One by one, they all died while I stood there and watched.
My memories were interrupted by a deafening roar as Raine suddenly threw herself at me. Her little fists were pounding on my chest while tears rolled down her face.
“You have to tell me what happened to him!” she screamed at me. “You have to tell me! Tell me now, Bastian Stark, you son of a bitch!”
I was still so tensed, I couldn’t even understand what she was doing at first. Once I realized she was trying to hurt me, I couldn’t figure out what I should do about it. I could let her continue, since the most damage she was going to do to me was some slight bruising. No, that wasn’t going to work because she was using up a ton of energy – energy she couldn’t afford to waste. I could cold-cock her and knock her out – she might be more sensible when she woke up. No, I couldn’t do that. Shit, I’d already hit her once. I wasn’t going to repeat that, no matter what the reason. I was going to have to find a way to subdue her…gently.
Was that even possible?
“Raine, for fuck’s sake, stop it!” I tried wrapping my hands around her arms and pulling her away, but she continued to struggle against me, screaming and crying. When I let go of her, she went back to her ineffectual poundings, which didn’t exactly hurt but were starting to be fucking annoying. Finally, I just wrapped her up in a bear hug and held her against my chest, mostly immobilized.
She fought against me for a while but eventually gave in to exhaustion. Her heavy sobs shook us both as she cried against my chest the same way she had the first night on the raft. Every few minutes she would reiterate that I had to tell her what happened to him. I didn’t answer her, though. I knew no one in their right mind really wanted to know how someone they loved died – not when it was like that.
Eventually, she calmed and I lay back, bringing her with me and keeping my arms wrapped around her. She let out one last shuddering breath and seemed to give up. Her eyes closed, but I didn’t think she was actually asleep. I ran my hand over the top of her head, intrigued by the soft texture of her hair. When she had touched my hair, it seemed to have relaxed me a little, so I thought maybe I could do the same for her.
“Are you going to tell me?” she asked after we had laid there for quite some time.
“No,” I responded.
“Why not?”
“Because I don’t want to remember it.”
“I need to know,” Raine insisted.
“You want to know,” I corrected. “The problem with that is you can’t ever un-know something. If I tell you, and you don’t like what I have to say, I can’t take it back out of your brain. Believe me, you don’t want to know this.”
“Tell me, please.” Raine raised her head from my chest and looked at me with reddened eyes framed in deep, dark lashes. I didn’t know if it was the look in her eyes, the nature of her request, or just the way she said “please” that destroyed my resolve. Whichever it may have been, I gave in. It was possible she could have asked me for anything in the world at that point and I couldn’t have denied her. I couldn’t let her know that, though.
“All right,” I said, taking a deep breath, “but not now, and I’m not telling you all of it. I just…can’t.”
Raine nodded and turned her head so her cheek rested on my chest again. I ran my fingers up and down her back in silence for several minutes.
“You were the one he was thinking about when he died,” I finally said. “The last thing he said was, ‘I have a daughter named Raine.’ Then he was shot.”
I felt her tears drop onto my chest again, and her body shuddered once before her grip tightened on me.
“Thank you, Bastian.”
“Don’t thank me for that,” I snarled at her. “Don’t thank me for any of this shit.”
“Tell me something else,” she pressed.
“Not about that,” I said. I’d beg her if I had to.
“Will you talk to me about something else?”
I felt my body start to relax immediately. I’d be willing to talk to her about most anything else at this point. I’d tell her about Theresa or Jillian or any other part of my fucked-up life if she would just stay away from that one particular subject.
“Like what?” I asked.
“I don’t know – tell me something else about you.”
“You’re a glutton for sob stories, huh?”
“I want to know more about you.”
“You’re not right in the head,” I scoffed. I took a deep breath and let it out in a sigh. “What do you want to know?”
“Tell me how you got that scar on your back.”
“I told you already,” I said. “I got stabbed.”
“Tell me the whole story,” Raine clarified.
“I’ll tell you,” I said, “but then you have to tell me something about you.”
“Deal,” she said, and I thought I felt her smile.
“There was this guy named David,” I started. “Tall dude, drank a lot, had been playing the games a long time, and he’d won far more than I had. I don’t know how many, I just know that the bookies were giving him a lot better odds than me or any of the other players. We all knew he was a dirty player – if you could really call it that in a game without rules. He’d get someone to tell him where he could find the weapons on the course so he would get to them first or smuggle in something – I don’t know what. He definitely didn’t play fair.”
“The game was in the desert – somewhere in Africa in the savanna or whatever. I don’t know, but it was fucking hot. It had been going on for about three days, I think. There were two dozen of us at the beginning, but we were down to three: David, a chick that called herself Honey, and me. It was a no weapons tournament, but there was still a lot of stuff around you could use. I’d been hiding out for a couple hours on top of a pile of rocks. You couldn’t have seen me from the ground.”
“How big an area was it?” Raine asked.
“Maybe two or three square miles, all fenced off so you knew where the boundaries were. Not huge or anything. We were air dropped. All the spectators were set up in some posh hotel in Cairo. I think that was it, anyway. Really, I have no idea where we were.”
“I bet they were in the air conditioning,” Raine mused. “I could use some of that right now.”
“Yeah, no kidding,” I laughed. I paused for a while, thinking about the air drop and the giant pile of elephant shit I nearly landed in when I hit the ground. Raine turned her head back to look at me, her eyes expectant. “Do you want me to keep going?”
“Yes.”
“Fine.” I took another breath and kept going. “I watched Honey as she came up over the bank, watching all around and looking for me or David. I had a garrote I made out of the bottom of my shirt. I had already taken out two other players with it. I jumped down from the rock and made her the third.”
“You strangled her?”
“Yeah,” I said softly. I waited for her to try to get away from me, or at least get herself on the other side of the raft, but she didn’t move. I felt her hand twitch where it was resting on my stomach, but she didn’t make a move to leave. I paused for another minute before going on.
“I was just finishing with her when David came up behind me. I don’t know where he got the knife – there weren’t supposed to be any weapons at all in this game except ones you made yourself. I heard him behind me just before he swiped it across my arm and back. I managed to turn so the first hit wasn’t lethal, like it should have been.”
“I guess I lost it at that point. I don’t remember it hurting right then. I just remember being pissed off that he had that thing at all. I’d been in enough knife fights to know how to play, though. I dodged him when he took another swing at me, and we went back and forth for a bit. I got a couple good punches into his face, but I couldn’t get as close as I wanted with him waving the fucking knife around, and I kept feeling blood running down my back.”
“David was good,” I said. “I have to give him t
hat. He knew how to fight, with or without the weapons. Maybe if he hadn’t stabbed me, he would have won. Since he did stab me, and it was deep enough that I bled all over the ground, he ended up losing his footing in the pool of blood. I got on top of him, smashed his hand, took his knife, and slit his throat.”
I stopped, and Raine was quiet for a while. For a minute, I thought she had fallen asleep, but she finally had something to say.
“This really was a game for you?”
“That’s how I saw it, yeah.”
“That’s really kinda messed up, you know.”
“No shit,” I said with a humorless laugh. “I don’t recall telling you I was anything other than a lunatic.”
Raine’s finger was slowly moving back and forth over a spot on my stomach where there was another small scar. I couldn’t even remember how I got it, but it sure did feel good to have her running her finger over it. Of course, that made me wonder what it would feel like to have her fingers running over something else. I needed a distraction before my shorts busted open.
“It’s your turn,” I told her.
“What do you want to know?”
“Tell me about your last boyfriend.”
“Seriously?” she asked. “You want to hear about my love life?”
“Yeah,” I said, smirking. Then I realized how bad an idea that might be, considering our positions. “But you might want to get off me because I’m bound to get excited by the details.”
She slapped her hand playfully against my chest, but she did sit up. I did the same and watched her out of the corner of my eye while she seemed to be composing herself.
“I’m going to assume by the look on your face that you aren’t seeing him anymore?”
“No, I’m not,” Raine said. “He was really just a friend to me. He helped me after my father died. I loved him, in a way, but not the way he wanted.”
“What was his name?”
“Andrew,” she told me. “His father was my father’s best friend, and we grew up together. After my father died, he came over a lot and just helped me through all of it. He’d drive me to the courthouse and wait while I met with the judges and then console me when they told me no – when they told me no again. I think I just needed his closeness at the time, but he wanted something more. So, I gave it to him.”
“Did you fuck him?”
“Do you always have to be so crass?”
“Pretty much, yeah.”
“Well, I’m not going to talk about that,” she said with conviction.
“You did fuck him,” I said with a laugh.
She smacked me playfully again and damn if the sound of her skin hitting mine didn’t get me thinking about other ways our skin could be making contact.
“Come on,” I said, figuring if she could pressure me into talking about shit I didn’t want to talk about, turnabout was fair play. “Tell me.”
“He was my first,” she said softly, “and I was his. We were in the back of his dad’s minivan parked on a deserted road. Neither one of us knew what we were doing. Frankly, the whole thing was a disaster.”
“So you had crappy first time sex,” I clarified. She wouldn’t be the only chick to say that. “Did you do him again?”
“We tried a couple more times,” Raine said with a giggle, “but really, it wasn’t much better. It didn’t hurt, but I still don’t know what the fuss is all about.”
“The fuss?” I said, leaning back away from her a bit so I could look at her from another angle. “The fuss is how fucking awesome it feels, babe. Didn’t you notice?”
I let out a short laugh.
“It was…okay.”
“Okay? That’s all you can say about it? I mean, I’m not a chick, but the ones I’ve fucked thought it was better than okay.”
“Well, that’s not how I felt about it,” Raine grumbled.
“Holy shit,” I said as the realization hit me. “You never did come, did you? You guys didn’t know what you were doing, and he couldn’t make you come.”
“I don’t know,” she said, her shoulders moving up and down. “I mean, it was nice after a while, but…”
“Nice? Just nice? Yeah, baby. I’ll tell you one thing for sure; you didn’t have an orgasm if it was just nice.”
“Whatever.”
“Seriously, Raine?” I shifted my position so I was looking at her straight on. “You’ve never had one, have you?”
I couldn’t help it; I laughed again. No wonder she seemed so uptight about the whole thing. She had no idea what she was missing.
“Stop laughing at me!”
“Really, babe,” I said, trying to stifle my snickers but not being overly successful. It was just too incredible. “I’m not laughing at you; really I’m not. I just can’t believe a girl as fucking gorgeous as you hasn’t had a team of guys begging to bring you to orgasm.”
I could see her cheeks darken with her blush as she looked down at the floor away from me. She must have had offers – she said she had gone to college for a while, right? There was no way a chick this hot walking around campus wouldn’t be invited to every frat party in town. If she went to just one single party, there was no way some guy didn’t try to get up in there.
An image of Theresa flashed through my head for a second, and it suddenly occurred to me that something like that could have happened to Raine, too. I mean, it wasn’t a crime reserved for the underprivileged or anything. Date-rape in college was a fucking epidemic.
My hands clenched into fists. If someone had done that to Raine, I’d paddle this fucking raft to wherever the hell she went to school and kill the motherfucker.
“Raine…” I had to clear my throat to keep going. “Did someone ever…hurt you? Like that?”
“What?” Raine looked up to me. The look in her eyes was so confused; I knew immediately I must have been wrong and relaxed a little.
“Thank God,” I mumbled.
“Oh!” Raine’s eyes got wide and she shook her head violently. “No, nothing like that. I just never really dated after Andy.”
So, either she turned down the offer to go to the parties, or she pushed the guys away. Why would she do that? Mourning for her father? Ticked at the ex-boyfriend who couldn’t get her off? Or did she just not think she would ever enjoy it?
That idea just pissed me off. Of course, my mouth tended to go on about its merry way without consulting my brain and often took my body along with it, so the next thing I knew, I was propositioning her.
“I could do it, you know,” I heard myself say. My voice had dropped down low, but I knew she still heard me. I could hear her breathing increase over the soft lapping of waves against the edge of the raft. I leaned over only a little, bringing my mouth closer to her ear. “I could make you come without even touching you.”
I heard her sharp intake of breath, and then she froze, motionless and not breathing at all. I exhaled slowly, blowing warm air over the skin of her neck. Her arms broke out in gooseflesh.
“I really didn’t want to have this discussion in the first place,” she said, turning away from me with a shiver. She ran her hands up and down her arms. “And now it is definitely over.”
She ended the conversation, but that didn’t stop my mind from thinking about it some more – quite a lot more, actually.
* * * * *
She had only been awake for a half hour or so, but I could have sworn Raine was trying to go for one of those world records where people sat still the longest. I didn’t know what her problem was, and I was annoyed with myself for agreeing to talk about her father the previous night. I was equally annoyed with myself for offering to get her off. She wasn’t the kind of girl I was used to, and I honestly didn’t know how to interact with her without making an ass of myself, so I was trying not to talk at all. If I said anything at this point, it would end up being bitchy.
I collected what morning dew there was from the canopy and added it to the water container, sealing it tight. There wasn’t more th
an half a cup left. There wasn’t enough water to last half the day, and there hadn’t been any other schools of fish close to us lately. The only thing I had seen was a small shark, and cartilage fishes were useless for water.
Raine shifted again, and this time I caught the grimace on her face.
“What’s wrong with you?” I asked.
“What do you mean?”
“You’re in pain or something,” I stated. “What hurts?”
“I’m fine,” she said, her eyes looking away from me quickly as unease crept into her face.
“Bullshit.” I looked her over for a moment and watched her squirm in her bathing suit. Then it hit me what was wrong with her. I took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “You’re chafing in that suit, aren’t you? And those shorts are that stretchy crap that doesn’t breathe.”
She glared over at me and pursed her lips together, negating the need for a verbal response. She had to get out of that suit before it became a serious issue.
“All right, Raine,” I said sternly. “I’m only saying this once. You have to get out of the bathing suit and those shorts. The chafing is fucking annoying when you’re on your beach vacation. Out here it’s a little more serious.”
“Absolutely not.”
“Look,” I growled, “the chafing is going to react to the salt water, and you’re going to end up with sores and even boils. If those get infected, you’re dead – got it? I’ll try to avert my eyes until you fucking heal, but you have to take the fucking suit off.”
“As if you would,” Raine snorted. “It’s not bad – I’ll just be careful. There’s no way you could not look at me in this sized raft.”
She was right, of course, and if I was going to be totally honest with myself, I wouldn’t even have tried to avoid staring at her. I liked the idea of having her lying around here naked.
“Well, how about I take mine off, too?” I suggested with a smirk. “We’d be even.”
“Not even close,” she smirked back. She waved her hand in the air but generally pointed in my direction. “You’re probably making all of this up just to get me out of my clothes.”
“Sure,” I smiled right back at her. “I actually planted that rash between your legs as well. Sneaky bastard, aren’t I?”