Stay With Me 2

by Jessica Aniston

  “Look, there’s just water,” Karin says, prying her eyes forcefully away from Declan’s just so she can speak again. “So much water until the end of the world.”

  “Wha-daa,” parrots Averi and then yelps: “Fish! Fish!”

  “Exactly,” Karin says. “There are so many little fishies in there. We swam with them the other day, and they are so colorful. They’re blue and yellow and purple…”

  “Wed!” Averi gurgles happily.

  “Oh, I don’t know,” Karin replies. “Did we see red fishies, Declan?”

  “Bad,” Averi repeats before Declan can answer the question and wiggles around in Karin’s arm so she can look at him and touch her tiny hand to his sharply angled jaw.

  “That’s right, that’s Declan,” Karin chuckles and then Averi turns her head and brings her free hand up to touch Karin’s chin.

  “I’m Karin,” she answers the unspoken question. Then Averi retracts her hand to touch her own cheek.

  “Allie,” The little girl says. Tarzan and Janeing the whole thing to full-circle.

  “Yes, you’re Averi,” Karin coos while the baby touches her face again and she says: “Karin” to enforce the impromptu vocabulary lesson.

  “Karin,” Averi says.

  “Yes! Good job!” Declan and Karin say at the same time.

  “Dec,” Averi repeats, once more turning to him.

  “Right, I’m Declan,” he bops her tiny button nose. “Averi.” She giggles and Declan gets an idea. “Oh, see I got your nose now!” He ‘plucks’ it off of her, pushing his thumb between his index and middle finger and Averi makes a face of shock, her lips puckering into a surprised little ‘o’. “I got your nose now, where is it? Hmm, I’m so hungry, maybe I’ll eat it.” He shoves his fingers into his mouth dramatically and makes some munching sounds. “Oh, ate your nose! Mmm, yummy.”

  Averi fusses because she doesn’t like that at all.

  “Alright, alright, here, you get it back,” Declan hurries and puts her nose back quickly. “There you go.”

  But Averi is still wiggling, straining for the ground and Karin follows the request, drops down to kneel and puts Averi down to hold her between her knees in the shallow water. The baby grabs hold of her tank-top’s collar, just beside Karin’s mic. Declan drops down beside her, getting his khaki shorts completely wet and not caring by the looks of it.

  “You’re great at this,” he says after a moment and she turns to look at him, keeping her hand around Averi’s arm as the child bends down to splash around in the water. “I mean it.” Karin feels the water cool her skin in the best way but she sees nothing but Declan leaning in, slow and deliberate, and puts the most chaste, precious kiss on her lips. “You’ll make a great mom one day,” he says when he leans out again, opening his eyes to lock them on hers.

  “Just don’t leave me alone with them,” she mutters, more than a little lost in him.

  He grins, so brightly it makes the sun seem dull.

  “Never,” he promises, just before he kisses her again.

  It lasts longer this time and she knows he’s well on his way to deepening it when five pudgy fingers land on the spot where they’re connected and Averi demands their attention again. They both laugh and when Gorman lets them know that their babysitting time is over a few moments later, Karin is so loath to let the moment go, she veritably stalls at the shoreline, taking far too long to collect their things and only finding solace in watching Declan carry the little girl back on his shoulders the entire way to the villa.

  The rest of the day passes by in a soft haze, punctuated only by short flares of panic when Karin periodically reminds herself that it’s all fake and that Declan doesn’t really love her or want to have children with her, even if he looks at her like he does. But she doesn’t care today, she decides over dinner, barely listening as the others recount their babysitting stories. Aileen stepped on a Lego and swore in front of their baby and still feels bad, Grace and Mimi sadly have had even less luck with the real deal than with the fake one, but then, that’s life. You can't win every time.

  By the time Karin and Declan retreat to bed, she works herself into a state of superficial calm while executing her nightly routine. She pretends that she's just fine, stripping out of her top and shorts, and devoting her nightly shower to calm the nerves that keep flashing up stubbornly every other minute. It’s all good, she tells herself, drying off. It was a good day. You’ll be alright. Yes, it gets a little strange with him here and there and yes, now that she is admittedly in love with him again as if she hadn’t been since this whole thing started. She’ll be on the lookout for signs, whether she likes it or not, but nothing has changed. The old mantra resurfaces, triumphant.

  He’s still Declan. They’re still pretending, and if stuff happens that makes her think, like that time she’s quite certain he came as she sat on him in the hot tub in front of their room, he never acknowledges it later. It’s all just part of the act for him. It’s just his way of making it look real. If there was more to it, if it all meant more than that, he would surely say something, right? But he doesn’t. He never does. All she has to do is to just has to keep going. Relax, mind her head, and keep going.

  “I think we did well today,” she says evenly, nerves forcefully in check, when she is done getting ready for bed and has climbed onto the mattress to lie next to Declan. He’s immediately put his latest sports biography on his bedside table to turn to his side and watched her settle in like it was the most captivating entertainment.

  “Me too,” he smiles and looks content.

  “You’re so good with kids,” she praises, her ribcage tight around her heart. Its fine, she tells her fluttering pulse. Its fine, you can handle it.

  “If I wasn’t after nearly ten years of being a children’s dance instructor, I’d have done something wrong, wouldn’t I?” Declan half-laughs at her compliment.

  “Do you want a lot of them?” Karin asks curiously, and watches him consider her question, his tanned face moving in thought, looking golden in the faint light of the bedside lamp.

  “I don’t know,” he says. “Two or three, maybe? You?”

  “Two probably,” she muses. “If there’s three there’s always one parent too little.”

  “We have our parents to help,” he shrugs easily.

  Then he freezes when he hears himself. Karin is quite certain her entire nervous system stops circulating until he speaks again.

  “I mean separately of course,” he mutters.

  “Of course,” she whispers. Of course.

  “Though if you ever need help, I’m sure my Mother will take your kids off your hands whenever no questions asked,” Declan tells her, punching his pillow under his arm while he speaks. "Or I will, you know."

  “I know,” she says, the thought of him babysitting some faceless baby that isn't his, is strange, uncomfortable and shapeless. She can't even imagine it.

  “You’re part of the family,” Declan continues.

  “I know,” she repeats.

  “I want you to stay part of it, too,” he says and it takes a moment to realize that he’s laboring with something, long enough for the air to change between them, long enough to turn her head to him and watch as his expression changes into something she can’t quite read.

  “You know, I don’t want anything messing that up,” he finally grits out and Karin is mildly shocked that it feels like he’s edging in on talking about it. “So if things get strange out there and when I get in a bit over my head and you’re not comfortable, just pinch me or let me know however you want. I sometimes I get a little caught up in it.”

  He’s talking about the time in the hot tub. It’s happening now again.

  “Hm,” she hums, noncommittally, because her brain is suddenly blank as a white canvas, mocking her.

  “I don’t want it to be strange for you,” he reiterates.

  “It’s not strange. It’s fine. It’s just a part of the game,” she reassures him, because
that’s what he wants, isn’t it? He wants to put her at ease about the sexual things that she might misunderstand, mistake for deeper feelings that he doesn’t have, or at the very least very clearly doesn’t want to have, which is basically the same thing anyway. “I haven’t been uncomfortable so far,” she continues, doing her best, like she always has, to level his rumbling emotions.

  “Actually, sometimes I was more than comfortable,” she adds just so he knows. Just so he knows that it’s not just his body reacting. That there’s no need for him to be ashamed because it’s happened to her, too. Maybe not to completion, but she liked what they did in the hot tub, and he can put up with knowing that.

  “Me too,” he says. She knows.

  “I know,” she says, looks squarely at him and then Declan - cocky, confident, smug Declan Shelton - blushes like a schoolgirl and looks away, flushed with embarrassment.

  “I’m going to get the lights,” he mumbles and it sounds like ‘I can't believe I came into my pants under you.’

  “I’m sorry about that, you know,” is the next thing he says and it takes him a while. A good minute of him draping himself in the shelter of the darkness, where she can’t see, where he won't let her observe how ashamed he really is. “I don’t know how that happened.”

  She does.

  She did that, she made it happen because she dry-humped him. She wanted him to feel something. None of that should be a surprise. He came because she wanted him too. Silly boy. Just to show him that she can make his body react. That she’s not his damned little sister. That she’s not the little girl he knew anymore that wrote him a stupid love letter at ten years old that he never replied to. He doesn’t want her, she gets it, thank you very much. But he could. It’s not impossible. His body reacts to her, it does. That’s all.

  “Its fine,” she shrugs, letting him off the hook nonetheless. “It’s a guy thing. It happens, I understand.” But then, because a little pettiness must be allowed, if only just for revenge that he’s made her fall in love with him again with no intention of catching her, she quips: “Why not get something out of it? All that effort must be good for something. A little orgasm can’t hurt.”

  “That’s not what I meant,” he sputters out and she’s glad that the dark hides the wicked, little smirk she can’t keep off her face. He blathers on stupidly: “Do you mean what I think you meant? Because…”

  “You fine, there?” she cackles, and maybe that’s a little bit too self-indulgent. But still.

  “No,” he says, sounding raw, that cadence he gets when his temper is just about to flare. He clears his throat. “I think I’m going to go for a walk.”

  “Everything alright?” she hurries, suddenly red-hot-scared that she overstepped. “It was just a joke, I didn’t mean to - ”

  Instead of snapping at her like he could - like he has before, sometimes, when his mood shifted to anger - suddenly Declan pulls her in hard, almost roughly against his side. He snags her up like she’s weightless, a leaf in the wind, lost to his strength, and moves her like a storm.

  Too quick to fully appreciate, but sharp enough to make her whole body burst into white light, he’s pressed himself flush against her, his front aligned with the right side of her body, his left hand a claw wrapped tight around her shoulder and his right cupping her head, holding her temple against his lips harshly. He kisses her there, long and forceful, as he scratches down her scalp. When it’s over, he shoves his forehead into the place his lips had occupied before and holds her there. She’s stopped breathing entirely, which makes his staggered panting sound like a thunder in the utter silence of the room.

  He's shaking with effort, like he's holding back. Is he holding back? Can't he let go? No matter if it's just a whim - just his body reacting. God, his breaths come out so labored, it's making her lungs feel tight, running feverishly hot even though the AC is on full blast. Then he does two things at the same time that blow out her brain, because he thrusts, ever so slightly, into her thigh, unmistakably hard for her, and upon finding that friction, growls into her ear, just so. Low, raspy and violent. None of it is for the cameras, all of it is Declan, just her Declan.

  This might be the quickest Karin ever got her panties well and truly drenched, and, damn him. She’s got nothing on him, he doesn’t even need to grind on her to turn her to putty.

  “I know, Rinny,” he exhales, his body beating like a drum, breath so hot on her skin, it feels as if it's burning her flesh away like acid and she loves it. The way her name sounds like a moan tumbling from his lips. “I’ll be back in a bit. Don’t wait up, alright?”

  A second later, he moves away from her - so rapidly that the loss of his flashing hot body leaves her shivering, cold and bereft. He doesn’t say another thing, just charges up ahead to the glass doors that face into the yard and pushes one open, disappearing into the night and not coming back for hours.

  It’s fine with her. The second his footsteps outside disappear, Karin releases her breath and tries to chase it back into her system. She doesn’t hesitate for a second before shoving her hands roughly down her jersey shorts and into her panties. She doesn’t even bother with circles and teasing, she’s way past that. She pushes two fingers inside herself and comes after just a couple pointed thrusts against her palm, wincing. Then she does it again, taking her time. After, she scrubs her scent off her fingers, but not before wiping her hand on the underside of his pillow.

  She’ll be fine in the morning.

  She’ll never speak of this to him again, will not demand answers in the harsh light of the coming dawn. But it happened, and she knows it. Yes, if she hopes again, just a little, that’s her own risk to take. She falls asleep thinking this, offering herself up to fatalism. He’ll be her downfall. She’ll try to put up a fight, true to her principles, stubborn in nature as she’s ever been. But whatever happens, will happen. Besides, he wanted her, even if it was just for a second, not for any camera and not for any money. He touched her and she'll let him touch her if he wants to again. So let that be her story, she's fine with that. It’s the first time on this island that she goes to sleep with some semblance of peace in her heart.

  The next day, the Elimination shoot starts late again - after an entire seven hours of Karin and Declan steadfastly acting like whatever it was that had unfolded between them the night before had never happened. A little before sundown, they all gather around the gazebo, reuniting with the parents and their babies, and get to watch the rough cuts of the highlight reels of their babysitting back with their charges on their laps. Karin is holding Averi’s little hand tightly when Kaidan and Kaelan are declared the winner of the challenge. Despite the disappointment, she isn’t sad, the hours she got to spent watching the baby that is sitting on her lap now were enough of a win in her book.

  Naeomi and Dale’s verdict about their own babysitting skills is also very good, so there’s even less reason to be sad. “While I agree that it looked like Grace and Mimi sort of fell apart watching Felix,” Naeomi says, repeating the talking points of the parents that made their statements before, “I was really very impressed with Karin and Declan. It looked like they really understood each other without having to speak, like a well-oiled machine. They were so in tune with each other that they could be very attentive to Averi and she’s in a bit of a shy phase right now with strangers but she took to them immediately. We would let Karin and Declan watch her again in a heartbeat!”

  “Just give us a call,” Declan jokes, turning on his bar stool to grin at them. Karin truly hopes they do, nuzzling Averi goodbye before finally handing her back, giggly and happy, to her parents. It’s the last moment of levity before Aileen and Rickard, as well as Grace and Mimi, are asked to give their bottom two statements.

  By the end of it, Grace and Mimi do not make the cut and this time, different from last week, Karin is sincerely sad to see the couple go.

  And yet, Declan and her are still very much in the game, living to fight another day on this beautiful isla
nd to play out their romance. In the end, she’s so happy about it, her skin prickles and tingles all over, and that has absolutely nothing to do with the one million dollars.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Breakfast without Grace and Mimi is supremely strange. The places where they’ve sat are now empty and their whole easy, relaxed way of recapping whatever has been going on behind the scenes of the show - may that be rotten cheese in the fridge or Marietta’s latest pair of outrageous designer shoes, they always made it interesting - is missing from the table conversation and that upsets the entire dynamic they had cultivated over the past week.

  “It’s so strange that Grace and Mimi are gone, right?” Kaidan finally says and there is a round of affirmative mumbles coming from his fellow contenders.

  “Yes,” Courtney agrees, otherwise happily munching on the poached egg Karin had made her. “I know it’s only been a week and a bit but I liked our group. It’ll be so sad to see more people go.”

  “Oh, because you’re not going, right?” Aileen quips good-naturedly. But it seems that Courtney has had her claws sharpened overnight.

  “I don’t think so, no,” the blonde smirks. “We’re not fighting every night like some other people do…”

  Aileen, who goes from surprised to outrages, shoots her a glare while the table falls silent.