I swam against the waves, mostly doing a basic crawl stroke and kicking furiously behind me. I wasn’t into form or anything that might be considered value-added strokes – I just wanted to get as much energy as possible out of my body before it exploded either in anger or something much worse.
Stroke, stroke, kick, kick, breathe…
I focused on telling my body what to do, breathing, and not thinking until the buildup of lactic acid in my muscles told me I had probably had enough. I lifted my head and treaded water as the waves lifted me into the air and lowered me again. I looked back over my shoulder and saw the raft bobbing up and down on the swells – a bright orange blob in the middle of the Caribbean Sea. I thought about the woman inside of it, and my mind wandered to the sensation of her hand against my face.
Stop thinking.
I tried floating on my back and staring up at the clouds for a few minutes, but the waves were a little choppy and kept trying to dunk me under. I also couldn’t stop my mind from thinking back to Raine – how smart she was, how brave she was, and how she refused to put up with my shit. It made me smile and cringe at the same time. I reached down to my waist to grab the tether and hauled myself back to the raft, ignoring the burn in my biceps.
I pulled myself onto the edge of the raft and shook water from my hair. I sat there for a moment and watched the waves crawl up my dangling legs and then recede back down again. My head hurt, and the light from the setting sun was amplifying the pain. The swim might have been good for relieving some stress, but the saltwater soaking into my skin wasn’t going to help with my headache too much.
After I had officially wasted enough time staring at the sea, I shook my hair out again, twisted around, and slipped through the opening of the raft. Raine was on the other side, turned sideways and graciously looking down at her hands in her lap. I toweled off and pulled my shorts back on because keeping them off would annoy her, and I really didn’t want to do that anymore. I should have done it anyway because pissing Raine off was in her best interest. Despite the swim, I realized at once that I was still fidgety and, quite frankly, still conflicted and bitchy.
After a quick drink of water, I lay down on my back right where I was without looking at or speaking to Raine. I tapped my fingers against the floor of the raft and stared at the ceiling. I wasn’t sure how long I lay there without speaking, but I had counted well over two hundred taps on the floor, and I hadn’t started counting right away.
“Are you ignoring me now?” Raine asked, her voice quiet and full of trepidation, like she thought I might bite her or something. It probably wasn’t a completely unreasonable assumption.
“Possibly,” I answered. I decided not to elaborate, so for a while there was more silence.
“Mister Fluffy used to chew through his lead when he was left outside too long,” Raine said, totally out of the blue. I felt the muscle tension return instantly. “He would go and hide in the crawlspace underneath the house, and I’d have to crawl under there and get him out. Dad thought when he was alone too long he forgot he had a family and got scared again, like he was when he was first brought to the shelter. I always wondered if it wasn’t because he thought too much. He really was pretty smart.”
“Are you comparing me to your fucking dog again?” I snapped.
“Not necessarily,” Raine said. “Why? Is that what you are doing now, hiding in the crawlspace?”
“Fuck off,” I growled. There was something inside of me that wanted to apologize to her, but I shoved it down. Apologies were pointless, and I wasn’t sorry. Shields at full strength. Engage! “Your analogy is not only insulting but fucking stupid, and I’m pretty fucking tired of hearing it.”
I could feel the tremors in my hands again, signifying either the ineffectiveness of the swim or a reaction to the knot forming just below my sternum. I tried to swallow and couldn’t. I was going to hurt her but only because it was for her own good. If I didn’t do it now, I would certainly do it later. It was better to do it quick – rip that Band-Aid off.
“I wasn’t trying to insult you,” she whispered. “Please stop shutting me out.”
“I never let you in, baby,” I sneered. I managed to swallow this time though it hurt my throat. Maybe I swallowed some salt water or something. “You’d have to get in before I could kick you out.”
“You’re doing this on purpose,” Raine surmised.
“Look, the truth is, I’ve just had it with your shit!” I exploded, pushing myself back up to a sitting position and glaring at her. I grabbed my calves with my hands, hoping it would help with the tremors. I was so fucking sick of my legs shaking, and I wanted a fucking drink fucking now. “I’m not your pet dog, and I’m not your fucking pet project, either!”
“Bastian, I never said…”
“Just shut the fuck up!”
Stop it, stop it, stop it…
I didn’t know how to stop. Everything in my body was so tight – so tense and hard – I couldn’t even stop if I wanted to – I was on complete, reactionary autopilot. I managed to wrap my arms around my knees and lean forward a little, but that was it. I couldn’t look at her because if I did my reaction would be – undoubtedly – violent. I would either lash out more with verbal abuse or I would grab her and violently…beg her to hold me. Fuck.
She was moving closer to me. Why would she do that?
“Don’t fucking touch me!” I jumped back and out of her reach before she could lay a finger on me. I didn’t want her to touch me even if my brain was screaming for it. She shouldn’t want to have her hands on me. I was fucking toxic – ask any woman who knew me. Well, ask the one who ever knew me.
On the other hand, don’t ask her.
My brain spun into old memories, out of control and unbidden by my conscious mind.
“You know what your problem is, Bastian?” Landon placed one foot over the other on top of my cherry wood coffee table and sipped his scotch.
“I thought you said I was a dickhead,” I responded.
“That’s a symptom,” Landon corrected. “Your actual problem is that you have no idea what kind of potential you have. You have no idea what you could do, and your self-pitying nature means you’ll probably never actualize any of it beyond staying alive in the tournaments.”
“I don’t have any pity for myself,” I growled back at him.
“Don’t fucking contradict me,” Landon said, his voice soft and murderously cold. I sat still and tried to steady my breathing. “‘If you call forth what is in you, it will save you. If you do not call forth what is in you, it will destroy you.’”
“What the fuck does that mean?”
“It means if you don’t ever allow yourself to be what you can be, you’re dead,” Landon said. “Maybe you’ll still be walking around and the same shit will still spew out of your mouth, but you’ll be dead to everyone you know. You can sit there and puff on your cigar, but you might as well be a picture in a fucking frame. No life. No spirit. No soul. You don’t have to live like that, Bastian, but if anything’s ever going to change, you’re going to have to let someone inside again someday.”
“Fuck that,” I responded. I glared down at the black satin box on the table next to Landon’s feet, resenting the fact that he had gone through my room to retrieve it just to call me out on my brooding. I reached out and my fingers tightened around the box, which I threw into the fire before storming out of the room.
“That was an expensive tantrum, you self-pitying dickhead.”
“Don’t…” I whispered, not even knowing it was my own voice that called out in a nearly silent plea until it had happened. Part of me was still inside my own head, listening to Landon berate me with the Gospel of Saint Thomas while my body was rocking back and forth uncontrollably. I didn’t know what I was trying to say to her.
“Don’t what, Bastian?”
“Don’t listen to me.” I could barely hear my own voice as I looked into her eyes, and then I knew exactly what I wanted. I wanted h
er to touch me. I needed her to touch me as badly as I had ever needed a drink in my life. I felt like I might actually die right here in the raft if I didn’t feel her touch. True to her intuitive nature, I watched her hand reach out to me, my eyes fixated on her movement. I tried to hold my body still, but it just wouldn’t listen.
“You want me to touch you?” Raine asked. I couldn’t tell if she was trying to get me to acknowledge it or if she was afraid I was going to hit her again. I couldn’t say the words, but I tried to nod. Raine looked at me tentatively but didn’t move. I forced sound from my lungs.
“Sometimes…” I started, but didn’t really know what I wanted to say, so I babbled. “When I say something that…no, I mean…fuck!”
“I don’t know what you are trying to say,” Raine admitted. I tried not to scream at her and forced myself to take a deep breath before speaking again.
“Raine, I never say sorry,” I told her. “It’s meaningless, and it doesn’t change anything.”
“Bastian, please don’t try to explain.”
“I can’t,” I told her. “I don’t know what to say. I just need you to…”
I couldn’t finish, but I didn’t need to. I felt her fingers glide over the backs of my hands and up my arms before running through my hair.
“It’s getting late, and I’m tired. Lie down with me, please?” Raine asked. She started to lean back right where we were. Then one hand was on my face, the other in my hair, and my arms were around her. Raine tugged at me until we were both lying down on the raft with Raine on her back and my head buried against her shoulder. I stopped shaking, but I still felt the panic building up inside of me. I shouldn’t want this. This was going to lead to pain and not the easy kind.
“I’m not going to hurt you, Bastian.”
I tilted my head up from her shoulder, feeling her cheek brush against mine. I looked at her, confused by her words, her tone, her actions – her everything.
“How do you know what to do?” I asked her.
“I don’t understand,” Raine said. “How do I know what to do about what?”
“You make me calm,” I said quietly, “or at least calmer. How do you know how to do that? The way you touch me, the way you look at me…I don’t know what it means.”
For a moment, we stared at each other until I saw a tear drop from her eyelashes. I reached up and placed my hand on her face, wiping the moisture away.
“Don’t cry.”
“No one’s ever done this for you before, have they?” Raine’s tone was sad, but there was anger there as well.
“Done what?”
“Shown you any kind of affection.”
“Affection?” I thought about the word’s definition and what it meant to me, quickly determining it meant nothing. “I don’t know what you mean.”
“No one’s ever cared for you,” Raine expounded. “Or taken care of you.”
“Landon…”
“He did not take care of you,” Raine practically growled. She took a deep breath and let it out slowly, then began running her fingers through the hair on my face again. “Not the way I mean.”
“He got me off the street,” I said, wondering what exactly I was trying to convey. Was I defending him? He gave me purpose at least, though the purpose itself was a little unconventional. “It’s not like I was going to be useful to anyone else. I was a violent, fucked up asshole. I still am. Why would anyone treat me like something I’m not?”
“You deserved affection, Bastian,” Raine’s voice was firm. “You deserved it as a child, and you deserve it now.”
“None of them wanted me,” I heard myself say. I looked up at her, and words just poured from my mouth without any conscious thought behind them. “There was something wrong with me, and none of them ever wanted me to stay. They’d keep the other kids.”
Another tear fell down her cheek.
“Don’t cry, Raine. Not for me.”
“Someone should,” she said. Part of me wanted to contradict her, and part of me just wanted to join her. For a while we looked at each other, and I tried to understand what any of this meant. I didn’t know how long it was before I spoke again.
“I want to, Raine,” I said quietly. “I want to let you in. I just don’t know if I can.”
I pushed more tears away from her cheekbones before dropping my head back to her shoulder and pulling her body a little closer to me with the arm I had around her waist. I closed my eyes and gave into the exhaustion.
…I have both a blanket, ragged though it is, and my bear, Snuffy. I move some of the boxes out of the back of the closet and crawl behind them with the blanket over my head, obstructing my view of the closed closet door. I am sure this time he won’t find me since I am completely covered. I hear his footsteps, his loud voice. The door is opened – I can see light through the blanket – and then there is brighter light as the blanket is torn from me, my arm wrenching painfully as he hauls me out. I try to throw Snuffy back into the corner where he’d be safe, but he grabbed the bear from my hand…
I jerked awake, panting and sweating.
Raine was still in my arms…or I was in hers. Whatever. I had my arm wrapped around her midsection with my head still on her shoulder and her hand slowly tracing patterns through my hair.
“Shh…” I heard Raine’s quiet hush. I turned my head to look up at her and found her staring down at me. I just looked at her for a minute while her hand moved from my hair to my jaw, slowly caressing it. Her lips turned up in the very slightest of smiles.
“I’ve got you now.”
* * * * *
The waves were calm and the morning air cool as I sat motionless on the edge of the raft. The swimming suit-net I had previously constructed lay quietly across my fingertips, and my eyes were trained directly at three large brown pelicans floating on the water about twenty feet away. They had apparently given up on the whole fishing thing as well and were just resting on the water. They hardly took any notice of me or the craft floating near them.
I spread my fingers slowly over my thighs and then raised my hands up just a fraction of an inch, holding them quiet and still again. Like catching fish, netting birds is all about patience. Pelicans weren’t too quick when it came to taking flight from the water, which gave me an added advantage, however slight it may have been.
I pulled my feet up under me, balancing precariously on the edge of the raft and trying not to let the swaying of the craft freak the birds out. Unfortunately, I had caught their attention and had to remain still in that awkward position while they eyed me for a minute. Fortunately, that minute was enough for the raft to drift a little closer to the group.
Springing out away from the raft with the net outspread, I landed in the water on top of all three of them, and the beak of one was thrust through the net. The other two were dunked but resurfaced quickly and took to the air, abandoning their companion. I broke its neck and pulled at the tether until I reached the edge of the raft again.
I used a little of the water to clean the meat from the fragile bones. Bird meat isn’t that great to eat raw because of their predilection for parasites, so I cleaned it carefully. Making sure it was relatively safe was worth a little water waste. I cut the meat into strips and lay them out on the canopy of the raft to dry in the sun. It would make it a little more palatable at least.
When I slid back through the opening, Raine was awake and taking a drink of water.
“Full water rations today,” I told her. “Tomorrow we go to two-thirds.”
“Good morning to you, too,” Raine responded dryly. I stared at her for a minute, a dozen insults forming on my lips. Then I remembered how I woke up, with her hand still tangled through my hair and my head using her stomach as a pillow. She was warm and soft and…
Damnit.
“Good morning,” I mumbled. “We’ll be having a late lunch, but we will be eating.”
“You found fish?”
“No,” I said. “Pelican. I’m sure it??
?s a delicacy somewhere, too.”
Raine snickered, and I smiled at the sight of her bright eyes and the sound of her laughter. We passed the rest of the morning and most of the afternoon talking bullshit. She talked about friends of hers and their crazy shopping habits, and I talked about how much juvenile detention sucked. When I checked the meat again, it was dry enough to eat at least, so I pulled half of it in, handed Raine a chunk, and showed her how to tear it into smaller chunks to eat it.
“It’s your turn,” I told her.
“What do you want me to talk about?” Raine asked.
“Tell me about your mom,” I suggested, silently hoping I wasn’t treading on ground best left untraveled. Then I wondered where the hell that thought even came from. Since when did I give a shit? Oh yeah, since now, apparently. “You never mention her.”
“There isn’t a lot to say,” Raine responded. She placed a small bit of pelican meat into her mouth and made a face while she chewed it. I wasn’t sure if it was because of the taste or my question. “When I was four, she died in a car accident. I was in the backseat, but I don’t remember anything about it. Icy roads, nasty curve that she must have taken too fast for the road conditions. Dad almost wasn’t going to let me learn how to drive when I turned sixteen. He never really got over her.”
“Do you remember her at all?”
“Yes, some things.” Raine looked up to me, then back down to her hands again. “She was your typical post-sixties eccentric hippie. I remember her always taking me places to plant trees and pick up paper along the road to recycle. We even made our own paper from the stuff we found once, and then I drew pictures on it for my dad’s desk at the station. She worked part-time at the hospital, so she was always around when I got home from school. When I was little, Dad said she took me to the playground at a nearby park every day to ride the merry-go-round. Apparently, I liked spinning in circles until I puked.”
Raine chuckled quietly.
“It sounds like you were close,” I said. I’d long stopped feeling jealous of people’s relationships with their parents, but I still found myself wondering if my mother had ever done anything like that with me.