck and took a deep breath of sea air.

“Nice bumping into you… again,” I said.

She had her hand shielding her eyes as she stared back up at me.

“And you,” she said.

I turned to leave, suddenly wondering what on earth I had planned to do before seducing her rushed to the top of my priority list.

I wandered my way to a lower deck and found a few boys, had some coffee and laughed about the misadventures of the night before. But deep down I was already certain that I would see her again, and that the next time I did, we would do much, much more than just talk.

Chapter 4 - Charlie

It was the second night of fourteen. I still had time, but not that much time. Once we got to California, the training would take front and center and then who knows when I’d next have real alone time with him.

I paced my room. I hated being alone like this. Hated having nothing to do, no schedule, zip. I peeked out the window and watched. The boat was so big it felt like the water was moving, not us. It soothed me for a second but I was soon back to pacing again.

I took a deep breath.

I was an attractive, competent young woman who could achieve anything she put her mind to. I was smart. I was good looking. I was fit as hell, and strong. And Todd, irritating fucker that he was, was actually right about something: I did treat love like it was some kind of competitive game. This is how it always goes in the movies though, right? The too-tough bitchy girl learns to get in touch with her cheesy feminine side and the main character guy realizes she had been a babe all along. Right? Right.

I sat down on the dressing table chair and examined my reflection. I looked a little less severe without the braids, but it wasn’t enough. I had to look vulnerable. I sighed and rummaged in my toiletry bag. Time for my war paint.

“Come on, Charlie,” I muttered under my breath. “You’re a warrior, you’re a badass. If you can turn over tractor tires, you can sure as hell put on a bit of lipstick.”

I pulled it out and looked at it. After a series of embarrassing failures in real life makeup shops, I had decided instead to buy this …thing online. ‘Maybelline Glow Shine Maxxx in Sparkling Pink Nougat’ my Amazon receipt had read. Ugh.

I clenched my jaw, unwrapped it and wound it up till a faint pink nub poked out at the end. I tried applying some to my pouted lips and, to my surprise, it didn’t look all that bad. I closed it, kissed my lips together a few times and examined my reflection again. Sure, I wasn’t a runway model or anything, but that was definitely a step in the right direction. Right?

In a heartbeat I was furiously rubbing my lips again, smearing the glitzy pink wax off onto the back of my hand. I looked at my reflection again. Ugh. I was a fucking monster. Big old beak nose. Small shitty eyes. Crooked teeth. No boobs. I was ugly as hell. Just what did I think I was going to achieve with this dumb shit anyway?

With all the fury I could muster I hurled the lipstick into the trash can and leant forward to smear the rest of the lipstick off on the fabric of my black jeans. I didn’t want to, I honestly didn’t, but all at once I started to cry. It happens sometimes, and I have no idea where the tears come from. But I smeared these away too, sniffed loudly and tried to pull myself together again. It was just too easy. Too obvious. The only remaining female trainee was crying alone in her room like a little baby? No. That sure as hell wasn’t going to be me.

I hesitated a moment, got to my knees and started rummaging around under the bed instead. Once my fingertips touched that familiar package, I pulled it out: a small cellophane bag with two non-descript pills inside. I didn’t want it to come to this. I had stewed over it for days, ever since that guy in the bar had offered them to me. But desperate times, desperate measures and so on. I needed more than pretty pink lipstick if I was going to get what I wanted.

People are more willing to grant others a little weakness after they’ve already achieved something. Once I made it through the training in one piece, I could slow down a little, I could stop, maybe think about things.

But not yet.

My eyes scanned the room. I found a pair of spoons in the kitchenette drawer, and proceeded to crush one of the pills between them, placing the powder back in the cellophane bag and hiding the other pill back under the bed. I put the cellophane baggie in my pocket.

I took a final stock of my image in the mirror. Screw the heels I’d brought along. Screw the dress. And most especially screw the damn lipstick. I was wearing a simple green tank top, tight jeans and flats, and I looked good. I was a strong, capable, confident woman, just as I was. I didn’t need any of that other shit.

I peeked out of the window and noticed something that gave me pause – the weather outside looked suddenly insane. I hadn’t noticed it change. I pressed my nose up to the round glass and watched what looked like a swirled oil painting done in blue and black and sickly green. The water was opaque and peaking up in irregular, chaotic looking waves that didn’t break but only seemed to swell bigger and bigger. The sky was mottled with heavy clouds choking out any last rays of the sunset. I didn’t know much about ocean weather patterns, but it didn’t look normal to me. Nevermind. It would be a good excuse to not have to get into my damn bikini.

I took a deep breath and left the room – the party would have already started. And I needed to find Todd.

“You’re looking dapper this evening,” I said when I finally found him.

“Why thank you! I can clean up nice, you know,” he said and did a little twirl. He looked amazing. He smelled good, too.

“Can I get you a drink?” I offered. He held up his hands to signal no.

Ok. Fine. Just play it cool. I had all night, no need to rush.

“I’m still putting my liver back together after last night, thank you very much.”

He was super friendly, but he seemed distracted somehow. Maybe the heels would have been a good idea after all.

“I hear things got a little out of hand last night,” I said.

“Yeah, you could say that. Why do you never join us though? We missed you there. You’re part of our team, Charlie.”

I shrugged.

“And get up to the nonsense that you clowns get up to? No thanks,” I said and laughed.

“So you heard about the …the branding thing, huh?”

“Yeah, I had breakfast with Adam this morning and he told me. I think he just needs to call his mom and think about his life choices for a while.”

We both laughed.

“Are you sure you don’t want a drink? Come on,” I said.

“OK. Yeah, why not, I’ll get something.”

“What do you want?”

“I don’t know. Surprise me,” he said, his eyes still glued to the door like he was waiting for someone. Oh, I’d surprise him all right.

I nodded and went off to the bar to order two beers, asking specifically that they be kept in their dark glass bottles. The bartender didn’t seem to mind this request. Then, when the coast looked clear, I huddled myself into a corner, quickly slipped the cellophane baggie from my pocket and sprinkled its contents into one of the beers, swirling quickly to dissolve it and wash away the white powder streaks inside.

“Charlie! Hey, there you are!”

I spun around to see Todd behind me. With somebody else. A woman.

“This is Ellie. Ellie, Charlie, Charlie, Ellie,” he said and gestured between us.

“Nice to meet you,” she said sweetly. “Todd says you’re like, the meanest, toughest, baddest member of their team.”

I cringed inside. I already hated her, and not just because she was standing so close to him.

“Well, you have to be mean and tough to put up with this guy,” I said, and moved myself closer to him.

She smiled.

“Hey Ellie, you want a drink?” Todd said, turning to her.

“Sure, I could go for a beer.”

“Great! Here, why don’t you take this one, and I’ll quickly go and get myself another one while you chat here with Charlie…” he said and snatched the tainted bottle from my hand.

“No!” I snapped.

He looked a little surprised.

“I just mean, don’t trouble yourself, these are yours. I’ll uh, I’ll get myself another,” I said, deliberately handed him the tainted bottle and the woman the clean bottle, and then skulked off, trying hard not to be too obvious as I cast backwards glances at them.

From the bar I could get a more careful look at her. She was pretty. Too pretty. And in every way the annoying, awful, horrible opposite of me. A girly girl. She sure as hell didn’t have any problem with makeup, that’s for sure. Her face was full of it. And her hair was curled and flicked off to the side, and she was wearing – I shit you not – she really looked like she was almost wearing a night gown. The weather had dropped this evening and it was quite cold, yet that didn’t seem to stop her. The dress was slinky and lacy and clung to every fat roll she had, and it ended in a big nasty ruffle of silk or some shit at her neckline where the dress just gave up and her great big tits came spilling out the top instead. I’m not a jealous type, I leave that to other woman, but even I know trashy taste when I see it.

The bartender looked at me, followed my gaze into the crowd and then looked back at me. I didn’t care what he thought. When you know you can easily take a man in bare handed combat, it’s easy not to give a damn if he gives you funny looks. I took a hasty sip of my new beer, blinked away angry tears and walked over to them again. Just at that moment, three of the guys came blustering along to greet us, every one of them wearing something ridiculous, looking like they were already well on their way to another legendary night.

“Charlie!” Ethan said. “Charlie, Charlie, Charlie, my man! This will not do, where the hell’s your fancy dress?”

“This is as fancy as it gets, fellas,” I said drily.

They were in my way, cutting me off from Todd and letting him drift off with that …girl.

“Charlie, come over here a second …you know, Ethan won’t tell you because he’s scared you’ll kick his ass, but when are you going to wear something nice, huh? Something sexy. I even heard tell that you were planning on wearing a dress on this trip,” Joey said, and linked his hand over my shoulder like we were the best buds in the world. I shrug it off, terse.

“Just cut it out, assholes.”

The mood dropped instantly.

I angled my head to peer into Todd’s glass bottle and saw that he had already drunk around a third of it. A strange little kick of excitement went through me. Now, if he could just lose that bitch then part two of my plan could start to come together. All at once the music inside the bar lounge stopped and the lights flickered on brighter. Everyone stopped to listen as a voice came crackling through the speakers.

“Ladies and gentlemen, I regret to inform everyone that the storm warning we received a few hours ago seems to have gotten a little more serious. There’s no need for panic, though. Tropical cyclones are extremely rare in these waters and so we’ll likely return to our program shortly. The crew and I are working hard to plot an alternative course. However, we do expect some rough weather for the next few hours, and insist that everyone return to their rooms till further notice. Please walk calmly; again, the situation is under control. Crew members can answer any questions later, but for the time being please make your way as soon as possible to your rooms. Thank you for your attention.”

Todd and the girl immediately looked at each other. And me, the stupid, pathetic idiot that I was, I looked at him.

“Shit,” said Ethan.

Todd swiftly downed the rest of his beer and set the bottle off to the side.

“Cheers guys, Ellie and I will be clearing off I guess, was nice knowing you,” he said with a shrug, took her hand and walked off towards the exit. The other guys were as shocked as I was. People started talking all at once and suddenly everyone in the room began to bustle into one another and rush for the doors, cutting me off from him.

“Todd! Wait!”

But he was long gone into the crowd, and when I heard the announcement coming again over the speakers, this time people were making too much noise for it to be heard.

Chapter 5 - Ellie

He grabbed my hand firmly and yanked me outside, and we both stood and stared in awe for a moment at the weird color the sky had turned.

It was all wrong. Panicked people streamed past us on all sides but I couldn’t tear my eyes away from the bizarre green and yellow swirls rolling quickly over the horizon. Bruise colored clouds. And something metallic and threatening hovered on the wind, which was now whipping in all directions. I had never seen anything like it. Little ribbons of blue sky remained but were rapidly skidding off to the east and disappearing.

Reflexively, I squeezed his hand. He looked at me, for once not smiling, and then pulled my hand to guide me through the maze of confused people.

“Todd! Todd wait, my room is in the other direction!”

He turned and scowled at me.

“Ellie, that storm is serious, and with this wind it’ll hit us in five minutes, if that. Where is your room?”

“On Deck B, just that way…” I said, pointing lamely.

“No, it’s too far. We need to get inside now.”

The crowd was already thinning around us, people disappearing quickly into doors, loose sarongs flapping in the wind. A towel came slinking by on the floor and wrapped around my feet. I untangled it and the wind carried it off again, slinking and twisting fast over the deck and off into the sea. Two hours before it had been a perfect, sunny blue day. How could this actually be happening? Surely this wasn’t right…

“Ellie! Are you listening? Come with me, my room is closer; it’s on this deck. We need to get indoors before the storm hits…”

“Your room?”

It suddenly felt more difficult to hold his hand. Just how much of an emergency was this, really? One moment I was enjoying a casual party and having a good time and the next the sky had churned into some vision of hell and I was standing here, and the wind was making it difficult to talk, and now he was inviting me to his room?

“Ellie, we’re wasting time. This is dangerous, standing out here.”

It was frightening how quickly people had cleared the deck. Only one or two people remained and were scrabbling to unlock doors and get inside as the wind seemed to whip up into a frenzy with every passing second. I didn’t know what to do. Anthony would still be in the room, and he’d be looking for me…

“Ellie!”

He had grabbed my hand more tightly now and was pulling me hard in the wrong direction. The moment slowed right down. It was all wrong. Leaving Anthony like that. Coming out here where I knew this guy would be there, and I knew Anthony would be devastated if he knew about any of it… I was unprepared for the sheer weight of remorse that hit me just then, even harder than the stinging wind thrashing our faces. I stood frozen.

“Hey, you two! You need to get off deck! Get off deck!”

I spun around to see a crew member gesturing at us wildly, his voice getting lost in the now screeching wind. One more moment of hesitation and the crew member grabbed both of us by the sleeve and yanked us nearer to the body of the ship, where he banged a card key to the door and opened a small storage room filled with deck chair cushions and lilos.

“Get inside!” he yelled, pushed us in and in a heartbeat the door slammed behind us.

The wind howled madly outside, and I watched in horror as thick, heavy raindrops then began to splatter the glass of the door window. I turned to look at Todd, but he was nowhere near as flustered as I was. He seemed to be distracted.

“That’s… that’s the scariest looking storm I think I’ve ever seen,” I said, breathless. I almost had to shout to be heard. Todd said nothing. Without wasting any time, he started to look around the room, turning over the piles of deck chair cushions like he was looking for something. The ship groaned and lurched, slowly to one side and then slowly, sickeningly, back to the other side again. I staggered a little on my feet.

“Todd… how bad do you think this is, really? This will all just pass, right? I need to get back to Anthony…”

Here he paused a little in his rummaging but didn’t look up at me.

“I don’t want to alarm you, but I don’t think this is just a storm, Ellie.”

“What? What else could it be?”

“Look, I’m not going to lie, I think we’re in for a rough time. But just listen to me and try to act quickly, OK? Can you do that for me?”

“But…”

“Can you just promise me you’ll try to stay calm?”

I nodded.

His words hit me hard. I suddenly realized how cold I was, and looked down at my flimsy dress, raindrops making dark speckles on the silk and my hard, icy-cold nipples poking shamelessly through the clinging fabric. Staying calm seemed utterly impossible right now.

I went to the door to peer out the window but as quickly as I did, Todd’s fist closed around my arm and he snatched me away again.

“Get away from there! It’s dangerous,” he said, his whole face seeming different now that he wasn’t smiling and joking anymore.

“But I have to get back to Anthony,” I said. “He’ll be wondering where I am, and what if he’s not OK?” I said. His mouth tightened and he stood to look at me.

“Anthony can look after himself. We need to stay out of the storm, and I think it’s going to get much worse. Come here and help me look for flotation devices.”

“Flotation devices?” I said and staggered towards him, starting to feel numb. “What do we need those for?”

He shot me another look.

“Did you see those big, tall clouds out there, on the horizon? That’s not a storm, Ellie, that’s a big ass hurricane. We’re in an El Nino year. The water’s just been too warm. Once the ship starts taking on water we’re going to need to be prepared…”

“Wait, what? A hurricane?”

“A cyclone, yes. A hurricane.”

“But California never gets--”

“Ellie, just help me look!” he barked, and I did as he told me, hot tears forming on my lashes.

Outside the rain was indeed getting heavier, so much so that the raindrops of the glass had turned into a solid, rippling sheet of water pelting down. The violence outside drummed against the steel of the door so loudly I could scarcely hear myself think as my hands turned over piles of chair cushions.

“Yes!” he cried and I turned to see him holding up some orange life jackets.

“Put this on,” he said and thrust it at me. I was still crying as I put it over myself, hands shaking, struggling to fasten the black plastic clips. The last thing I had done with Anthony was fight with him. I was angry he didn’t want to come out with me. Again. We were all going to die now and the last words I had spoken to him were in anger, and now I couldn’t bear the guilt. Nothing better was in store for me anyway, so why didn’t I just marry the guy and get it done with already? Why had I been so ungrateful to him, so difficult, when all he wanted to do was start a life with me? What the fuck was wrong with me?

At that moment, I can’t explain why, all I could think of was a documentary I had watched some years ago, about people who had gotten caught in some great fire, and they were interviewing the survivors afterwards, and an elderly lady had said, in a sad, defeated voice, “you never realize just how fragile life is until it’s too late”. And now those words were banging around in my head as I tried to close the other clasps, and the thought made my eyes burn and I couldn’t see and I couldn’t breathe.

“Ellie, hey Ellie, you need to calm down.”

Todd’s firm hands were squeezing my shoulders, and he was staring those pale blue eyes straight into me, looking more than a little frightened himself. His hands were the only warm thing in the world at that moment. Everything seemed to have dropped a few degrees in temperature.

“I… I need to get back to my room …I can’t be out here with you… I’m engaged, I’m supposed to be married,” I said, unable to stop my words from melting into one another and becoming great big stupid sobs. He looked a little surprised, but didn’t loosen his grip on my shoulders.

“Ellie, listen to me. You can’t go back to your own room.”

To my horror, the ship started groaning again, and the bone-shuddering sound of metal against metal rang out from beneath us.

“You can’t go back to your room. The ship might …the ship might go down, and in that case--”

“Go down?!”

“Ellie, please calm down. Just listen. The ship might go down. But you need to stay with me, OK? You need to stay calm so we can figure out a way to leave if we need to,” he said, and he was suddenly checking over the fastenings on my life jacket.

“But where are we gonna leave to?” I said.

At that moment, two inches of tepid, foamy water came crawling in from under the crack in the door and sloshed easily around our feet as the ship lurched to one side. I staggered and he reached out to catch me. It was like my brain had stopped working. I saw the images in front of me. I heard the people screaming outside. But I just couldn’t process it all. It was too much.

The sound of creaking metal intensified and seemed to be right over our heads. We both looked up to see the exposed beams overhead kink and bend as the torrents of rain outside beat down on us. A crack appeared at the far end of the ceiling and in burst a blue-green spray of seawater. I turned to look at him in horror. The moment became surreal. I could make out tiny droplets clinging to his eyelashes as he stared back at me; a raw, fearful look on his face. Another groan pulled his attention upwards and he frowned at the buckling ceiling overhead.

“We need to get out of here,” he said, and tightened his own life jacket. He looked so pale.

“And then what?”

He caught my eye again.

“I don’t know. Maybe we won’t make it. But I think our best chance is to get out of here and soon,” he said.

I couldn’t believe the words coming out of his mouth. That maybe we wouldn’t make it. It was absurd. I wasn’t meant to die. I was meant to marry Anthony and settle down and have two children and be content and normal. I started crying again.

“Ellie, no more of that, seriously. Are you listening to me? When I say go, we’re gonna make a run for it, OK? I think I know where we need to go, but you have to hold onto my hand and run as fast as you can, OK? You won’t be able to see with the rain, but I know where we’re going, so just follow me, OK?”

Before he could finish his sentence I lunged forward and planted a deep, full kiss on his wet lips. My heart was pounding hard enough to rival the noise outside. He didn’t resist me. In fact, in the very next second, he grabbed the base of my neck and pulled me in hard for another kiss.

His tongue felt so warm and sweet and soft, like it was the last good thing left in this weird watery universe we had suddenly found ourselves in. Leaking water from the roof spattered down onto us but I pressed hard against him all the same, shivering in my life jacket. A loud bang made us both jump, breaking the spell of the moment. Another followed. The ship sounded like it was being torn apart.

“Let’s go!” he said and grabbed my hand, slippery with rain.

We waded through the water over to the door and he gingerly opened it, letting in a rush of water that splashed right up to my knees. The ship lurched again, and the water rose higher, nearly stopping my breath as it swirled right through my dress and up onto my thighs. I fell back but he grabbed me and pulled me out the door, where I could now see sheets of rain blasting down with such fearsomeness you could scarcely see two inches in front of you. I heard the crack of thunder grumbling somewhere out of sight.

“Ready?” he said and squeezed my hand so hard it hurt.

I nodded.

Beyond belief, we saw the grey blur of someone washing by, yelling and trying to catch their footing but being swallowed away by the vicious current of murky water. I heard an immense snap behind me and realized too late that something had struck me. On my head. My vision flickered out for a moment and a dull pain radiated out from the back of my skull. The last thing I saw before I blacked out was his beautiful, plump lips, yelling something I could no longer hear.

Chapter 6 - Todd

Something was wrong. Not the massive storm pummeling mercilessly over us. Not that, but something else. Had I inhaled some weird fumes? But then she would have been affected too. No, something else was going on.

Sometime just after we left the main auditorium and just before we were shunted into this storeroom, my head began to ache. I couldn’t be drunk, not from one beer, and even being the lightweight I was, I knew I couldn’t still be drunk from the night before.

So then why was I having such a hard time standing? Why did it feel like now, of all possible times, my muscles were liquefying inside me, just barely responding to anything? I tried to hide my panic from her. She was freaked out enough as it was, and I certainly didn’t need her losing her head on top of everything.

I remember standing with her in that weird storage room, the storm trying to beat its salty way inside, and her wide eyes as she looked up at me. Fuck, man, I’m not a cheater. I don’t make commitments, not because I don’t think they’re worth anything, but because I think they’re worth so much. Shit, I don’t know. Maybe we were all gonna die and getting a kiss in edgeways was just making the best of an increasingly shitty situation.

Her lips felt so cool on mine. So wet and slippery. It felt good, carving out that weird little moment between us. All the tension we had built since the day before seemed to come to one gooey point and just melt. She was a fucking amazing kisser. There was something so trusting about her, so open.

When the roof bust open and sent a metal beam smack into the back of her head, I was almost certain she was killed instantly. It sickened me to see it, the way her body went limp and just folded down with a sploosh into the water. I yanked her up again but she was a deadweight. I pressed my face to hers. Thankfully, she was still breathing. A thin black ooze appeared at the back of her head. Shit. She was hurt badly. But at least she was still alive.

The ship gave another heave and sent us both rolling and tumbling to the back of the room. We had only a few minutes in here until the water filled it entirely, and then who knows if we’d be able to get out. The water was already lapping aggressively at my waist.

I looked down.

Huh.

It was no question the most awkward boner I’d ever have in my life. I smiled wryly to myself as briefly I imagined telling this story around a beer later on. If there even was a later on.

Gravity suspended for a while as the weight of the water inside the room lifted us both off the ground. At least she was easier to hold onto and steer this way. I couldn’t tell if the water was icy cold or too warm, or if it was just my legs feeling heavy from shock. But something wasn’t right. She started to drift away from me and bang into the wall, but I clutched at her flimsy little dress and pulled her towards me, anchoring her against me and noticing in a daze that I had torn some of her dress, and now had a handful of weird lace in my hands.

Why did I feel so weird?

It took all my energy to steady us both against the brutal flood of water rushing into room, but I did it. I had been fucking trained for this. All my work had to have been for something, right? If I couldn’t put all of those hard-earned skills to work now, then I deserved to die. But I owed it to this woman, this sad-eyed, soft lipped, beautiful woman that had landed in my lap just 24 hours ago. She was still breathing, and as long as she was, I would find a way to get control of my sluggish muscles and haul us out of here before the entire ship went down. We were lucky to be on the upper decks – I had never been trained to manage this particular crisis situation, but even my foggy brain could see that the sheer suction force of a huge passenger liner like this dipping under water would be too much to escape from. Especially too much for a knocked-out woman and a guy who for some reason couldn’t get his legs to work anymore.

Through a massive deluge of water, I managed to stick out my hand and hook it against the store room door. The water immediately picked up my feet and washed me out nearly horizontal. But it lifted her, too, and with so much effort I nearly screamed out loud, I pulled up and out, both our body weights levering on my beleaguered bicep. I eventually wrenched us out and into the rushing flow outside.

The change was swift. My head ducked under and I felt bubbles clattering in my ears. I clung to her for dear life, tumbled over myself until my feet found metal and I pushed up, breaking the surface of the water to bring me a merciful gulp of air. I wanted to throw up. All around the storm was dark, chaotic, and carrying disjointed screams and the sounds of sirens on its lashing winds, whipping up water all around. It was hard to even know which way was up.

The body of a large, heavy wave came lurching over us both and lifted our bodies a good few yards up, but our life jackets kept us buoyant and floating high above the weird debris I saw floating in the dim water beneath our feet. It was bizarre. The whole world was topsy turvy. I tried to call out to a clump of people clinging to a raft to our left, but they soon bounced out of sight behind a curtain of rain, and I realized with alarm that I couldn’t work my tongue, either.

Drugged. I’ve been drugged.

I wracked my brain as the waves and water pummeled us in a swirl, Ellie’s limp body locked against mine as her head lolled scarily from side to side.

I had had only one drink.

The beer.

From Charlie.

I felt a wretching sensation in my guts, but tried desperately to stay focused. To stay awake. I couldn’t leave Ellie like this.

Another wave came roaring over us and dipped me under again. I was slowly losing sensation in my arms, now. I couldn’t feel the water against my skin. Underneath, the world went quiet and slow and green, and I saw a million swirling faces frozen in screams under the water.

Up swelled the water and I burst out again. The ship, unbelievably, was now almost out of sight. I watched in disbelief as it listed and tilted heavily to each side, thrown by the waves like it was made of paper, each dip down to the side scooping up whole decks full of water and rinsing off people, who looked like nothing more than mice from this far out.

I blinked hard to get my vision to stop blurring. Maybe I was just paranoid. Maybe I had taken something by accident. It couldn’t have been Charlie. She would never… I would think about that later. For now, I had to get us both to safety.

Like I was summoning each of them from the dead, I commanded both of my heavy legs to start kicking for all they were worth. The effort of dragging myself and Ellie through the raging tail of the storm was so extreme I felt like my heart would burst. Rain still lashed at us from above, but was starting to clear. When I turned to look behind me again, there was nothing but a giant, foamy patch on the ocean surface where the ship used to be. It swirled and rose in nauseating waves, dotted with screaming people and debris. I paddled harder, leaning back and noticing that Ellie’s wound was leaving a fine ribbon of red as we swam on.

“Todd! Todd, come here! Todd!”

I could no longer lift my head up. I felt the tension in my jaw loosen, and no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t keep my eyes open either. I vaguely felt hands on me, and could do nothing but succumb to the feeling of being hoisted up. Or maybe down, and the hands were not my rescuers but the fingers of deep water demons reaching up to claim me and pull me under forever.

“Todd, wake up! Todd, can you hear me? Todd!”

Everything disappeared except the faint ring of that voice. My body shut down, each of the sense switching off, except for my water-logged ears, which could still make out my name being yelled. I shifted my weight and felt my skin squeak. Was I on a raft? Was Ellie still attached to me?

“Todd, can you hear me? Open your eyes if you can hear me,” the voice said.

Was it Charlie? Maybe I was already in hell. In any case, I couldn’t open my eyes. The roar of the rain seemed to settle down to a regular drone. Remarkably, I was still conscious. Barely, but conscious. I felt as though all of me had died, except one small little flicker at the center that was still awake somehow. This little flicker crouched somewhere unseen, while the rest of the world tossed and raged around me. I knew that if I let go of that flicker, I might never get it back. I had the dim sense that my arms were around Ellie. I couldn’t feel them anymore, and I couldn’t open my eyes to see, so I contended myself with the idea that I just wouldn’t let go of her in thought.

When I finally woke up, it was to the sound of crying. My eyelids felt salted over but I managed to peel them open. Still dark. Slowly, like painful patches of a picture coming back together, I realized what had happened.

The storm.

The ship had gone down.

Ellie.

I tried to sit up and look around me, but a searing pain shot all the way up my spine and immobilized me again. I pushed through it, dragged myself to sitting and tried to find the source of the crying.

It stopped.

“Todd …Todd, oh my god,” the voice said.

“Charlie?”

“Todd, I’m so sorry…” she said. It was Charlie, but not like I’d ever seen her. And I barely could see her. We were in a tiny inflatable lifeboat, and I could feel the waves of seawater heaving beneath the thin tarp under me. It was dark all around. A little light from the stars and moon overhead gave a hint of an outline of a crouched woman in front of me and …Ellie! Ellie lay crumpled at the bottom of the boat. My eyes gradually started to adjust.

“Ellie, are you awake?” I said and grabbed her. I nearly flinched when I touched her cold skin. I pressed my face to hers and, like a miracle, the delicate rush of air was still entering and leaving her small body. I wanted to cry.

“Todd …Todd, I never meant to. Thank god you’re awake. I’m so sorry. I don’t know what I was thinking. Oh thank god. I never intended for this to happen…”

Slowly my confusion was lifting. And in its place was anger. I took a few moments to find my lungs again, to breathe, to steady myself against all the many miscellaneous pains I was now aware of in every corner of my body. I was cold. And in pain.

“What are you talking about, Charlie?”

“Your beer,” she said quickly. “I put something in it.”

I groaned. It was all too much.

“Is it gonna fucking kill me?”

“Todd, I’m so sorry…”

“Well, is it?” I snapped.

“It was just a roofie, Todd. Just a stupid mistake. But I pulled you from the water. You and the girl. You had passed out…”

She was speaking so quickly I was having a hard time keeping up. My eyes still weren’t doing a good job focusing on the surrounds in such low light. It was dark, and it was wet, but beyond that I was having a hard time orienting.

“I’ve bandaged her head,” she said, now flapping the lower half of her torn jeans at me to show me. I squinted my eyes to look, then examined Ellie again. Yes, I could now make out a crude bandage over her wound, made of stretchy denim material.

“How long…?”

“We’ve been floating for a few hours. I haven’t seen anyone else, Todd. I’m so scared. The ship’s gone. It’s just …gone” she said.

“Charlie, calm down. You’re in shock.”

I was gradually finding the energy to look around the boat. It looked pretty miserable. Nothing to keep us warm. Nothing at all. Just us three, this wet rubber, and the incessant rain.

“Todd, I’m sorry.”

“Will you shut up? You’re fucking crazy, you know that? I could have died out there because of …let’s just figure out how to get out of this mess, OK?”

“It’ll be morning soon and--”

“Just shut up.”

I hated speaking to her like that. But I hated even more the sensation of not having any control over my body. Of not being able to do the things that I needed to do, right at the most crucial moment I needed to do them. She could have gotten me killed. And what if I had passed out before I could strap Ellie in a vest and carry her away from the wreck?

I lay my broken body down beside Ellie on the cold rubber and huddled next to her. Charlie sat on the far side of the boat, still crying.

“Ellie,” I whispered into her ear. “Ellie, wake up.”

Her breath snagged and caught, then she took another deep inhale and cracked her eyes open slightly. Even in the darkness I could see the light green of her iris swivel around to focus on my face.

“Todd?”

“I’m here.”

It was all I could think of to say. She drifted back out of consciousness and her eyes flickered closed again. I didn’t know how we were going to get out of this. I didn’t yet know how to keep her warm, or how we were going to find dry land. But I was here. That much was true.

Chapter 7 - Anthony

I looked down at them huddled together on the floor of the raft, sleeping fitfully. Folded into one another’s arms, their backs against the harshness of the reality around us. That should have been Ellie and I. We should have been here, on the raft together, holding one another for comfort.

The rhythmic bobbing of the raft had been making my stomach turn all night, but what was really sickening me was the thought that the last thing we had done together was fight. About something stupid. About a dumb fancy dress party that would have cost me nothing to go to, and would have meant the world to her, and it was all just monumentally stupid, and this very instant she was probably sinking down to the floor of the Pacific Ocean and everything, absolutely everything, was wrong now.

Through narrowed eyes I looked over at the chopped surface of the ocean. How much water was in an ocean? How many millions of ocean liners could disappear inside it? It blew my mind, just staring at it all, at the unbearable flatness of the whole situation. The sun had just peeked a glowing tip over the horizon and everything was flooding over in gentle yellows and pinks all across the sky. But this perfect, tranquil seascape was pure horror to me, because I knew what was underneath it. I knew what was hidden down there, inside all that blue and green that had violently toppled and gobbled my whole life just a few hours ago.

It was like a joke, watching the quiet water now. It was just a big, vulgar joke to see the two of them together, devoted lovers, still entwined while my Ellie was nowhere to be seen. I wanted them to never fucking wake up. I glanced over at the kid on the other side of the raft. He had his knees pulled high up to his chin and was gazing far out, like me. He looked like some kind of skinhead, couldn’t have been older than 21 or 22. Not that it matters how many years you’ve gathered up when life comes to cruelly slice you down. We weren’t dead, thank god, but floating here on this pitiful raft was damn well close to it.

My clothes had dried to a salty crisp on my skin, and now felt supremely dirty. We were plainly exposed to the heat and wind, and if the sun decided to rise any further, we’d have absolutely zero protection from its rays.

I had no idea where we were, and how we were going to get to anywhere else. The only place my mind could travel was back: to all the missed opportunities. To the moments I could have made her happy but didn’t. I had done things to her that I wasn’t proud of, and now it was too late. I could have relented on my stupid rules once in while. Could have gotten off her case about her work, about all those endless niggles that seemed so unimportant now. Could have made love to her more. Why hadn’t I made more of an effort to love her? Because I’m a fucking idiot, that’s why.

The boy caught my eye.

“This is like, some action movie shit,” he said.

I was appalled.

The waves seemed to bob us forward a little, bob us backward a little. It was hard to tell if we were moving at all, but with miles and miles of blue in every direction, it was hard to even conceive of travelling anywhere.

“Looks like there was a little pack attached here,” he said, gesturing to some empty clips on the wall of the raft, “I’ve seen ‘em before, they have like, a paddle in it and some emergency gear. And whistles and flares and things.”

“Well, where is it?”

“Gone,” he said.

It was infuriating just how little there was on the raft with us. When it had first careened straight into my head as I floated and flailed in the center corridor, I had clung to it for dear life. Chairs and suitcases and cups and shoes and every kind of item you can imagine swirled and whizzed around me as I hitched a ride and tried to cower from the rain and falling debris. But now, none of that stuff was left. Not a single teaspoon or deck chair. Not a button. Nothing.

“Now, the sun’s over there, right? So the coast has got to be off over to that direction,” he said, gesturing broadly over to one side. “There are plenty of islands around, but unfortunately I don’t know them or where they are.”

This guy was getting on my nerves. His voice roused the couple and they stirred, sat up, rubbed their eyes and looked around at the bright morning scene with the same dread I had felt a moment before.

“Good morning,” I said.

They nodded at me. The woman didn’t seem too concerned that her shirt had torn straight down the middle and was halfway to revealing her navel. Ah well, not like any of that mattered now. We sat in silence for a long while, each of us far gone in our own thoughts. It wasn’t a long process to think through. Every possible solution to our problem stopped short almost instantly: we were stuck at sea, no food, no water, no paddle, fuck all. But we sat and thought about it all the same.

“Baby, if we don’t make it out of this alive, I wanted to let you know that I love you, and I’ve always loved you, and nothing will change that, not even death.”

The boy and I exchanged glances and then looked with curiosity at the older guy, who now had his partner’s hand in his, and was delivering this teary speech as she looked on wide-eyed. She sniffled and wiped her nose with the back of her hand.

“Baby, I know, you don’t have to say. I feel the same. I’ve always felt that way. We’ve come a long way together, you and I, haven’t we? It hasn’t always been easy, but it’s always been worth it. Always. I don’t what happens after this life but Livvy, I swear--”

“Jesus, do you mind?”

They both turned to look at me.

“I’m sorry but, right here? Now? I think that’s just a little inappropriate.”

The boy was laughing quietly in his corner.

“Inappropriate? You’re kidding, right?” The woman was already looking a little sunburnt.

“Look, I’m sorry, I know this is an emotional time, but please could you not?”

The frown on the guy’s face was so deep it looked like he was about to snap his eyebrows off.

“Look, buddy, I don’t know what your problem is, but this is my wife and this has fuck all to do with you, OK?”

“I’m sitting two feet from you.”

“So? You don’t like it, go somewhere else,” he said, and turned back to his wife. The kid was giggling again.

“Baby, I want you to remember the good times, OK, no matter what happens from here on out--”

“Do you know how inconsiderate you’re being?” I said, and shifted my weight so heavily that the boat rocked and swayed. It was an awful feeling, knowing that just this flimsy piece of plastic was suspending all four of us above miles and miles of solid ocean water.

The guy lowered his wife’s hands, took a deep breath and then gave me a stern look. I knew I was being an asshole. I knew it. But I couldn’t watch them do that, not now. Not with my head in pieces the way it was.

“Look, buddy, I don’t care if we’re the last four people alive in the world, you will not tell me what the fuck to do, OK?”

“Yeah? And if I do? You gonna sue me or what?”

“Are you seriously being this much of an ass right now?” he said, and glowered at me.

“Baby, please, we’re all just a bit scared, let’s not fight,” the woman said.

“Oh, I’m not fighting…”

“Hey, don’t you dare come over here, what do you think you’re doing?”

“Guys!”

We all spun to look at the kid who had pepped up and was now excitedly leaning over the edge of the raft.

“If you all would shut up for a second, maybe you could help me look over there. Am I seeing things? Tell me I’m not seeing things.”

We all trained our eyes on the strange fuzzy edge of the horizon. It definitely looked like land. Trees, even. I wouldn’t believe otherwise. We must have stared at it for a minute straight, all of us, in silence.

“I thought you said the coast would be that way?” the woman said.

“Guess I was wrong, lady,” the kid said, and instantly leant over, dunked his hands in the water and began paddling for all he was worth.

We all joined him without any encouragement, and soon the quiet ocean air was filled with the sound of frantic splashing. It felt, of course, like we were going nowhere, but we paddled all the same. Within ten minutes we couldn’t deny it. We all checked with one another: had the fuzzy patch on the horizon really grown bigger? Yes. Yes it had. We were going to be OK. We had found land. We just had to paddle like our lives depended on it. Which, of course, they did.

Chapter 8 - Ellie

My world went from deep, soft black …to blue.

My eyes were opening. I stared straight up, or what I thought was up. Nothing but a depthless, cool blue, and a wisp of cloud that told me it was the sky. I wasn’t dead. That was air – normal, clean air in my lungs – and I wasn’t dead.

All at once every one of my muscles shot to life and I sprang up, then recoiled instantly in pain. It felt like a hot, burning knot had taken the place of my foot; I looked down to see it tightly bundled in various rags. Worrying sensations radiated from some unseen spot on the back of my skull, and when my fingers went to explore the ache there, they touched more of the same rough bandages. I hurriedly examined the rest of my body: I was alive, but felt like a lumpy bag that had been kicked down a hundred flights of stairs.

After I was satisfied that my limbs were mainly intact, I turned my attention to the world around me.

Sand.

Sea.

I was on a beach, surrounded by all the elements of a tropical paradise except it was all far, far more frightening. The sand was too white. The air too thin. Some seagulls wheeled up overhead but it hurt to lift my gaze to the sun and look at them. Wincing, I tried to remember.

Todd.

The storm.

The storeroom.

Was I the only one who had survived?

I looked down again at my body. The silk over the bodice of the best dress I ever owned was ripped and hanging in ribbons off me. The salt water had matted my hair in one loose dreadlock which was now pasted to my back, and crunchy with beach sand. I was struggling to sit up when thought hit me. A thought so devastating it was like watching the whole accident happen all over again: I had nearly cheated on Anthony.

Or had I?

I sat back down again, head suddenly reeling.

Was the storm the only reason I hadn’t gone through with anything? What would have happened if that storm never came? Would I have just gone back to the room, back to my life with him, back to California and straight into the marriage that was waiting for me like a wolf in the forest, licking its chops?

I looked down at the shreds of my dress.

The irritating fact was, I didn’t know. I liked to think that I would never have jeopardized my relationship with Anthony. And yet, why did I feel so guilty? How could I feel so bad about something that never happened? Never got the chance to happen is not the same as not happening, though, is it? It all seemed so pathetic now. So sordid in the hot morning sun. Suddenly, as though I had been kicked in the stomach, I folded over to the side, retched and threw up all over the sand. Sitting up again, I felt no relief. I wanted to cry but felt too dry inside. Too tired.

I flopped back down and contemplated dying right there and letting the seagulls peck me away, when my eye caught something. A jacket. An orange jacket laying neatly in the sand. I couldn’t coax my bruised body up to go and examine it, but my mind raced off all the same.

Anthony…?

What were the chances?

When I saw two figures walking over a soft dune towards me, I didn’t know if I started crying or laughing or screaming. I had never been more happy to see human beings in my life. One of them picked up their pace when they saw me; the other hung back. I lifted stinging eyes upward and saw who it was. Todd soon stood towering over me, sun behind him, an undecipherable expression on his face.

“You’re awake,” he said.

I could think of no response. I just wanted to reach out and hold him, to just touch something that wasn’t the hostile elements of sand or sea or wind. But I couldn’t get up. I felt like my entire body had been rinsed out inside with burning salt water and now everything hurt. I could hear the muscles in his thighs crack as he crouched down and looked me square in the eye.

“I was sure you wouldn’t make it. You took a massive gash to the head, and you were out cold for at least a few hours.”

My hand again went to the back of my head to see if it felt different now that I knew what it was. Everything was slowly coming back to me though.

“Maybe you don’t remember. The ceiling broke and came down on your head. It knocked you right out.”

“You… you saved me?”

“Nah, you can thank your life jacket for that,” he said and gave a playful nod to the orange jacket I had spied earlier. So Anthony wasn’t here, then. I stopped my mind from thinking any further. My head spun.

“I feel like shit, Todd.”

To my surprise he broke out in a big, juicy laugh.

“Yeah, I bet! But you’re a fighter, no question,” he said, and extended his hand for a high five. I weakly lifted my hand to his and, despite the wash of pain moving through every part of me, I found myself laughing quietly with him.

“Has this actually happened, Todd? Did the ship really sink? Are we really …shipwrecked on an island?”

“Yep, not a dream I’m afraid” he said, and straightened to standing again.

The other figure had ambled over now, a woman. I recognized her from the bar. She said nothing, but only peered down at me, and I wasn’t quite sure if the scowl on her face was my fault or the sun’s. Her hair was tightly braided back and she seemed …angry. I couldn’t think of anything to do but nod in acknowledgment of her and try to stand again.

“So, the deal is that we appear to be the only three survivors,” she said quickly. “The ship went down sometime last night after nineteen hundred hours. Your foot was broken but we’ve made a short splint and bandaged it as best we could. Your head will be fine, just a surface wound. I recommend keeping that braid in, the tension will help it heal.”

My fingers went to touch my hair again. Ah, not a dreadlock, but a braid. The thought of them both ministering to me while I was unconscious sent a strange pang of fear through me. I tried to stand again and coax my limp legs to hold my weight. I wobbled, but Todd immediately stepped in, grabbed my arm and held me up firm. The effect his had on the girl was palpable. She shot us both fiery looks but held her tongue.

“I’m sorry, I don’t remember your name…” I said, trying to soothe the awkwardness of the moment and to tear my attention away from how wildly erotic it felt to suddenly have his arms around me, faintly touching over the places where my dress had been torn open.

“Charlie. It’s Charlie,” she spat and watched me struggle with a faint sneer on her face.

“If it wasn’t for Charlie, we wouldn’t have found the raft, or made it to the island. In fact we wouldn’t even be here right now,” Todd said, but there was something not perfectly sincere in the way he said it. I wanted to collapse against his touch and sleep in it forever.

“Thank you, Charlie,” I said with full earnestness. “It looks like you saved my life.”

“I saved Todd’s life, actually. You just happened to be strapped to him.”

The look they exchanged with one another was loaded with venom. I gently pried myself free of his grasp and took a moment to wobble and come to standing on my own. My foot rang out in pain with even the faintest touch on the ground beneath. But I was too exhausted to lift my leg and carry it. The compromise was to hang awkwardly somewhere in between, trying to find my balance.

“Well, however it happened, thank you. I don’t even …I don’t even remember getting here, to be honest. Nothing.” I looked at them both and wondered what we had all gotten ourselves into. “You and Todd are both… uh…?”

“Both SEAL trainees, yes. We trained together. We’re training buddies, me and him. And we’re doing our next course in California together,” she said, again speaking so quickly it made me wonder if I had scrambled my brains somehow and wasn’t processing so well anymore. But I think I got it now. This was his girlfriend. Or …was his girlfriend? My head was too sore to tease out the soap opera dynamics in front of me, so I just put my forehead down and tried to focus on standing upright.

My rag-bound toes touched the sand but this time the pain was so intense I felt it stab right through me, and I cried out in pain. Anthony was gone, and it was my fault. The thought of what had happened was indistinguishable from the pain in my body. I had put on this dress. I had gone out, when he asked me not to. I was just trying my luck. Just having fun. But now he was dead. Now they were all dead and only I was alive to think of how I had betrayed him, or meant to betray him. I burst into tears. And once I started, I couldn’t stop.

The tears came in big, inelegant gushes, and my whole body shuddered. The grief was so intense I could do nothing but let it take me completely, and now I was sure the waves of nausea and guilt and searing pain would kill me for real, and that I was half dead already, just a worthless piece of debris. I cried and cried and cried, not even summoning enough energy to sob.

His arms closed around me again. And the second they did, everything changed. What a delicious torment. How outrageous. Not only was I a deceitful asshole, apparently, I was actually doing this. I was actually getting turned on by this hot stranger who I had just a day ago been so eager to wreck my entire life for. I cried even harder. The ship was wrecked. My life was wrecked.

“Hey, shh, it’s OK, it’s OK… I’m sorry, Ellie, I’m so sorry,” he said and crumpled down to the ground with me, his body a warm shell around my small, broken one. The way he stroked my brow seemed to me, at that moment, the most beautiful thing that had ever happened to me. Not forgiveness exactly. Not a chance to fix anything. But it was human, and it was warm and soft, and I felt so cold and hard inside.

“Shhh, it’s OK…”

“Yeah, I don’t mean to interrupt y’all, but we have a lot of shit to get done right now.”

I looked up to see Charlie with her hands on her cocked hips, looking irritated. I quickly wiped away my tears, trying to gather myself.

“I’m sorry, I’m just…”

“Jesus, Charlie, can you give her a break? She’s in shock.”

“Yeah, OK, fine, but what’s crying about it going to achieve?”

“What the hell, Charlie? She just lost her fiancé, can you show some fucking sympathy?”

Charlie’s eyes widened with interest.

“Oh, so she has a fiancé?”

They exchanged another venomous glance. Charlie turned to me and in a slow, deliberate voice, said, “I’m sorry your fiancé went down with the ship, Ellie,” all without taking her eyes off Todd. “But we lost people too, you know.”

I groaned and looked around. What the hell did people even do in this situation? What was the protocol? Somebody had to be looking for us.

“You OK?” he said.

“Yeah, I’ll be fine. It’s just that I …this is embarrassing but …I have to …go.”

He looked confused for a second but then immediately sprang to action, understanding me.

“Of course! Right! Yeah, we’ll give you some privacy, you can go behind those bushes over there…”

“But I can’t walk…”

Charlie snorted.

“Charlie, can you stop?”

“Stop what?”

“Just cut it out.”

“It’s not my fault she’s a fucking baby. We’ve all sustained injuries, not just her, you know.”

“Just lay off. She’s a civilian. She’s scared. And you’re not helping. Hey, Ellie, just …how about I carry you over there?”

“Carry me?”

Charlie gave another nasty laugh. “You sure you can handle it, Todd?” she said, and looked down at the white of my stomach peeking out from a tear in my silk dress.

Fat. She was joking about me being fat, of course, because all the tragedies so far hadn’t quite been enough, and I needed some stranger to quip about my belly. Of course.

“What the hell is that supposed to mean?” I said. I’m not an angry person, but the pain gave my voice a bitter edge. She looked as surprised at my tone as Todd was.

“Nothing, buttercup, jeez, just chill,” she said and turned to leave.

“No, I won’t just chill. You apologize to me. Right now.”

“Excuse me?”

Todd was beginning to look like he wanted to crawl into the sand and get away from us both.

“You meant my weight, right? Just say what you mean. I don’t even know you and you’re saying that kind of stuff to me? Apologize.”

Charlie looked a little stunned but stood her ground. She kept glancing over to Todd but he wasn’t returning her gaze.

“Fine, I’m sorry, OK?” she said, squeezing as much poison into the word as she could. She straightened her posture. “But the next time I see your pasty fat ass in trouble, remind me not to step in and help,” she snapped and turned to leave.

I could only look on, mouth hanging open, as she walked off again. Todd let out a long, low whistle as we both sat in silence for a moment.

“Don’t mind Charlie, she’s just …she’s kind of used to playing the badass, you know?”

I bit my tongue. If these seriously were the only other two people on this island with me, the last thing I needed was to fight with them on day one. But damn.

“Here, put your arm over my shoulder.”

“What?”

He leaned forward, slipped under my arm and in one movement hoisted me up and had my weight resting across his broad shoulders.

“Let me take you to those bushes over there.”

I nodded and we went.

“I’m sorry, Todd. This is not my finest hour, I know,” I said as he padded softly but strongly through the fine sand.

“Don’t worry about it.”

He carried me towards a small copse of palm trees a few yards away from the shoreline, behind which was some denser, dark green growth so thick it was almost completely enveloped in darkness.

He had to stop and adjust his grip around me a few times – firming up his one arm under my knees and the other behind my back and curling over my shoulder. For a moment, the skin of our bare stomachs touched. Though we both did nothing to acknowledge this, it was all I could think about as we walked on. I didn’t move away. Neither did he. And then I noticed something else. I had to check that I wasn’t dreaming. No. It really was what I thought it was. I could feel …him, through his still-wet trousers. It was unmistakable. There was a firm, distinctive bulge below the waistband of his pants and it was rubbing squarely against my hip. His cock. Right there, pressing firm against me. Unable to control myself, I looked up at him and to my surprise, he was already looking down at me. We still both said nothing and quickly snapped our gaze away again.

“Hey Ellie?”

“Yeah?”

“Don’t feel weird about asking for help, OK? Till your foot’s healed I’ll carry you to wherever you want to go.”

He was slowly ascending the small dune now, and I could feel the mercifully cool shadows on my skin.

“Yeah? Well, can you carry me away from here? Back to California?” I said, laughing. What I really wanted to say was, “thank you, that means the world to me, I have literally nothing else in the world right now but your kindness, so thank you with everything I have in me…”

He looked around for a good spot to lower me down onto, but I caught his eye again and he froze.

I could kiss him.

I could.

What was there to stop me from kissing him as much as I wanted, now that my whole life was in ruins and there was nothing left of it except him?

I had known this stranger for less than two days. And yet looking up at him now, I felt like I knew everything that was worth knowing about him. I knew that he was strong, and that he wanted to help me. I knew that in the face of the most absurd danger, he still knew how to laugh. In that moment, that handful of facts seemed enough. He parted his lips and the moment tightened a little with anticipation.

“Ellie?”

Todd spun around so fast it made my neck jerk. But what I saw was a greater shock still. Walking over the same soft sand hill, clothing torn and dirty, was Anthony.

He looked ten years older. Redder. Sadder. But it was still him and the longer I stared the more it sank in: he was still alive after all. Alive and well and on this island, with me.

He looked at Todd, looked at me again, and it seemed like a thousand painful years passed between us. He took a single step towards us, then another. Todd stood firm and still, hugging me close to his chest. I was still wearing that shameful, torn dress. And I was in the arms of the man I had tried to maybe-seduce by wearing it. Even from this far off, I could see the hate coiling up in Anthony’s clenched fists.

“Get your fucking hands off my fiancé,” he hissed.

Chapter 9 - Charlie

He was the only one who wasn’t intimidated by me.

We met at the new recruits social and he was instantly easy and warm with me, and we chatted like we had known each other forever. He told me about flunking out of school, about his mom, about wanting to run away from it all. We had laughed and drunk more and then I had put my hand on his knee and he just left it there. He didn’t say anything, he just let it rest there. And I don’t know how it happened or why, but the next thing I knew we were at his place, and his shirt was off and I wanted to compose ballads about how glorious it felt to run my hands all up and down that rock hard chest of his…

He said it was his first time. I didn’t believe him. But it was my first time too. It didn’t hurt, the first time he lay himself over me and pushed inside. I remember how he tried to put all his weight in his arms so he didn’t squash me. I remember how he whispered into my ear and kept saying, are you OK? Is this OK? And it was more than OK. It only took a few minutes. We were done so quickly, he pulled out, handed me a towel he found on the floor and came to snuggle next to me again. Under the blanket, we smelt like sweat and breath and cum and it was the most beautiful moment of my life.

He fell asleep against me; his soft dick nestled against the fur between my legs, his arms still around my shoulders, holding me against him, naked skin to naked skin. In the morning I told him I wanted to see him again, to go with him to the state fair that was happening that weekend, to get some breakfast. I told him I hadn’t had so much fun in a long time, with anybody.

He told me he had made a mistake.

Well, it wasn’t a mistake. I had been there. I had seen the look in his eyes. I had felt the way he touched me and heard that secret abandon in the muffled sound he made when he came. He was just scared, that’s all. He didn’t want to start training with the extra complication of a girlfriend, I got that. He didn’t want to make things complicated. I was ambitious too. I really did understand his hesitation. So, I decided I’d give him as much time as he needed. I wouldn’t push him, wouldn’t be the needy girl always begging for attention.

But I hadn’t backed off from him for so long just to make room for some fat bitch to muscle her way in with her damsel in distress routine. If anyone had Todd, I was the one. Todd needed a strong woman. Someone who was his equal. Todd needed me.

I kicked up dry plumes of sand as I walked, trying to put all that out of my head while I thought of what to do next. We had been training to within an inch of our lives for weeks, and yet I felt utterly hopeless now. I hated feeling hopeless. Nobody got to tell me what I could and couldn’t do, especially some lame ass island.

The first thing would be to find fresh water, and the next thing to find was food. After that, we could think about a makeshift shelter – this place looked like it could easily switch weather-wise after evening fell and I didn’t feel like another night of being pummeled by water.

I searched around, pressing further and further into the gnarled vegetation. There had to be some sort of underground spring, some brook or something. If not, we could use the canvas from the raft to collect rainwater and dew and hope that kept us going.

As I bent down to examine some roots that might be edible, I pricked my ears to hear distant shouts and a scream. I stood, dropped the plants in my hands, and ran over back to the shoreline. What I saw froze me in my tracks.

Other people. We weren’t alone!

I quickly raced over and soon understood that a fight had broken out, but I didn’t understand what I was seeing. I found Todd standing between Ellie and some guy I didn’t recognize, his hands outstretched and his chest heaving. Two other people, a middle-aged man and woman, were running quickly towards them from the other direction.

“I’ll fucking kill you, do you hear me?”

The guy screaming was red in the face, and looked just about ready to tear Todd limb from limb. The fat girl was crying, again, and struggling not to flop to the ground like the weakling she was. The other three people looked at me as I approached, looked at the debacle unfolding before us and then at me again. I didn’t know who was more surprised.

“Can you fucking calm down man? Can’t you see she’s hurt?” Todd yelled. The girl was sobbing, her head in her hands, and seemed not to know what to do with herself.

“And just who the fuck do you think you are? Back off. Let her speak. Ellie, who the hell is this guy?”

Ellie could do nothing but sniffle and cry some more, her face twisted in pain as she tried to balance on her busted leg. It was an infuriating thing to witness. This must be her fiancé, back from the dead. And that was good news for me, at least. Very good news.

“Todd, just get out of here, OK?” I said and marched forward, shoved him aside roughly and grabbed the girl to help her to her feet. Stunned, she stopped crying and looked at me as I bent down to pick her up before walking over to her fiancé.

“Just take her,” I said.

He obeyed.

She folded down into his arms, her stupid leg still bound up with half of my jeans. For long lost lovers, they sure as hell didn’t seem all that excited to see one another, but I couldn’t care less at that moment. None of my business. I looked at the expectant faces all around me. As usual, it would fall on me to take charge of the fucking mess. Again.

“I’m Charlie, by the way,” I said curtly and nodded at him.

“Anthony. Anthony Coates,” he mumbled.

“Great. That over there is Todd, and I see you and your, uh, fiancé, already know each other. We came in on an emergency raft last night after the ship went down. We didn’t think there were any other survivors.”

They all just stared at me.

“Now, I don’t mean to be funny, but today is going to fly by, and if we don’t start looking for a smart way out of this mess, we’re all going to die here. If you assholes could hold off on trying to kill each other for a minute, that would probably help.”

A small, wiry looking guy stepped forward.

“My name is Carl and this is my wife Livvy.”

He was covered in aging tribal tattoos on his arms, had a soft little pot belly and a serious shirt tan. The woman waved her hand timidly and made eye contact with everyone else.

Great. By the looks of them two it meant that Todd and I were the only two truly capable adults here and it would be up to us to sort this shit out. Too bad Todd was so distracted.

“Are there any more of you?” I said.

They all looked at the ground.

“We also came in on a raft, just us, but we had another guy with us, a younger guy,” the woman said to the sand between her toes.

“And…?”

“Unfortunately he didn’t make it,” Anthony said quietly, and I thought it so strange how hard he was trying not to look down at that fat cow he was miraculously holding up.

I shrugged and tried to think.

It was sad, but I don’t think it had escaped anyone’s attention that basically nobody on the ship had ‘made it’ either. Hundreds of people, gone. And only we remained. Fine, I could handle that. Out the corner of my eye I noticed more black and green clouds growing far on the horizon, threatening to overtake the current blue.

“OK, well, six is a good number. We can make this work. Our best bet for fresh water is to look in the interior – who still has shoes?”

I looked down at Carl’s beat-up flip-flops.

“OK, you and you wife can go into the forest and start looking for fresh water or at least some tubers. Don’t be too fussy, though, we’ll need every calorie we can get our hands on.”

I turned to Anthony. He didn’t look like he was in the best physical condition of his life but at least he stood tall, was paying attention and didn’t cower like those other two.

“Anthony, can you fish? Are you a good swimmer?”

He puffed his chest up and nodded. “I can check out the coast all around the island and see if I can find some food. With rocks like this, there’s a good chance of mussels or maybe snails. I’ll try and get a sense of how big this place is while I’m at it.”

“Good man, that’s good,” I said, pleased that at least someone else had their head in the right damn place.

I turned to look at Todd, who stood a little back from the group, chewing on his lips.

“Todd, you and I should get to work on building a shelter. It’s probably going to storm again tonight, if those clouds are anything to go by. I sure hope you were paying attention in training, because I’m going to need you to magic up some fire out of thin air, OK?”

He said nothing but I knew he was onboard. He had to be, it was the most sensible plan. It was the only plan. The couple seemed a little hesitant, like they didn’t appreciate a strong woman taking charge of the situation. But fuck ‘em. It wasn’t my goal to win friends and influence people. It was to survive. If they wanted to die three days from now, that was their prerogative.

“What about me? What can I do?” Ellie said, and she flashed those big Bambi eyes my way.

I smirked.

“I don’t know, what can you do?” I said.

Maybe in some prehistoric times a chunky bitch like her would have stayed home as the village brood mare. Maybe she had the genes for basket weaving or some shit. But right now, she just looked like a big, fat liability to me.

“I can, uh… I can’t move much but I can …dig!” she said. She tried to wriggle down from Anthony’s arms.

“Dig?”

“Yeah, dig. I can stay here with you guys and dig a nice, deep hole that we can cover over with sticks and fronds, and that’ll make a nice shelter. Going underground a little will help keep us cool as well.”

She was at least trying to make herself useful, I’d give her credit for that. I looked down at her pink nail polish and pointy nails.

“And what are you going to dig with?”

“That’s my problem to solve, isn’t it?”

“OK, fine. I won’t stop you. But if you can cover up a little and stop stirring up drama, that’d be great too,” I said and gestured towards her bare cleavage.

She looked mortified. Good.

I glared at the couple and they quickly sprang to action and walked off towards the center of the island. I watched as Anthony carried Ellie off a few feet, gently placed her down and exchanged a few hurried whispers with her. They both looked so tense. Almost embarrassed about something. She was doing everything she could to avoid eye contact with him. Interesting. Then he stood, leant forward to kiss her brow and disappeared off towards the ocean, not giving Todd or I a second glance.

“I’ll be back to check up on you in an hour,” Anthony yelled after her.

Water, food, shelter, warmth. We had less than 24 hours to secure all of life’s essentials. And just as soon as we did, I had another plan.

Todd.

It was a bit of a joke, really. Something you’d never imagine would happen. The middle-aged woman was married and didn’t count, and as long as her fiancé was around, that bitch Ellie didn’t count either. In effect, I was literally the last female alive for Todd. And it was just a matter of time before he realized that he wanted the same thing that I wanted.

Chapter 10 - Anthony

Well, we were certainly having our ‘adventure’ now.

I consider myself a cool, collected man. A rational man. But the last few days felt like I had been blasted with ten years’ worth of emotional turmoil and I had no idea how to process it all. The landscape all around felt empty compared to the tumult inside my head. Just as soon as I grabbed hold of one thought, another, completely different one beckoned. And when I grabbed hold of that one instead, yet another one popped up to taunt me.

On the raft, I had felt nothing but pure, intense devotion to Ellie. It felt so obvious and easy at the time. She was the perfect woman, my future wife, nothing less than an earthly goddess that I’d chosen to be the mother of my children. But there were ugly scratches on this vision, and the fact that we had fought the night of the storm hadn’t escaped me. And now those ugly thoughts were as plain as the day in front of me, unavoidable.

What had she been doing… before the storm hit? Was she doing it with …him? What exactly had happened on the raft? Whatever she was doing that night when I told her to leave me alone and go and find adventure if she wanted it so bad… why had she chosen to do it wearing that dress?

I pushed the thoughts out of my mind for the time being, hoping I would come to some sort of resolution in the background while I focused on the more pressing problem: food. The truth is, I had never fished for any damn thing in my life and even if I was a pro, I’m not sure how I was supposed to do anything with my bare hands. I waded out into the water till my knees. The water was blue and clear. And empty. I waded further out to my neck, dunked my head in and opened stinging eyes to peer underneath. Still nothing, and now my eyes hurt.

I waded back out of the water again.

I had died and gone to hell, that was what was happening to me. I had spent my life setting myself up as a high earner so I could provide for my future family. I had painstakingly made long term investments, devoted myself to earning an education in a field I knew would be the most lucrative and was soon going to buy a three bedroom house with a garden for Ellie to sit in and read during her pregnancy.

And yet, none of that mattered now. It was just me, my pasty ass, and the blinding fact that I was going to starve soon if I couldn’t conjure up some real sustenance.

Why hadn’t I ever spent more time at the gym? If that buff army asshole thought he was such hot shit, why wasn’t he out here, ‘fishing’? I wanted to say Ellie wasn’t capable of that. She wasn’t the kind of woman to be impressed by some hot jock and throw away a promising life with a real man. But maybe, you know …maybe she was.

After unsuccessfully trying to find something swimming in the water and realizing how hopeless that was, I drifted further out and found some rocks. I could try pick mussels off them or find a crab in the pools or something. The thought was truly appalling but I sure as hell wasn’t going to turn up to the group empty handed.

I cast my eyes back to the island.

I couldn’t see anyone. For all I knew she was spreading her legs this very minute, letting that asshole take advantage of her. I picked up a rock and hurled it to the ground with a scream, shattering it into shards that went flying into the rock pools. Sea birds overhead peeped and cried but a second after my tantrum the world was exactly the same as before. I shook my head to clear it, told myself to just man up and look for something to fucking eat.

I had hit her once or twice, sure. If I could imagine myself in a court of law right now, defending my actions, I’d be hard pressed. But we had moved on from all of that. She knew that I didn’t really mean it, that I just had a problem with managing my stress and she just had a problem provoking me when she knew I needed to be left alone. She knew it was all just an accident. We had both realized how dangerous alcohol was for me, and we’d moved on. Or at least I thought we had moved on.

My eye caught the beautiful blue gleam of mother-of-pearl on some black rocks. I hobbled over, the sharp rocks cutting me underfoot. There were a few clusters of mussel shells wedged in the cracks of some rocks and I crouched down to examine them. I had never been so happy to see something in all my life. My stomach growled.

With shaking, sore fingers, I got to work tearing the mussels off, watching some of them slowly and sinuously shut their shells on me. I stuck my fingers in one, wrenched the shell open and took a look inside. It was a wet, pale ball that looked like snot. But it was food.

There was enough here for all six of us. I peered around, and decided I’d have to make some kind of container to carry them back to the others. After some thought I pulled my shirt off, knotted it at the open end and made a makeshift bag. I stuffed this so full of mussels it made the cotton bulge and stretch. Clutching the bag like Santa, I waded back into the water and swam slowly back to shore, feeling a little more upbeat. Maybe it wouldn’t be so hard to play Robinson Crusoe out here after all.

The sky was blue overhead, and the water felt delicious and cool on my bare chest. She had looked beautiful, I’d give her that. As I swam I let her image float into my mind. The torn bodice of her dress. The way her hair was all wild and knotted around her face. Her wide open eyes and god, those tits. Nevermind tropical beach paradises, Ellie’s breasts were the real heaven on earth. By the time I arrived back at the shore, I had settled on my next move: I would forgive her. Then I would have to fuck her.

It was predictable, I know. But I had to claim my territory. Call it the brute in me, I was guilty as charged. But all the old rules of my life didn’t seem to hold here anyway. I’d find her, take her somewhere quiet, and let her know that it was all OK, that I was going to take care of her, and I forgave her everything. None of it mattered anymore, not after the brush with death we’d both endured. Marriage is all about compromise, about adapting to the challenges life throws your way and making the best of it that you can. I would do that for her. She was afraid. She had made some bad decisions. But that was all in the past now.

By the time I waded onto the dry sand an hour later, I was horny as hell and could think of nothing but taking her, right here and right now, under the sun.

Thankfully, I found her alone. She was sitting in a sea of green, and as I walked closer, I could see it more clearly: she was surrounded by palm fronds. She was sitting in an awkward cross-legged position, a long frond over her lap as her little white hands worked quickly over the torn leaf ribbons. She looked up at me and tried to smile.

“Where did you learn to do that?” I asked her and looked down at the woven leaves. It was remarkable.

“This? It’s just braiding. If I can make a few layers of these, it’ll make a nice roof. I don’t know how waterproof it’ll be, but if it’s slanted, like this, and I put a few more fronds on top to channel the water off, it’ll hopefully keep us all dry.”

Maybe we’d never speak again about the wreck. Maybe we’d just live the rest of our lives talking about this and that. Maybe we’d live here forever.

“Ellie? Ellie, I’m sorry,” I said, dumped my bag of mussels on the sand and came to sit beside her.

“I’m sorry too,” she said, and her fingers kept working, flicking the long thin leaves up, over and down again. I tried to help by feeding her the next branch when she reached the end of her current one. We worked together for a while like this, in silence.

“What happened, Ellie?”

Her hands paused.

“I went out. I met up with him. He saved my life. Nothing happened.”

I hated that she seemed to be using as few words as possible. At least she knew how bad it looked.

“You dressed up,” I said quietly. Her dress seemed to be disintegrating all around her. I had the wild thought of it falling to pieces completely, leaving her some kind of wild beach woman with a coconut bra and a grass skirt. I hated that I still wanted her. Badly.

“I’m not mad, Ellie.”

“Good, you have nothing to be mad about.”

Silence.

“I fetched some mussels for us.”

“Great. Once Todd makes some fire, we can cook them.”

Fucking Todd. I bristled at the mention of his name.

“Ellie, can we… let’s go somewhere private. I just want to speak to you, alone.”

She looked at me.

“We are alone.”

I sighed.

“I just want some privacy…”

She seemed to understand what I was saying. She gently let the frond fall from her fingers and stroked her hands over her thighs.

“Of course. Can you carry me though? My foot is really fucked up.”

I caught her eye and we stared at one another for a moment. She was the same Ellie as always. Only now there was an entire storm between us. And there was Todd, taking up too much fucking room.

I leant forward, gently took her in my arms and she dutifully linked her own arms around me and rested her head gently against my chest. Without a word, I carried her into the dark green forest at the heart of the island.

It was a dream. A dirty, delicious fantasy. My woman. Half naked, unable to flee. I was hungry, and angry, and who knew if either of us would see another day.

She was heavy, but I knew she was sensitive about her weight and so I tried as hard as I could to not show any strain. None of us had had a drop of fresh water or a bite to eat since the night before, but I wasn’t going to let that get in the way. I picked my way over twisted branches, and the light grew dimmer around us as we crept deeper and deeper into the growth. It was an alien landscape, all broad leaves and twisting plants that clamored over ones another, so that you couldn’t make out one individual plant in the whole mess. Maybe she’d be more thrilled to come out here with me if I was brandishing a manly machete.

“Is this really happening, Anthony? How did we even get here? I still can’t believe that any of this is happening. Like this is all just a dream and any second I’m going to wake up in my bed, on the ship, and you’ll be there with me and none of this would ever have happened…”

We had come to a clearing in the trees, and I lowered her down onto a soft mat of moss ringed loosely with ferns. It was completely shaded, silent, and cool in this place.

“It feels like a dream to me as well,” I said.

It was the kind of landscape out of which a jaguar could appear, or else a mysterious pygmy warrior. And ancient place. All around us was shadowy, and smelt like damp wood and crushed leaves. I crouched down beside her and stroked my hands down her legs, lingering gently over the scratches and bruises on her pretty skin.

She was strange. Receptive, but different somehow. She couldn’t look me in the eyes, but her hands easily went to mine and followed my tracing, guiding them up higher on her thighs to lift the ragged lace of her dress. There was nothing but the sound of our breathing. Even here the wind and soft roar of the ocean was muffled by the wall of vegetation surrounding us.

“I never want to lose you,” I said, fingertips finding her naked skin.

Her only response was to lay back a little, and pull her knees up closer around her. She looked like she had something just on the tip of her tongue, something she wanted to say. When she didn’t speak, I cleared my throat and spoke myself.

“When I thought you were gone I… it suddenly made me see things so clearly, you know? I don’t know I was pushing so hard for the wedding, Ellie, but when it comes down to it, that’s not what really matters. I don’t mind if you want to wait another few months and--”

“Shhh!”

I looked at her but her eyes were glued to some spot in the trees behind me.

“Ellie?”

“I think there’s someone there,” she whispered and pointed.

The bulge in my trousers was clearly visible when I sprang up and stood between her and the noise. She noticed it. And I noticed her noticing it. She hobbled to her feet, winced silently and came to creep beside me as we moved to a parting in the trees and tried to find the source of a soft rustling noise. My heart was pounding in my ears.

I pulled some long creepers aside and created a window we both looked into. To my amazement, her hand went down to touch me. Like a secret little mouse, her fingers ran over my body and cupped loosely over the bulge there. Still staring straight ahead, she began to stroke me idly. I couldn’t tell if I was terrified of what was in the bushes or so maddeningly turned on that the she didn’t even think it necessary to stop what she was doing. I throbbed painfully in her hands, the thrill of her touch shooting all through me and making it very hard to focus indeed. But in a second, the source of the noise became clear.

“Look, it’s them,” she whispered so quietly it was almost inaudible.

Two pale, naked bodies appeared out of the dense jungle. It was hard at first to understand the writhing knot of limbs in front of us, but one thing was clear: they were having sex. Right there, a few yards in front of us in a similar mossy clearing secluded by tangled branches. They hadn’t seen us. I felt like everything in my body stopped working – my breath, my brain, my heartbeat – and I suddenly became one thing and one thing only: my cock.

We both froze on the spot; no motion except for Ellie’s deviant little hand moving slowly but smoothly over me. Outrageously, her hand now slipped under the band of my trousers and onto my naked flesh, pulling long, secret strokes over my stiff cock. I snapped a glance over at her but her eyes were glued on the squirming couple in the bushes ahead. The sense of everything being a dream was getting deeper, and weirder.

I could do nothing but watch. And feel. And swallow hard as her expert fingers still seemed to remember where to touch me. At least some things hadn’t been destroyed by the wreck. My mind switched off and I found my body responding on its own to what was unfolding around me.

I was hungry. I was dehydrated. Maybe even traumatized. But there was something so disgustingly hot about watching those two, knowing that Ellie was watching everything as well, and that she liked it, and that I could feel how much she liked it when the pace of her hand slowly picked up…

The geometric tattoos on the guy’s shoulder rippled and pulsed as he curled again and again into the softness of his wife’s body beneath him. I couldn’t make out much of her form, except for an outstretched thigh that clung to him desperately and the full curve of her bouncing breast. They fucked feverishly, secretly, trying to stay quiet. It was wrong, watching them like that, but my body had already approved and I soon felt myself edging closer, panic rising as I wondered how I could stifle a groan in the dark, leafy stillness of this weird Eden we had stumbled into. Ellie stared and stared, hypnotized. She was timing her strokes with the wet slapping sounds coming quietly from the couple before us. It was the sexiest, dirtiest thing I’d ever done. And I couldn’t believe I was doing it with her.

When I whimpered, she shot me a wide-eyed look and then darted her eyes back to the couple. I nearly had a heart attack to see that they had stopped moving, and were now pricking their ears, aware perhaps that they weren’t alone. I tensed my muscles and made as though to dash off, but Ellie stood firm, holding me tightly and giving me a strange pleading look. I swear she was close to making me come there and then, and she knew it.

What happened next was nothing I could have expected. The couple exchanged some quiet words with one another, and, easy as can be, the woman twisted her head to the side, turned her face fully to where we were hiding and immediately made eye contact with Ellie. But she didn’t flinch. In fact, neither of them did. It was as though they were both bewitched by the other. He buried into her neck and, to my amazement, began to slowly fuck her again; all while her eyes were pinned shamelessly on Ellie.

I was about to say something but Ellie’s hand started to work desperately over me again, stroking more quickly this time, and it felt so good I could scarcely summon the will to push her off. We stayed locked together like this, the woman and Ellie holding each other’s gaze, them screwing over there and Ellie stroking me quickly to an orgasm over here. Is that what we’d come to? Barely a day on this island and we were rutting in the forest like depraved savages?

As angry and uncomfortable and disgusted as it made me, my cock was still rock hard and threatening to explode any second. I was sure I was well-hidden, and I could barely see the other two that well, but that didn’t matter. It was in the eyes. It was in how utterly brazen Ellie was being, how she didn’t hesitate, not even for a second. My eyes nearly popped out of my skull when a rustle made me look down and notice that Ellie’s other hand was under her dress, bobbing just as furiously between her legs as the other one. Her knees bent softly and parted, and she bit her lower lip again and again as she gawped at the spectacle.

When the woman in the bushes came it was like a sexy chain reaction that couldn’t be stopped. It was a strangled, tortured little moan that began as an animal-like whimper and then, with each successive thrust of her husband’s hips, escaped her control and shattered the silence.

“Fuck!” she cried, and he grunted hard on top of her, delivering a few last violent thrusts before collapsing heavily on top of her. Still, even still she held Ellie’s gaze, and in the next heartbeat Ellie’s legs seemed to buckle under her and her spine arched as she threw her head back and succumbed to her own orgasm.

The sound of that hot, sweet little surrender from her lips was enough to push me right over the edge, and I shot big, juicy gobs of cum all over her hand and onto the dark green leaves hiding us.

I groaned and shuddered in her small hands as she squeezed and milked me, the waves of her own orgasm not distracting her from her rhythm. Pulsing hard and twitching as I came down, I looked over to see her with a strange, naughty look on her face. She was squeezing her knees together, her eyes nearly rolled back into her head. Looking to the couple again, I could no longer see them anymore, and realized that they were probably already moving out, getting dressed quickly and running off.

It took me a moment to catch my breath. I stared at Ellie. She stared at me.

“You liked that,” I said. I didn’t know if it was a question or a surprised statement.

“You did,” she said and wiped the white off her hand on the front of my trousers. I mean, the evidence was certainly there.

“Are you gonna get us out of here?” she whispered.

Gathering myself, I reached over, hoisted her up and tried to pad my way through the growth and back to the shoreline. I could feel her heart beat against my chest. I could smell the sweat off her.

“They saw us,” I said.

“Oh yes, they certainly did.”

“They didn’t care,” I said.

She paused before replying.

“I don’t think I cared either.”

“That was wrong, Ellie. I don’t know what to say but …what happened back there, that was…”

“Kind of hot?”

I said nothing. This whole situation suddenly took on a dirty, sour tone and I didn’t like it one bit. She disgusted me. The couple we had ‘spied’ on disgusted me. But more than all of that, I was disgusted with myself, and the fact that I had come harder than I had in as long as I could remember.

Chapter 11 - Todd

She had torn the lower half of her shirt off, turning it into a tight crop top that exposed her midriff. She claimed it was to make more bandages for Ellie’s leg. But I knew why she had really done it.

We had worked for the last hour to put together our little sand dwelling: a seven foot by seven foot cube in the cool, packed sand, bolstered on the inside by tree branches and protected overhead by Ellie’s woven palm frond roof.

It had come together surprisingly fast, and when the daylight seemed to reach its apex and wind down into the late afternoon, I felt more confident that we’d be OK through the night. Another storm was definitely brewing, and the mood around our ‘camp’ grew darker as the light slowly left the sky. But I knew we’d be OK. We had made it this far. If I could only find a way to beat off Charlie’s advances and get something to eat by the time the sun went down, I’d call this day a success.

She was standing over the fire now, looking triumphant.

“You’re still mad, just admit it,” she said as she looked down at the flames.

“Would you drop it? I don’t care anymore, really.”

“You don’t care somebody tried to drug you?” She pushed some sand around the fire with her foot to make a windbreak.

“Well, shit, Charlie, what do you want me to say?”

She shrugged and frowned, crouching down to shape the sand with her hands.

“It’s hard for me too, Todd. I don’t know why I did it. But last night, when I didn’t know if any of us would even live to the morning, I really got to thinking…”

I tried to ignore her yacking and focus on the task at hand. I was exhausted and my muscles ached, but I wouldn’t stop till I knew I’d tied these branches on as firmly as I could.

“I realized that I want to live my life differently, Todd. I had a breakthrough moment, and something just …snapped. I had an insight. Why I am like I am. I felt so bad about what I did to you, and it seemed like the end was so close, you know? And I realized, I needed to change, I needed to be different…”

“Could you just hold this for a second?” I said. She came forward and held down a piece while I twisted some fiber around it to bind it to the others.

“Are you even listening?” she asked as I worked away. I tied a knot, wiped my brow and looked out over the choppy ocean water.

“Charlie, no offense, I’m glad you’re feeling better, but I think all that stuff’s your own business.”

Her expression fell.

“I was just trying to apologize, to explain--”

“You don’t have to explain anything,” I said and looked her straight in the eyes. “I get it. I’m not mad. Can we just stop talking about it, please?” I had the strong sense that this conversation hadn’t exactly gone the way she planned it.

“So, you and that girl… what’s going on with that?” she said, trying to sound casual.

The look I gave her was harsh, but I didn’t feel too guilty about that. She immediately shut up.

“I’m done talking Charlie, about this or any other topic.”

We both worked silently on our pit for a while, she tamping down the sand walls and me checking for holes in the ‘ceiling’. I wanted to see Ellie again. I didn’t care about her meathead fiancé. I didn’t care that I couldn’t have her. I just had to see her again. As pathetic as it was, the thought that I may get the chance to huddle close to her in this two-bit dwelling tonight was something small to look forward to.

Charlie was over at the fire again, this time swirling around the mussels in the ashes with a stick, sending steam billowing into the air.

“You know, you might as well forget about her,” she said quietly.

“What?”

“That girl. She’s taken. It sucks but you’re not going to get anywhere with that.”

I said nothing.

“But I’m here.”

I stopped my work and looked at her.

“You can hate me as much as you want, but we work well together, Todd, and you know it. I’ve kept quiet for a long time, but I don’t know, I guess being out here and with things being the way they are, I can finally just be blunt with you. I’m available. OK? I’m here. Maybe it’s fate. But the offer’s there. I want you. There, I said it.”

I let out a long, low sigh.

“Charlie, I told you how I feel about relationships, and how I’m not ready to--”

“Who said anything about a relationship?”

She stirred the mussels again, their blue shells clinking in the fire. It wasn’t enough food. Not by a long shot.

Why was I resisting her, anyway? If help didn’t come to rescue us, I didn’t see how we’d survive for long out here. Charlie made me uneasy, and she always had. But did that matter now? With my brief little Ellie fantasy gone up in a puff of smoke? I frowned as I realized Charlie wasn’t exactly being unreasonable. She was a fit, no-nonsense woman and she was offering me sex. Could I live with myself if I took her up on her offer? If I wasn’t even going to live anyway, did that change anything?

“Tonight,” she said, “after it gets dark, let’s go off somewhere, just you and I. I think I saw some interesting things over that way. What do you say?”

Before I could answer, some rustling in the bushes announced the arrival of the married couple, who came marching over towards us with a bundle of roots and leaves tied up with a vine. They both looked a little flushed. I’m not sure what I was expecting, but they seemed almost suspiciously happy for people who were stranded on a desert island and had no escape in sight.

“We have no idea what this stuff is but we tried some and it tastes OK, no ill effects so far,” Carl said and dumped the bundle by the fire. “I don’t know what these leaves are but Livvy says they taste a bit like rocket, so we could try eating them.”

Charlie and I started to examine the bundle just as Anthony came clamoring through the same bushes with Ellie in his arms. They, too, had strained looks on their faces. Nevermind. Everyone’s nerves were fried, that was understandable. Charlie and I exchanged knowing looks but I put my head back down and got to work stripping the tough skin off what looked like an edible tuber.

“I see the mussels have gone onto the fire,” Anthony said.

The last thing I wanted to do was talk to that useless fucker so I held my tongue.

“Yeah,” Charlie said, “they’re OK, trouble was, a lot of the shells were empty.”

“Empty?”

“Yeah, next time you should check inside – not all of them had a mussel inside, or else the mussel was dead and gross, you know?”

Anthony nodded but looked like he was trying hard not argue with her. I’ve dealt with men like him all my life: they think that because they’re a big shot in one area, they’re automatically big shots in every area. That if he has a fancy law degree, it means he couldn’t possibly suck at knowing how to gather mussels. Well, if he thought we weren’t going to call him out on the fact that he failed at his only task on this island, he had another thing coming.

Everyone sat silently around our meager dinner, a little dejected. The couple sat together on the sand and the rest of us found a few seats in misshapen pieces of driftwood. A few crudely steamed mussels and a handful of raw roots was hardly a nourishing dinner, but by the looks on everyone’s faces, it was better than the gnawing hunger that had been growing all day. I looked out over the fading sunset and thought about the size of the problem we were really facing. Even if we found food, another day would always come, the challenge would reset and we’d need to find it all over again.

Anthony was now looking over the dwelling, examining the rough ‘stitches’ I’d made to loop Ellie’s frond mats together.

“No way this’ll hold if the wind picks up,” he said matter-of-factly. I lifted my eyebrows at him.

“You’re welcome to build your own hut, buddy.”

Though everyone was silent, I could feel their attention swivel over to us. I was tired, hungry and miserable, but I wasn’t averse to kicking this guy’s ass if he came looking for it a second time today.

“Todd, please,” Ellie said. Anthony shot her a dark look.

“The mussels are ready,” Charlie said and sprang to her feet. “Looks like everybody gets four of them, plus some roots and things to chew on. It’s too dark to go swimming out there now, but tomorrow we can gather more, and maybe get some fish, too.”

I hated to admit it to myself, but I was thinking about her offer. Thinking about how good it would be to have one hard, angry fuck, just once, just to get it out of my system and clear my head. I noticed how the cooling night air was bringing tiny goosebumps to the skin on her belly.

“I’ll go and hunt for the mussels tomorrow,” I said.

Anthony flung aside a rock he had been passing from hand to hand and glared at me.

“Yeah? Well, you do that then. I’ll stay here and build us a shelter that’s not going to cave in and kill us all in our sleep, deal?”

I said nothing. My fists were itching and I wanted nothing more than to show this guy what I thought of him. But it wasn’t worth it. Ellie wasn’t mine. There was no use being angry about something that never could have happened, and wasn’t ever going to. She had made a mistake. I was just a quick holiday she took from her real life, a life she seemed firmly plugged back into now.

“It’s not much, but it’ll hold,” I said and stared into the fire. “I hope y’all are happy to huddle close tonight. We’re all going to get to know each other real well…”

“Oh, I think we’re all already well acquainted,” Livvy said and caught Ellie’s eye. They just stared at each other for a moment, really intensely.

Strange.

I couldn’t put my finger on it, but the look they exchanged was disconcerting.

I didn’t understand it.

And I didn’t like it.