by Shay Savage
Shit. I could be risking my life for a body.
Another wave hit just as I was taking a breath, and I took in a mouthful of water. I didn’t actually inhale it, but I didn’t get any air, either, and my lungs were starting to burn. I pulled up on the hair in my fist until I could get a better grip on the actual torso. I managed to grab what was, undoubtedly, a boob, so at least I knew I was saving a woman. I pulled her up against my chest and leaned back, trying to simultaneously float on my back, use the life preserver to keep me above the wave swells, and keep the head of one of my passengers above water.
I got a couple of good breaths and started to pull in the rope. The added weight wasn’t helping when the waves crashed around us. More than once I considered just letting her go because my arms were starting to hurt really, really bad. I didn’t know who she was, but I couldn’t quite manage to intentionally let go of her. If one of the waves took her from me, well, that would be a different situation, but I wasn’t going to just let go of her no matter how much it hurt. I may be a mostly uncaring ass, but that was going too far. Besides, I’d been hurt a lot worse than this and still pushed through.
My hand touched the end of the lifeboat, and I struggled to pull both of us over the side. I got her in first, and then tumbled in after her.
I was balanced on my knees and one hand, breathing heavily with the other hand over my chest. The rain still poured down on me, and I knew I didn’t have any time to rest. I mentally yelled at my muscles to get going again and sat up. I leaned over the chest of the woman I had pulled from the water, just to check.
She wasn’t breathing.
“Fuck!”
I quickly pulled her upright and flipped her over my back, pushing my shoulder into her diaphragm. Her mouth dropped open and water released from her lungs, pouring out of her mouth. I flipped her over onto her back and tilted her head to open her airway, checking her mouth for any obstructions.
A for airway, B for breath, C for circulation…
Her airway was clear, but she still wasn’t breathing. I placed the first two fingers of my hand against her neck and felt the faintest thump of her heartbeat under the pads of my fingers. If she had a pulse, she must have been breathing recently, which meant she still had a chance. I placed my hand on her forehead, tilted her head back and covered her mouth with mine.
I blew a long, slow breath into her lungs, then tilted my head to the side and watched her chest fall. I turned back to her mouth and breathed into her a second and third time. My fingers went back to her neck and verified her pulse was still there before I breathed for her in another three-breath segment.
It didn’t take long, thankfully. I was exhausted, and there wasn’t much chance of me being able to continue resuscitation for very long. If she had needed chest compressions, we were going to be in a lot of trouble. After only a dozen breaths, she coughed, sputtered out more water, and then took several gasping breaths before passing out across my lap. At least she kept breathing on her own, and her pulse felt a lot stronger.
I took a couple of deep breaths for my own lungs and turned my face up to the sky with my mouth open, drinking in the rain drops and hoping the raft was set up to automatically start collecting the fresh water. I was going to have to check that before I did anything else. Fatigue now was bad, but it was still better than dehydration later. I figured I would locate John Paul and the better equipped lifeboats when the sun rose, but I didn’t want to be wrong.
Thankfully, the water collection did seem to be set to go, I just needed to attach a little collection tube from the built in gutter in the ceiling of the raft to the plastic collection bag inside. I pulled the canopy over the top part of the raft; sealing it and leaving just a small part open so I could bail out the water that had already gotten in from the rain and the waves.
I was feeling a little dizzy and figured I wasn’t going to be able to do much more. Every muscle in my body was screaming at me to just sit down for a minute. The thing was, if I did stop, that would be it. I’d be out in a second, and if I didn’t do the important stuff first, we were both going to die before I woke up.
I looked back over to the girl I pulled from the water and heard myself gasp as I saw red marks all over the floor. I reached to her and turned her over, checking her back, under her hair, and up and down her limbs, but I didn’t see any sign of injury. While I was laying her back down, I saw a drop of red fall and hit her shoulder, so I reached up to my own forehead.
I guess I hadn’t noticed it, since the rain and sea water kept washing the blood away, but there was a pretty good gash on my left temple. It probably wasn’t too serious, though still worthy of stitches. Head wounds meant blood, so there was a lot of blood. I dug around in one of the sealed pouches until I found first aid supplies. I covered up the cut with some gauze and tape. Hopefully I’d find John Paul in the morning so he could stitch it up. Like I needed another scar. At least it was up near my hairline and would probably be covered up most of the time.
I checked myself over for any other injuries but didn’t see anything. I took a quick inventory of what was on the life raft and found two thin pieces of cloth that were probably supposed to be used as both towels and blankets. Maybe even sails, though they weren’t big enough to make any difference at sea. I used one to dry off the floor in the back of the raft and pulled the drenched girl back away from the raft’s opening, near the dry spot. I tried to make her at least look comfortable, and as I moved her arms and legs so she didn’t look too awkward, it briefly registered that the passenger I pulled from the water was the early-rising bookworm. Of course, now that I had pulled her over to the dry side of the raft, it wasn’t so dry anymore.
Fuck it.
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 th
e 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.
Well, at least we know I’m still a guy.
She was kind of hot, from what I could tell anyway. She was also breathing and female, which is all I usually required. I tried to remember what her boob felt like when I grabbed it in the water, but I had been a little too preoccupied with trying to stay alive to commit it to memory.
Damn, I was fucked up.
Besides, she was just another one of the high society bitches that chartered ships for their little personal pleasure cruises because they were far too good for the “normal” cruise ships that went all over the place carrying “normal” people. She wasn’t my type, and I definitely wasn’t hers. My type was more likely to cost me a little cash, but at least I knew where I stood, and I didn’t have to call them later or buy them any fucking flowers. Who knew what her type might be? One thing I knew, I didn’t have the blue blood that was always the top requirement on the list. Maybe if I took a shower and shaved, she’d probably look me over and maybe consider giving me a tumble. In the end I wouldn’t be good enough to wash her Chihuahua.
I must have fallen asleep eventually because the next thing I knew there was natural light coming through the translucent sides of the raft, and it was really getting hot. This was partially because the sun was cooking us in there, but also because I had a sweaty girl lying on me.
I slid out from under her, cringing when our stuck-together skin peeled apart audibly. I set her down relatively gently and scooted myself over to the raft canopy opening. I pulled back the seal and opened up the front piece, nearly blinding myself as the sunlight flooded in.
I took a deep breath and shook my head, trying to get the sleep out of my system. My head was pounding, but without my usual spiked morning coffee and half pack of cigarettes, I didn’t think it was going to improve anytime soon. My arms and shoulders were sore and my back was stiff. It was also really fucking hot in what was basically a small greenhouse on the ocean with the equatorial sun beating down on it. All and all, I felt like shit.
The waves were a lot calmer than they had been the previous night, thankfully. I glanced back over at the girl, who was still out of it, and then whipped open my fly and pissed over the side. I managed to tuck myself back in just as she rolled a little and groaned. Not that I really cared, but she probably didn’t want to wake up to me waving my cock around. She only murmured something unintelligible and stilled, not yet awake.
I looked over the horizon and saw…water.
I maneuvered part way out of the small opening in the canopy and looked all the way around us.
More water.
Shit.
With no sign of any other lifeboats, I had to fight down the nervousness I was starting to feel in the pit of my stomach. The life raft was equipped with three days worth of food and water for four people. I could collect more water as long as it rained, and I could certainly make the food last for more than six days – probably as many as ten or twelve – but after that it was going to get nasty. I looked over at the sleeping form behind me. With her size, she was going to dehydrate fast. She was probably on the verge anyway, considering the amount of seawater she swallowed. I’d last a lot longer than she would. My stomach lurched a little again. It occurred to me I hadn’t felt that particular pang since the last time I was in a tournament.
I crouched with my head out of the opening and secured the flap to the top of the raft. In the back of the raft, near the sleeping passenger, was another, smaller opening. I released that one, too, so we could get a crosswind going through the inside of the raft. It wasn’t going to make much of a difference with the heat, but it was marginally better than nothing.
I really wanted a drink.
I settled for a small amount of water instead.
The girl rolled again, and I could hear the sound of her skin clinging to the bottom of the inflated raft. I thought about how she was probably used to silk sheets and that kind of shit and almost laughed out loud. I shifted back towards the opening because she looked like she might wake up, and I didn’t want her freaking out on me again. I sat back down and watched as she opened her eyes and looked right at me.
She had really nice eyes. I mean, just fucking fantastic – all dark brown and deep and really wide open, like if you looked into them you could fall in or get lost or something – and she was staring right at me. My own reaction to her gaze actually surprised me more than her eyes themselves.
She sat up and pushed herself against the backside of the raft, as far away from me as she could get. Not that it was all that far – the raft was only a ten-footer, so you’re never very far from anything on it. Her eyes stayed on me for a moment, and then she took in the rest of her surroundings.
When she looked away, I wanted to go over to her and turn her back so she was looking at me again. I didn’t do it or anything; it was just weird that I wanted to.
She started to say something, but her voice was all scratchy when she tried to talk. She raised her hand up to her throat and coughed a couple of times before she tried again.
“What happened?”
“My ship sank,” I said, completely unnecessarily.
“How did I get here?” she asked. “The last thing I remember is trying to get up on the deck, but when I did, there was a big wave. I fell in the water.”
“Yeah,” I said, nodding. “I pulled you out.”
“I don’t re
member that,” she said.
“You were half-drowned and unconscious,” I told her.
“Where’s everyone else?”
I shrugged.
“Are they…?” Her eyes got all wide again.
“I don’t have any idea,” I told her. “I’m going to see if I can spot any of the other lifeboats.”
“Did everyone else get in one?”
“I just told you, I have no fucking idea!” I snapped. I hadn’t really meant to, but I felt like absolute shit. I really needed a drink, and I really didn’t want to be talking about this. I tried to calm my voice down a bit. “Now stop with the twenty questions.”
She pulled back and just stared at me again with her mouth hanging open. Fucking high society bitch. She had probably never heard a real f-bomb before. She had better get used to it.
I pulled the canopy back a bit more and got hit with a decent sized trickle of rainwater overflowing from the gutter system.
“Damnit!”
I yanked off my waterlogged shirt and tossed it off to the side. I would need to remember to hang it up, or it would never be dry. It was bad enough my shirt was wet, but wasting the water was going to come back and haunt me later. Landon would have fucking killed me for wasting water under these conditions. I wondered if I could somehow get it out of the shirt.
I heard a gasp behind me and immediately regretted not just keeping the soggy shirt on.
“Wow, your arms are…um…” the girl stammered at me. “And your back…”
I felt my whole body go rigid and my hands clench into fists.
“What?” I snarled, glaring back at her over my shoulder. If the prissy bitch had a problem with my body, she could fucking keep it to herself or go overboard.
“You just…um…look really strong.”
“Oh.” I didn’t know how to respond to that. I thought she was talking about the scars. Sailing takes strength, but I was built up long before I started sailing. John Paul made sure I still worked out a lot to keep me in shape and make up for the poison I drank. Our professional lives might not require it anymore, but John Paul’s favorite saying was still “Strong people live longer.”
