I looked out over the water and saw her out there up to her shoulders but not out far. She must have been sitting down in the sand in what would have been water up to her thighs if she was standing. She was running her hands all over herself with water and a glob of sand apparently trying to take a bath.
I kept my eye on her as I placed the wood into the fire pit I had constructed earlier, just a few feet from the shelter. Raine was now running her hands through her hair, trying to remove sand with her fingers. When she held her arms up to pull each strand out straight, I could easily see the curve of one of her breasts from the back. That’s when my eyes registered her clothes lying in a pile on the sand not too far from the water’s edge and realized she was out there completely naked. Not surprisingly, my cock was very appreciative of this bit of information, and he jumped up to attention, trying to get a better look as the waves splashed around her.
Lucky waves.
I should have averted my eyes as soon as I figured all this out, but there wasn’t any way in hell I was going to do so. Ultimately, I was still an asshole. Instead of acting the part of a gentleman, I made sure the fire was going well and walked onto the beach, trying to be as quiet as possible. It wasn’t difficult to come up to the edge of the water without being heard since the surf was pretty loud. She was still mostly covered by the water, unfortunately, but she had to come out sometime, so I sat on the sand just a foot from her discarded clothing and watched. After about five more minutes, Raine seemed to finish her task and started to get up, turning as she did. I got a pretty decent glimpse of a beautiful pair of breasts before she saw me.
“Oh my God!” she screamed, dropping back into the water on her stomach.
I knew I was being an ass, but I couldn’t help it. I laughed out loud.
“Need some help?” I offered with a cocky grin.
“You scared the crap out of me!” she yelled back. “Go away!”
“You were supposed to stay out of the sun,” I reminded her.
“I wanted to try to…clean up a little.” She looked up at me with narrowed eyes, and then cocked her head to one side. “You shaved.”
“I figured I was overdue,” I said.
“I didn’t recognize you,” she said.
“There isn’t anybody here but me, babe.” I laughed again, but the look on her face silenced me fairly quickly. She was biting into her lower lip, but not in the inquisitive, shy way I was used to seeing. She blinked her eyes a few times.
“I wasn’t sure…I mean…” She stopped talking and tilted her head down towards the water. Her breathing was faster. I had the feeling her heart rate was probably up, too.
“I didn’t mean to scare you,” I said, and it was sort of true. Startle with the hopes of maybe getting a better look at her naked body, yes, but not actually scare. “Who did you think I was?”
“I didn’t know at first,” she said, and tears suddenly burst out.
“Shit, Raine,” I said as I stood up, but then I didn’t know what to do. If I went out to her…well, she was still naked and obviously a little upset about that, too. If I took her clothes out to her, they’d get wet, which also wasn’t a good idea, and now that she was crying, all I wanted to do was hug her. I growled at myself, took a few steps away, and then turned my back to the water.
“Get out of the water and put your clothes on,” I told her. I heard the water splash as she hurried out, still crying. Finally, she said okay, and I figured I was good to turn around. I took half a dozen steps to reach her and wrapped my arms around her waist. “Why are you crying?”
“I really didn’t know who you were at first,” she sniffled. “Just for a second, but I was…naked...and then I thought I didn’t know where you were. What would I do if you weren’t close by? And I got scared…and then I realized it was you…”
She sobbed again, and I held her tighter, not knowing what else to do.
“Come on back to the shelter,” I said softly. “You really need to be out of the sun.”
She didn’t move, so I picked her up, held her up to my chest, and walked back up the dune to the shelter. Raine wrapped her arms around my neck and held on to me tightly, still crying and getting my shoulder all wet. I wanted to be pissed off about it, but I wasn’t. I just didn’t want her to be so upset.
“Raine, please stop,” I said when I reached the lean-to. I didn’t know if I should put her down or not, so I just held on to her and stood there like an idiot. “I don’t know why the fuck you’re crying anyway!”
“I don’t know either!” she sobbed.
How the fuck was I supposed to deal with that? I turned around and ducked through the entrance backwards, and then sat with Raine in my lap. I moved my hand to the back of her head and held her against my shoulder. It’s not like it could get any wetter at this point.
“Please stop,” I said softly. “We may have more water here, but that doesn’t mean you should waste it on crying.”
“I c-c-can’t hel-help it!”
“Take a deep breath,” I told her. I felt her chest rise and fall a couple of times. Slowly, she began to relax against me, the shock wearing off. “Better?”
“A little,” she confirmed. “You shouldn’t have done that.”
As if I was really trying to frighten her. What the fuck? Did she think I would really do that? Well, yeah, she might. It’s not like I’d shown her anything other than the jackass I could be. I took a deep breath and huffed it right back out.
“I was only playing with you,” I finally said under my breath. “I didn’t know you were going to get scared. I kind of forgot I shaved at all when I realized you were out there in the buff.”
“You could at least say you’re sorry,” Raine grumbled.
“I never say ‘sorry,’” I reminded her. “It’s completely meaningless, and it doesn’t change anything.”
“It would mean something to me,” I heard her whisper under her breath.
I started to shake my head and considered telling her the five thousand reasons apologies were completely pointless. Those words didn’t change anything. You can’t take back something you’ve said or done, and throwing a couple more words onto the end of it didn’t erase what had occurred. I could tell her I was sorry, but it wouldn’t change the fact that I had scared her and made her cry. I couldn’t stop that from happening now because time just didn’t flow that way.
In my mind, I heard the sound of shattered glass.
“You stupid, stupid fuck!” The tall man with dark hair on his face screamed, and I tried to get out of the kitchen chair faster than he could reach me. I failed and he grabbed me by my ankle, pulling me off the chair and letting me fall to the floor. A piece of shattered glass embedded itself in the palm of my hand.
“Stop your little girl crying!” he screamed.
“I’-I’m-I’m s-s-sorry!”
“Shut up, you stupid little shit. Sorry doesn’t change anything! Sorry is fucking pointless! Sorry doesn’t make that glass magically fix itself! It ain’t gonna make the money to replace it fucking appear out of the air! Don’t you ever fucking say sorry again, you stupid, stupid…”
Memories I don’t think my conscious mind had ever revealed to me flowed through my head. I wasn’t sure who he was…my father? A foster parent? I didn’t know who he was, only that he terrified me, he hurt me, and I hated him. What I did know was that anything that was meaningful to Raine mattered more to me than anything I may have believed before. I didn’t give a fuck about what anyone else might have said or cared about. Raine’s thoughts and opinions meant more, and whatever Raine wanted – if it was within my power – I was going to give to her.
“I’m sorry, Raine.”
I guess I didn’t need to be such a dick after all.
Chapter 12 - Food
A few feet from the lean-to, Raine and I sat on large palm leaves around a fire, popping bits of the first cooked food we had consumed in weeks. The cooking fire was nothing but hot red coals now,
and since we were done with the actual cooking, I threw a couple of green palm fronds on top of it, creating a column of smoke.
“Why did you do that?” Raine asked. She had finally calmed down enough that she was no longer sniffing, and her breathing was steady again. I still didn’t understand why she freaked out on me, but at least she seemed okay now.
“It will help keep the bugs away,” I told her. “It’s good for keeping other animals away as well, though I don’t think there is much here besides those tiny little lizards. They aren’t even big enough to eat. We should still always keep the fire going, especially at night.”
“I thought I’d never eat cooked food again,” Raine said with her mouth full. “I can’t believe how much better it tastes!”
She was right; it did taste a thousand times better. It would be easier to digest, and maybe she’d get a little weight back. I didn’t like how thin she was and wished I knew how to cook better so she would eat more. After we made some progress with shelter and water, I’d have to find something more carbohydrate-rich for her to consume.
“I’m a pretty shitty cook,” I said with a shrug. “Too bad Alejandro didn’t get stranded with us. He could make most anything taste good.”
I considered how life on the raft might have been different had Alejandro been there and decided I could put up with my own cooking. For starters, there hadn’t been enough water for two. We’d all be dead by now if he had been there. I had more selfish reasons as well and realized I was not at all sorry to have been put in this particular situation with Raine alone.
“What do you think happened to them?” Raine asked softly.
“No way to know,” I responded. “It’s best to assume they got on the lifeboats and were picked up. All of the boats had been launched,” or were lost, I thought but didn’t say, “by the time I got topside. There wasn’t anyone else on the ship but me by then. At least, I couldn’t find anyone else.”
“What are we going to do now?” she asked. “I mean, do you have any idea where we are?”
“I have a guess,” I said. “There’s a decent sized island chain north of Venezuela. I think we’re somewhere along there, just given currents and how long we’ve been in the open water.”
“Are any of them populated?”
“Lots of them,” I confirmed. “This island looks pretty small, but once we get a little more settled in, I can explore a bit. There might be a settlement or at least some evidence that people come here sometimes.”
“What if you find someone?”
“I’ll hope that they speak Spanish,” I said. “I don’t know any of the island dialects.”
“What if you don’t find anyone?”
“We’ll be okay here,” I assured her. “There’s probably a decent variety of things to eat, and as long as we find a reliable water source we won’t have any problems at all. If there isn’t any fresh water, there are still enough options between rain, the coconuts, and the still. It won’t be great, but it’s enough to live on.”
“Do you know what kinds of plants are edible?” she asked.
“Yes, I know a lot of them. There are some ways to figure out if something is edible, too, but testing stuff isn’t always safe. As long as I can find plants I recognize, I wouldn’t bother with it.”
“So we could look for those tomorrow?”
“No,” I said, shaking my head, “shelter and water first, then food.”
“Why?”
“Survival 101,” I responded. “You can live three minutes without air, three hours without shelter, three days without water, and three weeks without food. It’s not exact, obviously, but it tells you where to put your priorities. We have some shelter, but it isn’t going to last long if there’s a storm. It’s good enough that we’ll look for a water source tomorrow and then work on building a stronger shelter. After that, we’ll find better food sources.”
“Lindsay always told me she couldn’t live without a shopping mall within five miles of her,” Raine said. “It’s kind of funny how little you really need to live. I wish I had a toothbrush, though.”
“We can make those,” I said. I jumped up and went to a shrub with woody stems. I pulled off a relatively green one and stripped the leaves down so there was nothing but stem. I cut a piece of it off about six inches long and stuck one end in my mouth and started chewing on it. I handed a second one to Raine. After a minute, I pulled it out and showed her the frayed ends. “It works pretty well, actually.”
Raine did the same and was pretty delighted with how well it worked.
“Can you get one of these in mint flavor?” she laughed.
“I doubt it,” I said, “but you really don’t need the toothpaste as much as toothpaste manufacturers want you to believe. It’s the bristles that really do all the work.”
I drank a little more of the water we had collected on the raft and handed the container over to Raine. She drank as well and then looked up at me. She had a strange expression on her face, which I didn’t understand at all.
“We should probably see if it worked,” she said and then quickly moved over to me and caught my lips with hers.
I didn’t give a shit if the makeshift toothbrushes worked or not because Raine’s lips were on me, and that’s all I found particularly noteworthy. I grabbed her by the hips and pulled her closer, reaching into her mouth with my tongue. I had become so accustomed to her scent and taste, they were almost as ingrained in my senses as my own. With her teeth cleaned, she still tasted like my Raine.
My Raine. Where the fuck did that come from?
Raine maneuvered herself onto my lap, placed her hands on either side of my face, and kissed me deeply. She backed off after a minute, her fingers trailing over the now smooth skin on my face. She scowled.
“You don’t like it?” I asked.
“I do,” she said, “but it does make you look very different. I was just wondering how you managed to get it so smooth.”
I pulled out my knife and flipped it open.
“It’s really, really sharp,” I said.
“Makes me wish I had one, too,” Raine said.
“You have something you want to shave?” I cracked a smile, unable to help myself and my wandering imagination.
“I’d love to shave my legs,” she said, a blush suddenly covering her face, “and my…um…armpits.”
She giggled, which made me laugh, too.
“Why the fuck are armpits funny?”
“They aren’t,” Raine said. “I’m pretty glad I’m in your shirt now instead of a bathing suit.”
“I really don’t give a shit,” I told her honestly.
“Well, I do. I guess it’s ingrained in me. The perils of popular female hygiene culture.”
“Let me do it,” I said suddenly. My cock jumped to attention at the thought, though I couldn’t have explained why if someone had asked me. The idea of shaving her was just…hot. Sliding my knife blade over her skin…yeah, I definitely wanted to do that.
“Do what?” Raine asked with her eyes narrowed.
“I’ll shave you,” I clarified. She started shaking her head immediately.
“No way! You give me the knife, and I’ll do it myself!”
“Have you ever shaved with a knife like this?” I argued. “There is no way you wouldn’t end up slicing yourself open, and in case you haven’t noticed, there isn’t a fucking first aid station around. I can do it without cutting you.”
“You are serious, aren’t you?” she asked, her eyes big and round and glaring up at me.
“Very much so.” The more I thought about it, the more I wanted to do it. I looked at her legs, really just noticing that there was a decent amount of hair on them. I didn’t care, so I hadn’t paid attention before. “Let me do it.”
“You really want to?” she asked again, trying to comprehend my implausible suggestion.
“Raine, I really, really want to.”
“You are sick!” She laughed again and slapped me
on the shoulder.
“Let me.” I was starting to sound like I was begging, and I didn’t give a shit. It would be worth it, so I’d beg if that’s what it took. My voice dropped low as I moved closer to her. “I want to. Please?”
Raine looked back into my eyes and obviously decided I was completely serious. I glanced away for a minute because I realized she was going to say no, and I didn’t really want to watch her refuse me.
“Okay,” she suddenly blurted out, “if you really think you can – without cutting me, I mean.”
“I wouldn’t cut you. I swear you won’t get cut.”
“All right, but this is against my better judgment.”
I smiled and motioned for her to come closer. I reached out and took her heel in my hand, pulling her foot into my lap. I felt my tongue dart out and slide over my lips as I looked down at her gorgeous leg. Honestly, I hadn’t even thought about her wanting to shave even when my beard was starting to itch and annoy me in the heat. I’d been with women all over the world, and plenty of them didn’t shave, so it didn’t really bother me. The thought of shaving it off of Raine, though, was certainly an intriguing idea.
I slid my finger down the skin of her calf, brushing the stubbly hair on her leg all in the same direction. I heard Raine catch her breath, and I gave her a half smile before I did the same on the other side of her calf. The skin of her legs was ashy and dry from exposure to salt, and bits of it flecked off under my fingers. I found myself wanting to lick them to see if the smooth, caramel color would come back with the moisture.
“We need water,” I said. “Hand me the container on the left.”
“You’re going to use fresh?”
“No – that one’s salt water,” I replied. “I brought it up here in case we needed to douse the fire. I don’t need that much, and you’re not going back out in the sun.”