I looked out and watched The Oblation as it finally gave up and sank under the waves. She had been my home for three years, and now she was gone. I wouldn’t let myself wonder about John Paul or Alejandro or the other passengers. The lifeboats were gone, so I was going with the assumption that the rest of them were on board one of those. In daylight I should be able to signal them.
I made my body continue on. I dropped the two floating anchors and affixed the rest of the canopy, sealing us inside the life raft. Everything was well secured, I had the water collection going, and I wasn’t bleeding anymore. I checked my sole passenger’s breathing again and watched the last pieces of my home sink into the darkened sea. I took one more deep breath, flopped onto my back next to her, and finally surrendered to exhaustion.
I guess I really didn’t need a schooner after all.
Chapter 2 – Heat
I woke to screaming.
“Holy shit!” I sat up in complete darkness and reached around towards the noise until I got a hold of the girl’s arm. She swung at me wildly, so I gripped both her wrists to keep her from hitting me as she continued to scream. “Come on, babe, relax! It’s all right. You’re all right!”
She went from screaming to throwing herself against my chest and clinging to me. I let go of her wrists and felt her hands go up and over my shoulders with her nails digging into the skin on my back and her sobs shaking both her body and mine.
Comforting someone else was definitely not a strong point of mine. I just didn’t do that. I rarely even wanted to touch a girl after I fucked her. I didn’t have the slightest idea where to put my hands, and I couldn’t even see her anyway, but she was holding onto me, and didn’t show any signs of letting go. I was too damn tired to argue with her about it, so I didn’t push her away. I mean, she did almost die, and though I didn’t really want to think about it, I knew how far we were from land. If we found the others at first light, we’d probably be okay, but otherwise our chances weren’t all that great.
So I let her hold onto me, and I even put my arms around her awkwardly. She kept crying, and I didn’t say anything because I had no idea what I should say. I guess I could have lied to her and told her everything was fine, but I didn’t think there was much point in that. I reached over and grabbed the waterproof flashlight from its sealed bag, secured it in one of the loops on the inside of the raft, and turned it on.
She jumped when the light went on, and her breathing caught in her throat as she let out a soft sob. Her fingers dug into my flesh again but not quite as hard as before. I didn’t think she was actually breaking the skin or anything. She glanced quickly around the raft, pressed her cheek into my chest, and closed her eyes.
She went still kind of suddenly, and I listened to make sure she hadn’t stopped breathing again. I noticed her breathing was now really steady and figured she must have passed out or maybe just fallen back asleep. I didn’t want to wake her up and listen to her start screaming again, and I really, really wanted to lie back down. I shuffled our positions around a bit until I managed to lie down on my back with her still sprawled over my chest, holding tightly to my shoulders even in sleep.
It wasn’t comfortable, not in the least. I was still completely exhausted and figured I’d drop right back off anyway, but I was wrong. Between her lying on top of me and the crashing waves and wind from outside the canopy, I couldn’t fall back asleep at all. I sighed heavily and looked down at the young woman lying on top of me, bathed in the light of the flashlight.
She was in her early twenties, maybe, with long hair, bits of which were plastered all over her face, shoulders, and back. She was slim and wore a blue one-piece bathing suit with a pair of shorts on over it and no shoes on her feet. If she had been in flip flops or sandals like a lot of the ship’s passengers wore, she probably lost them to the storm.
She had really nice skin – all smooth and lightly tanned all over, not like a lot of chicks who were tan with blotches and shit when she didn’t get her suntan lotion put on in the right place. I kind of wanted to run my hands over it and see if it was as soft as it looked, but I figured that probably had its own special scale of inappropriateness. It reminded me of warm caramel, and I had the idiotic notion that she might taste like caramel, too.
I settled for checking out the rest of her visually instead. She was pretty small – I didn’t think she could have been much over five foot two and maybe a hundred and twenty pounds or so. Next to my six-two, ten-years-of-body-building frame, she looked like a child. I could probably lift her over my head with one hand. Of course, she had been lying on top of me for a while now, and she was starting to feel a little heavier.
Her leg shifted, and holy fuck if she didn’t rub her thigh up against my groin. We were in a life raft, for the love of God, in the middle of the fucking Caribbean, and I was getting a hard on from a half-drowned stranger lying on top of me.