The Christmas Surprise

by R. R. Banks

  Oh, he was definitely being wasted on the advertising industry.

  Chapter Six

  Gavin

  I climbed to the top of the rocky ridge, muttering as I went as if that would somehow convince the jagged edges to smooth out, or at least for the steep incline to have the decency to lessen for me. When I finally reached the top, I pushed aside the palm fronds that crossed my path, and discovered that I most certainly had not reached the top and that the trees had been concealing an even more treacherous path ahead of me. At the back of my mind I had been expecting to see a hotel in the distance, or at least the rope fences and small wooden signs that companies used to gently guide tourist exploration of the islands so that they could feel as though they were being wild and adventurous but didn’t become insurance liabilities. Instead I saw only more thick, untouched jungle.

  Dammit all to hell. This is not what I signed up for.

  I had been exploring the island since moments after we had first arrived, and so far, I had found no signs of human life. Hunter’s assumption that this island was one of the trail of little day stops on the cruise line tours had given me some hope. I figured he must be right. That storm couldn’t have jostled us so far away from the cruise ship that we would end up on an island that was totally uninhabited. There had to be at least a juice bar or tiki torch somewhere. But, no. Nothing. I had stalked my way through the jungle and along the rocks for what felt like hours and I hadn’t found anything but just more jungle and rocks.

  Concerned that I would get myself lost if I tried to venture any further without something to mark my way, I turned around and started back toward the beach. I had the strange compulsion to thank the palm fronds as I walked away from them, thinking it was almost as if they had tried to protect me by shielding the view of how much further the ridge rose ahead.

  Holy shit, I’m losing my mind already.

  I was nearly back to the sand when I noticed that Hunter was back on the deck of the boat, moving toward the cabin. I ran toward it, shouting Hunter's name as I went.

  "What are you doing?" I demanded.

  Who did this man think he was climbing onto my boat uninvited not once, but twice? He was the reason we were stuck on this --- I can’t believe these words are even coming out of my mouth --- desert island, and now he was poking around on my boat trying to find…. what the hell did he think that he was going to find? Did he somehow know who I was and what I had been doing floating around in the dark water near the cruise ship?

  Hunter stepped back away from the cabin door and glared down at me as if I had no right to be asking him about his actions. The fire in the look surprised me. My first impression of him had been that he was nothing but a nerdy little guy whose greatest concern was probably color coordinating his pens with his belt. Between the struggle with the storm and the way that he was looking at me now, though, I was wondering if there was actually more to him than just that.

  "If you haven't noticed,” he snapped at me, “there is no one else on this island. Not a tourist. Not a researcher. No one. We have quite literally gotten ourselves stranded on a deserted island, and with a trashed boat and no communication system, we are essentially screwed for the foreseeable future."

  "What does that have to do with you rummaging through my boat?" I asked as I crossed the water again and was climbing onto the deck to face Hunter.

  "I was hoping to find some supplies that we could salvage to help us get through however long we are going to be here."

  I forced my mind to calm and my heart to stop racing.

  He didn’t know.

  My papers were hidden far enough in the recesses of the cabin that no one would be able to find them without my help, and if Hunter knew about them, he would have already confronted me. All he was trying to do was find the things that we would need to help us through this situation. I gave a short nod.

  "I'm sorry. You're right. Go ahead."

  Hunter ducked into the cabin and reappeared a moment later with a large black trunk on his shoulder.

  "What's in here?" Hunter asked.

  "Clothes," I told him.

  "That's it?" Hunter asked.

  He sounded suspicious, but not as though he actually knew what was hiding in the cabin. It was more likely that he could feel the heft of the bag and didn’t believe that it was twenty pounds of underwear and socks.

  "A couple of knives. Some cash."

  "Well, I don't think that we are going to be hailing a cab out of here anytime soon, so the cash is probably useless. The knives could be helpful, though."

  Hunter hoisted the trunk off of his shoulder and handed it over to me. I took it and carried it over to the side of the boat so I could toss it down into the water. The boat had created enough of a temporary tide pool near the sandbar that I wasn't concerned that the trunk would float away, and I knew that the water wasn’t going to seep through. I returned to the cabin and we spent the next several minutes tossing the cases and trunks that we could salvage down into the water. When we were finished, we both jumped down and started dragging the cargo up onto the sand. I was getting strangely accustomed to flinging myself off of the boat and I figured that could be just one more skill I would be able to add to the “special talents” section of my resume if I survived getting off this damn island.

  The first crate that we opened was from the galley, and I spread the supplies out on the sand to evaluate them. Unfortunately, the crate that these had been stored in wasn’t watertight and many of the containers weren’t designed with an afternoon swim in mind, either. The food inside had been ruined, but we had basic cooking tools. Suddenly I was reminded of the fact that I hadn't eaten anything since well before I pulled up beside the cruise ship the night before and my stomach rumbled angrily.

  "We should try to find some food," I said as Hunter came up beside me and pulled the first trunk up to open it. "It might take a while to prepare anything worth eating." I pulled my kit out of the crate and spread it out, pulling out my flint and feeling a shimmer of hope as I realized it was still intact. "I can get the fire started if you and Eleanor can go see what you can find in the jungle. I saw some fruit trees back there."

  I could see Hunter bristle slightly, but then he nodded and stalked off toward where Eleanor stood in the sand, staring out over the water. She turned to him as Hunter approached and I saw them start off toward the trees together. I contemplated them as I watched them, wondering what had led up to them running along the deck of the boat together and tossing themselves down into the water. They didn’t seem like the type of people who would have any real reason to know each other, yet there was a somewhat tenuous connection between them that told me that they hadn’t just met when they were on the ship.

  Could he be one of her little boy toys?

  That didn’t strike me as being likely. Hunter didn’t seem exactly like boy toy material. Even with the anger and aggression that he had shown, there was still an aura of awkward, nerdy shyness around him that made him seem like the opposite of what I would imagine an exorbitantly wealthy divorcee would look for in a younger man she wanted to string along purely for entertainment purposes. And now that I thought about it, I hadn’t ever heard mention of her having any such relationships. They might be common among women of her age and means, and Eleanor was definitely beautiful enough to have plenty of willing participants, but it seemed that she hadn’t gone that direction since her divorce.

  Could they actually have a relationship going?

  That seemed pretty unlikely as well. While Eleanor and Hunter seemed to know each other on some level, there wasn’t enough between them to suggest that they had that level of connection. I thought that I had seen a spark of attraction between them, and there was definitely concern in Eleanor’s eyes when she thought that the younger man had been killed in the storm, but I wouldn’t jump so far as to say that she looked like she was in love with him. Besides, I was fairly certain that if there was such a relationship happening, I would h
ave been told about it when I got my instructions for this job. Having a man around always made things like this more difficult, and I would think that I would have been told so that I could prepare my approach differently.

  They had disappeared into the jungle and I turned back to the flint in my hand. It wasn’t going to just create a fire spontaneously. I got up and started gathering rocks from the edge of the beach. I formed a circle in the sand and filled it with dried palm fronds and wood. It took only one try for me to use the flint to spark the pit into a blazing fire.

  Good to know that some of my skills are still intact.

  The thought brought uncomfortable feelings into the back of my mind. It had been awhile since I had done a job. After the last one had gone the way that it did, I had taken some time off, sinking back into anonymity for a bit so that I could shake off of the heat and the guilt. Anonymity had its perks, but it also had its drawbacks, a very distinct one of which was a distinct lack of income coming in, which is what had brought me to this boat and the water just off the cruise ship. There was money to be had, but I had to finish the job first, and that was going to be decidedly more difficult from an island in the middle of nowhere with a witness who now had the fairly intimate knowledge of me that came with staring a watery death in the face.

  This left me in an uncomfortable position. I needed to finish what I came here to do in order to get paid and be able to keep on surviving for the next few months, which I had become rather fond of doing, but I had also just helped these two get through the storm and was now stuck on an island with them. They had both seen my face and I had been stupid enough in the moments of fearing for my life to actually tell them my real name. I was definitely a bit rusty, but that wasn’t going to excuse me. I didn’t know what I was supposed to do, but I was going to need to make a decision quickly, because this situation was only going to get more complicated the longer that we were here, and from the looks of the empty horizon, beached and completely destroyed boat, and untouched sand, that just might prove to be far longer than I would have liked to think about.

  Chapter Seven

  Hunter

  I reached down toward Eleanor and helped her up the steep path. I looked down at her feet as she climbed up and took her place beside me on the more level ground. Dark, damp dirt was already streaked across her pale skin and stood in stark contrast to her pristine, bright red pedicure. Something about the color was both surprising and a bit exciting to me. Despite the way that she had acted toward me during and after the reception, I had expected something tamer. There was something about her that seemed delicate and feminine, like someone who would paint her toenails pink, not fire engine red. That was a main motivating factor in rejecting her at the wedding. It wasn’t that I wasn’t attracted to her. It was more that behind all of the forwardness and seduction, I could see that that wasn’t really her. She was looking for something that night, and I didn’t feel like I was the person who was going to be able to give it to her.

  I had been taken completely by surprise when she had pursued me after the wedding. I wasn’t used to that type of attention. Women usually looked at me and didn’t seem to see beyond my glasses and a personal style that I would readily admit was about ten miles short of stylish but that worked for a daily life of working at Royal and Company and then moonlighting at my brother’s fledgling event rental company trying to help him get the business off the ground. It wasn’t that they treated me with disdain or ignored me, rather than they saw someone completely tame and unintimidating. I didn’t strike them as the type to try to hit on them, and they were absolutely right. Socializing had never been my strong point, even with friends such as Snow, and now that I was inching my way on toward thirty, I didn’t see many opportunities for me to get better at it.

  Eleanor was different. There had been a spark in her that I hadn't anticipated. She looked at me as though she saw something more than what anyone else saw when they looked at me. But she was also an intriguing duality. There the soft tenderness and fear that I had seen in her when we were running through the hallway of the cruise ship and when she was curled on the deck of the boat after we escaped from the ship, but there was also strength and vibrancy that rose up out of her every now and then, glimmering through before disappearing again. It was as though something within her was beginning to come to the surface again, cracking through the muted, hardened shell that usually surrounded her. She was proving herself to be more surprising and intriguing than I had thought when walking away from her at the reception, and every moment I seemed to be finding out more about her. The thought of this woman teaching Noah when he was a child struck me as odd. I didn’t know if it was harder for me to imagine Noah when he was younger or this woman standing in front of a class of children trying to teach them to write in script and do long division.

  "Do your feet hurt?" I asked.

  Eleanor looked down at her feet for a moment as if she had forgotten that she was wandering through the jungle barefoot, and then shook her head. She looked back up with the first hint of a smile that I had seen on her soft-looking lips since I walked away from her after the wedding.

  "No," she said. "They probably feel better than they would if I was trying to walk around in those heels out here." She gave a short laugh and shook her head again, looking back down at her feet. "I was barefoot all the time before I married Virgil. I used to love being outside."

  The sudden openness threw me off, but I found myself wanting to know more about her and what had led her into this situation.

  “I would think that a Cub Scout leader would have wanted to spend time outside,” I said, remembering what she had told me about her husband. “Didn’t he go on camping trips and stuff?”

  Eleanor looked momentarily confused and then jumped slightly as if remembering the same thing I had.

  “Yes,” she said, a bit too emphatically. “Yes, he did. He loved camping. Sometimes he camped in our yard just to be outside.”

  I narrowed my eyes at her, starting to question what she was telling me.

  “But you didn’t ever go with him?”

  “Well,” she said, “you know. I wasn’t a Cub Scout. I didn’t have all the…. certifications and…badges.” She gestured up and down her body as if to indicate what she was wearing. “No uniform.”

  I nodded.

  "What exactly happened with your husband?" I asked.

  Despite the fact that I was trying to keep the tone of my voice as casual as possible, the smile melted from Eleanor's face and the grey veil of lingering fear settled over her eyes again. She seemed to withdraw even though she didn't move and her eyes bounced between her feet and me and back again.

  “Ex-husband,” she muttered.

  “Ex-husband,” I said.

  She looked up at me, meeting my eyes almost too intensely.

  "It was a terrible marriage that took me way too long to get out of," she told me matter-of-factly.

  "Why would you marry someone who hurt you?" I asked. “Why would you stay married to him?”

  Eleanor sighed as if it was a question that she had asked herself many times. That was a sigh that I had heard come out of my mother throughout my childhood. My father had never been physically abusive toward her, but their marriage hadn’t been a terribly happy one, and there were plenty of times when I saw an expression on her face that said that she would rather he just hit her than to speak to her the way that he did, or to flaunt his countless affairs so blatantly. I knew that she didn’t want to be married to him and I often blamed myself and my brother for her continued misery, thinking that if it wasn’t for us, she wouldn’t have felt like she was obligated to stay with him. It wasn’t until I was nearly an adult that I learned that it had actually been financial pressures that had kept her tied to him. She had given up her education and the possibility of a career to be a wife and mother, and by the time that she decided she really was finished with the relationship, she was so completely dependent on him that she didn’t
see any escape. It took years for her to finally find her way out. For the first time, I wondered if there could be similar pressures for Eleanor.

  "When we first met, he treated me like a princess,” she told me. “He was so attentive all the time, like all he wanted was to spend time with me and make me happy. I guess that's what men like that do. They convince you that you are the center of their world so that they can get you under their control. It didn't take long after the wedding for me to find out who I had actually married, and within a year I was already in so deep…"

  Her voice trailed off and she looked away. I didn't push her any further. We spent the next few silent minutes gathering as much fruit as we could carry and started back down to the beach. As we stepped out onto the sand, I could see her eyes lock on something ahead of us. I turned and saw that she was staring at Gavin, who had removed his shirt and was standing in a shallow tide pool using a spear he had apparently taken out of his luggage to fish. I could see the fascination and even a flicker of attraction in Eleanor's eyes and felt defensiveness well inside me. I felt like the snap decision that I had made in the cruise ship to run from those men with her had put me in the position of being her protector, and I felt uncomfortable with not only Gavin’s unusual presence in the water, but with the way that Eleanor seemed almost fascinated by him. It wasn’t a reaction that I would have expected to have, and I did what I could to shake it away. It really wasn’t my place to judge Gavin or question anything about him. We were the ones who had flung ourselves off of a moving water vessel and pulled a Black Beard with his boat. They weren’t exactly ranking high on the “not suspicious” meter.