Fuck, that woman could cry when she wanted to. I couldn’t say that I actually minded or anything, but sometimes it scared the shit out of me. I didn’t know what to do other than hold her and wait for her to be done. She said that’s all she wanted, but it still made me feel fucking useless.
On top of the roof there were palm fronds laced together above the raft parts, so there was no way any rain could get inside. The roof tilted slightly towards the back, and I had included using some of the gutter system from the raft to direct the water from the roof off to the side, where part of the raft’s former canopy would collect it for drinking and cooking.
Inside the shelter, Raine had lined our sleeping area with dry grasses covered by the floor of the dissected raft. It wasn’t a designer mattress by any stretch of the imagination, but it was reasonably comfortable, and it kept me from bruising her backside when I fucked her.
A couple of the mats she wove were kept by the fire so we didn’t have to sit in the sand, and the others were at the entrance to the shelter. There wasn’t a door or anything, but the palm frond roof reached out a little farther in the front so it stayed dry just outside, too. We found a bunch of larger clam shells to use as dishes and shit like that. I didn’t really care, but Raine seemed to like having her food on some sort of plate. She also taught me how to use chopsticks to eat, which I had never tried before. All right, so they were two little branches about the same size, but the idea was the same. They took a while to get used to, but I eventually figured out how to grasp things instead of stabbing them with the tip of the stick.
The baskets Raine figured out how to weave were pretty fucking clever. She gave up on the flat, square bottoms, which never worked out right, and now made them more like hanging baskets, with two sides woven together at the bottom and open on the top. She gave the baskets handles and we used them for collecting food and also to hang on the walls of the shelter. I carved wooden hooks out of coconut shells and put them all over the place so the food wasn’t on the ground, waiting for mice or something to tear into it. It gave us a place to hang clothing to dry, too.
It’s a good thing I didn’t listen to Raine very much when it came to building the place with my leg in its condition. Only three days after it was done, we had our first really big storm. I had been watching the dark clouds come in from the west and knew it wasn’t going to be a little rain shower long before it got to us. I only hoped the shelter would hold. I thought it would. I hoped it would.
“We’re going to want to bring the fish inside,” I told Raine as I pointed up at the sky. She looked over from the constructed drying rack near the fire to the sky and then back again. “We won’t be cooking anything for a while, either.”
“Is the storm going to be bad?”
“Do you see a weather radio stuck to my head?” I raised an eyebrow at her. “I have no fucking clue, but the wind is already picking up.”
We brought in everything that could get damaged if it got wet and hung the blanket-towels from the raft up over the open entryway to the shelter as the first of the rain started. It picked up pretty quickly, and before long the rain was coming down in sheets. We both moved towards the back, and I dropped down on the mattress while Raine sat a couple of feet away, staring at the rain coming down outside. The shelter entrance faced east, so rain wasn’t getting in very much – just a little bit of mist near the front – but I could tell after the first hour Raine was getting nervous.
“Why don’t you lie down?” I asked.
“I’m not tired.”
“What does that have to do with it?” I wiggled my eyebrows at her and opened up my arms. She sighed heavily but scooted over and let me pull her down next to me. “It’s all right, baby. The shelter can take this.”
As if to mock me, the wind gusted right then, shaking the long poles at the corners. It held through it, but it didn’t help with Raine’s stress.
“You got me?” she asked softly and granted me a twitch of a smile.
“Yeah, I got you.” I wrapped my arms around her a little more securely, crossing my arm over her chest and wrapping the other one behind her shoulders. She immediately started tracing the outline of my bicep.
“I love your arms,” she said, almost too quietly for me to hear. Her finger trailed all the way down to my wrist, then back up to my shoulder where she outlined the muscles there.
“I thought you loved my dick,” I teased.
Raine chuckled and sighed at me.
“I like that, too, but your arms are my favorite part of you. They make me feel safe.”
“I’ll always keep you safe,” I told her. I tilted my head to the side, looked into her eyes, and smiled down at her.
“I know.” Her finger moved up my neck and over my jaw until she was cupping my cheek. “But when you hold me like this, I feel extra safe, like nothing could possibly happen to me.”
“That’s the way it is,” I said nonchalantly, “and I might never let you go, so you should be good forever.”
She giggled and snuggled against my chest.
“So it’s official; you only want me for my body,” I surmised, knowing it would get a rise out of her and wanting to keep her nicely distracted from the wind outside, which was picking up again.
“Bastian! Of course not!”
“I don’t know…if my arms and my dick are the best parts…”
“That’s not what I said!” Raine defended. I laughed out loud and hugged her a little tighter. “My favorite thing about you is your incredible will to survive.”
“Well, I had to learn a lot of that shit for the tournaments.”
“I didn’t mean knowing how to find food and water.” Raine shook her head, tickling my chin with her hair. “I mean everything you have been through – even when you were a little boy. You always came through it when I think a lot of people would have given up.”
“Not in my nature, I guess.” I shrugged. It wasn’t a matter of getting through it. I tried to find ways of forgetting it. “There’s a lot more to you than there is to me.”
“Oh, really?” Raine questioned. “Like what?”
“Well, there’s your tits…oh, and your ass…I love your ass…”
She smacked me on the chest.
The rain was literally pouring out of the sky in huge sheets now. The collection area in the back of the shelter was full and overflowing. I kept talking to keep her distracted from the weather.
“I like the way you look at me,” I said seriously. “Sometimes when you do, your eyes light up, and I think maybe I could be lucky enough for you to care about a fucked up asshole like me.
“That’s love, you know,” Raine said with a smile. “I see it in your eyes when you look at me, too.”
“It’s easy to love you,” I said, running my hand down her side and over her hip and then back up to her shoulder. “At least, it was once I stopped fighting it.”
“You did fight it,” she acknowledged. “What made you stop?”
“Your…acceptance of me,” I said. “That’s really my favorite thing about you. I don’t know why you put up with my shit, but I’m glad you do.”
“You aren’t that hard to accept, Bastian.” Her hand reached up into my hair. “You were very…trying in the beginning. A lot of that was the alcohol in your system, I think. Considering how much stress you were under, I can understand why you behaved that way. I know my dad would become quite a bear sometimes when his job would stress him out.”
“I don’t think I can just blame it on stress,” I huffed. “I mean, it’s not like I wouldn’t have been like that if you had met me at a bar or something.”
“I bet you could be very charming when you want to be.”
“Yeah, but I would just be hoping to get my dick in you. If you didn’t seem like the type to put out, I would have found someone who would do it for money instead.”
“Bastian!”
“It’s true.”
“You’re just trying to make it di
fficult for me to argue with you about it.”
“There’s no argument,” I insisted. “Are you fucking blind to all the crappy shit I’ve done to you? I scared you half to death when you were taking a bath, I bitched at you constantly when my leg was healing, I fucking hit you…”
“Please don’t bring that up again.” Raine closed her eyes and shook her head a bit. Every time she tried to tell me I wasn’t such a bad guy, I’d bring that little tidbit up. At some point, though, she needed to see what I was. She seemed to want to believe I was some kind of fucking hero. I wasn’t.
“All the shit I’ve done, Raine.” I stopped a moment and took a deep breath. “I’m a…a…murderer, for fuck’s sake. Sometimes I can’t comprehend why you would let me even touch you.”
“You did what you had to do at the time,” Raine reasoned. “I’m not going to pretend I like it, but I understand, given the circumstances.”
“You’ve got to be completely insane,” I told her. “Not that I’m arguing with it, because I’m not, but you can’t be right in the head to take all of it in stride the way you do.”
“Maybe,” she admitted, “but I don’t think so. I think if someone had loved you the way you deserved a long time ago, none of that would have happened.”
“Maybe I’m just unlovable.”
Raine turned her eyes on me, and her glare would have made me take a step back had I been standing.
“That is not true!” she yelled over the sound of the pounding rain. “Just because no one ever took the time to get to know you doesn’t mean you are unlovable. Don’t ever say that again!”
“Shit, Raine,” I growled and pounded the back of my head against the make-shift mattress. I was starting to get fucking pissed. “Even as a kid no one fucking wanted me. You know the one thing in common with every single foster parent who kicked me out? The same thing they had in common with my real parents - me. That’s it. At some point I had to accept that I was the fucking problem. I’m not a nice guy, Raine. Haven’t you fucking noticed that? Why do you think I was so good at fighting? Because when people piss me off, I want to kill them. That was my value to Landon. That was the only time anyone ever had any use for me.”
“Bastian, you are about the most useful person I have ever known, and that was long before I saw you fight.”
“But I only know that shit because of fighting.” I had no idea where I was going with this shit. It had started out as a means to distract her from the storm, which was really raging outside now, so mission accomplished. I hadn’t actually intended to get into it this deep, and now I was officially in over my head. When Bastian Stark gets in over his head, the asshole comes out. Long before my brain listened to the words it was forming, they were already out of my mouth. “The only reason you even fell in love with me was because I saved your life. There’s probably a fucking syndrome with your name on it. Fuck, if any other guy from the ship had been on the raft with us, you’d probably be fucking him now instead of me!”
Raine gasped, and I think my heart actually stopped beating for a few seconds. Holy shit, I didn’t even know where that came from. I guess on some level, I believed it, but I sure as hell never meant to say it.
“Fuck, Raine…” But I didn’t have any kind of follow up sentence to offer her.
“Bastian, do you really think so little of me?”
“What the fuck is that supposed to mean?” I didn’t even like how the words sounded in my ears. I thought the fucking world of her – how could she not know that? Oh yeah, because I’m a complete dick.
“Do you really think I would give myself to you because you are the only other person here?” She pushed against my arms and sat up, staring down at me. “Do you think I have sex with you because I’m just bored, and you’re the only guy around? Is that really what you think? You think that I would or could replace you with just any guy’s penis?”
I didn’t even know how to answer her, so I kept my stupid mouth shut. I had the distinct feeling that if it had not been for the rain, she wouldn’t still be in my presence at all. When I realized she was going to wait for me to come up with an answer, I still didn’t know what to say.
“I don’t think you’re like that,” I finally said. “I never did, and I don’t know why I said that. I never know what to think about you. I don’t know why you…why you do anything for me.”
“Because I love you.” There were tears in her eyes now, and it fucking tore me apart.
“I don’t understand that, either.”
“Because you are worth it,” she said with determination. I started to argue, but she placed her little hand right over my mouth and told me to shut up. “I love you because of you. Not because you’re strong enough to kill people. Not because you know everything there is to know about how to survive out here. Not because you’ve saved my life over and over again. Certainly not because you’re the only guy in the general area.”
“I love you because you are worthy of my love,” she continued. “I love you because you show me every day how much you care about me and how much I mean to you. You show me when you worry about me getting sunburned, when you make sure I eat a bunch of different things to stay healthy, and when you make love to me. I love you because under all that brawn, you are gentle and caring. I love your internal strength and willingness to persevere, no matter what life has thrown at you. I love you because when you recite poetry to me, I can hear in your voice how much you mean it. I love you more than anyone and anything in the world, and I can’t imagine my life without you now – not here, not anywhere else.”
She moved her hand away from my mouth and sat back, her arms crossed.
“And don’t you dare say to me that my love is misplaced, because it’s not. I love you, Bastian Stark. You are worthy of it, and nothing you say is going to make that change.”
I didn’t know what to say. Any words I could have invented on my own would have been inadequate, so I used someone else’s.
“Forgiveness is the fragrance of the violet which still clings fast to the heel that crushed it.”
Raine’s eyes met mine again, her tears still staining her cheeks.
“I’m a heel, Raine,” I told her. “You’re my beautiful violet, and I’m always crushing you. You take away my nightmares, and I probably add to yours. I don’t think I will ever believe I deserve you, but I love you more than I can even describe. I don’t know if I can ever…be better for you, but if you’re willing to keep forgiving me for being a complete idiot, I’m willing to keep trying.”
“You are forgiven, my strong, beautiful, gentle idiot.” Raine’s smile covered me in her love.
While the wind and rain battered at our shelter, I reached up and pulled her down to me, my lips gently caressing hers. I rolled her onto her back on the mattress and showed her how much her words meant to me the only way I knew how.
* * * * *
If I really wanted to, I could have figured out exactly how long it had been since we arrived on the island, but I didn’t really care anymore. On the raft I paid attention based on how many days of water we had left, but here it was not an issue. If I was going to estimate, I’d say it had been about two months since the ship sank, but I didn’t know for sure and most importantly, I didn’t give a shit.
“I’m going to go wash off,” Raine informed me. She smiled shyly and looked away, which just about made me laugh out loud. I’d fucked her three times since lunch, barely letting her up long enough to get something to eat before I was in her again, and still she played bashful when she looked at me.
Fucking incredible.
“It’s your own fault for wandering around naked all the time,” I said with a grin. “I can’t help but take advantage.”
“Shall I stop?”
“Fuck no!”
Raine quickly kissed my cheek and walked off into the edge of the waves. I smiled as I watched the curve of her ass come into better view like I was some pervert checking out the high school cheerleaders
. I admired the late evening sun shining off her smooth skin as she sauntered away, swaying her hips in such a way that she had to have been doing it on purpose. My cock twitched even though the little fucker ought to be tired out at this point. What can I say? I was always going to want her right here on this beach as often as possible.
I lit one of my homemade Lobelia smokes and leaned my back against a coconut palm tree. Raine had given me some shit for making them, but she eventually gave up and seemed to be content with rolling her eyes at me when I pulled one out. They weren’t chock-full of nicotine, like I would have preferred, but they did a pretty decent job of making me feel like I was smoking a Marlboro 100. If I only had a bottle of vodka to go with it, I’d be set.
Yeah, you’d think after all this time the cravings would go away, but they fucking didn’t. Sometimes I wanted a drink just as bad as I had the first night on the raft. I’d go through DTs again just to get my hands on a fucking fifth of most anything.
Raine reached the tide line and walked tentatively into the water, testing the temperature with her toes before walking straight in. I didn’t know why the fuck she did that – it was a pretty constant temperature so there weren’t any surprises or anything. She always did it, though. She walked in slowly, then shoved her toes underneath the sand and wiggled them around before she finally got around to actually getting in the water.
I continued to watch her ass as she wandered slowly into the calm waves. She was so fucking beautiful, it drove me nuts. She walked around naked most of the day unless she was going to go forage in the jungle or something. It meant my cock was hard a good portion of the day, but I made good use of that, so I fucking loved it. The new diet had brought back her curves, and though she had always been beautiful, she was simply stunning to look at now that she wasn’t so thin. I had lost several pounds while on the raft as well, but as far as I could tell, it was mostly back. If someone asked me to bench four hundred pounds, I might still have been able to do it. Maybe. Once the shelter was complete, I took to moving rocks around just to keep my muscles built up even though I didn’t really need them for anything. Sometimes I moved them from one side of the beach to the other. I got plenty of exercise existing around here, though, so it probably wasn’t completely necessary, but I did it anyway. I wasn’t as buff as I had been when there was a gym readily available, but I guess I was still built enough.