by Jane Henry
And that’s when I know. I’ve been gravely ill.
And he actually… cares that I was.
“What happened?” I ask, sitting up in bed. I’ve been here so long my skin and muscles feel strangely sore. “And God, can I have something to eat?”
He shakes his head, but his eyes bely his sternness. They twinkle like stars studded in a midnight sky.
He’s happy I’m alive. He’s fucking happy.
He leans down, brushes the pad of his thumb down the side of my cheek, and kisses me. When he pulls away he mutters, “You are in so much fucking trouble.”
What happened?
I’m suddenly nervous about him leaving, as if the absence of his presence will make me feel bereft.
“Where are you going?” I ask.
He turns and quirks a curious brow at me. “Just to get some food,” he says. “I’ll be right back.”
And he’s gone. I try to piece together the scattered parts of my memory, but I can’t formulate much of anything, and it disturbs me that I can’t.
Fortunately, he comes back in a moment later, with a large plate of food.
“Is that scrambled eggs?” I ask him, staring incredulously at the golden, steaming pile on the plate.
“Yup,” he says. “I found a nest nearby.”
“That’s a little sad,” I say. But I’m quickly over it when he sits next to me, takes a forkful of eggs, and lifts it to my mouth.
“I can feed myself,” I say, more out of surprise than defiance, but when I lift my hand, it wobbles and shakes.
“Let me do it,” he says. “I’ve been feeding you for days.”
I sit back and let him, my hunger too strong to protest anyway. He takes small forkfuls of scrambled eggs and places them in my mouth. In between bites, he offers me a split coconut filled with water. I wrinkle up my nose. “Oh, I hate coconut.”
His eyes darken. “I don’t fucking care. This is what’s brought you back to life, so you’ll drink it.”
I take a sip, grimacing at the weird taste. It’s like water but mildly sweet. “Can’t I just have water?” I ask.
“No. This has more nutrients and will help you recuperate.”
“I guess it’s medicine, then,” I say.
“Exactly.” His sober eyes bring me back to my question.
“What happened?” I ask, rolling over onto my side. I look about the room and see my clothes neatly folded, and a black bag next to them. I blink in surprise, but don’t say anything to him. It’s my toiletry bag. He’s brought in my personal belongings.
He folds his hands in his lap and looks over at me, as if he’s waiting for me to pass out or something, expectant and a little nervous.
“You didn’t come back from the beach,” he said. “You were supposed to take a quick trip, but you didn’t come back. So I went looking for you, it took a while, but I found you by the berry bushes.”
The memory comes crashing down on me like thunder. I exhale. “I fell asleep on the beach,” I say. “I woke and was really fucking sunburned and felt sick.”
“Sunstroke,” he says.
“I was coming back but I was so hungry and thirsty. I stumbled over to the berries. My mind was all confused and hazy, and I thought you said they were good to eat.”
He frowns. “They are most definitely not. I hadn’t tested them all fully. It’s a good thing you didn’t eat more, or I never would’ve been able to revive you.”
I look at him questioningly. I’m not sure what to make of this, to be honest. “You revived me?”
He shrugs. “I made you lose the contents of your stomach,” he says, then with a smirk. “Fun times.”
“Oh, gross.”
“Can’t exactly pump your stomach here in the wilderness, babe.”
Babe? I don’t respond. It’s almost… sweet or something.
“Yeah,” I say after a moment. “So… what did you do?”
“Carried you to the water, bathed you to bring your fever down, fed you nothing but coconut water for days.”
He nursed me back to health. He kept vigil by my bedside, bathed me and fed me. God. I don’t really know what to think of this.
“How long’s it been?” I ask, my voice a mere whisper.
He leans down and kisses my forehead so tenderly tears come to my eyes.
“A week,” he says.
“Holy shit. A week. I’ve been unconscious for a week?”
“Yeah,” he says, then his gaze darkens, and his voice deepens. “You ever fucking go near those berries again, I’ll take my belt to your ass. I punished you once with it, but you’ve not really been strapped yet.”
I look away shyly and honestly a little afraid, since I know he means what he says. It doesn’t take much to imagine him swinging that leather harder, longer.
“Yeah,” I say. “I don’t think I need the threat of punishment. That was fucking awful. So yeah, I won’t.” A gentle tug of my hair makes me quickly amend what I’ve said. “Yes, sir.”
It’s a reminder that though I’m no longer restrained, it’s only because I’ve graduated. I’m still his prisoner. He’s still my… master, or whatever the fuck.
But he saved my life.
“Thank you,” I say.
He stands and walks to the door, then turns to face me. “I don’t want to be here alone,” he says. He leaves.
My stomach sinks. I convinced myself for a short time that maybe I meant something to him. That I’m more than a body to warm his bed, that he can command at will. That I really, truly meant something to him.
He spent a full week nursing me back to health. He carried me back here. More than that? He went to find me to begin with.
But I’m just another human, so he doesn’t go crazy in the near-desolation on this island.
Maybe we both will anyway.
Chapter Sixteen
Adrian
It takes Nadine days to recover. Her sunburn turns to blisters in parts, and I know they’ve got to be painful, but she lets me treat them and doesn’t fight me. Some burst, and even I wince at the sensitive skin beneath, but over time the skin begins to heal. There are parts where her skin peels away, but with rest and food, she begins to heal. Her stomach is still queasy, but I give her little bits of coconut and scrambled eggs, and eventually feed her small bowls of canned peaches and pineapple to go along with some roasted fish. This she likes. I don’t enjoy using the stores in our small pantry, because we have enough food here to sustain us and those are better for emergencies. But there’s only so much coconut and fish one can eat.
One day I come in from catching our daily dinner, and Nadine sits up with a smile.
“Look!” she says. She’s found something wiry and cagey, likely wreckage from the plane, and she’s made a sort of metal net.
“What’s that?” I ask.
“To catch fish. Looks more like a lobster trap. I wish there was lobster here,” she says. “I’m fucking dying to eat some lobster.”
I smirk at her. She’s kinda cute when she’s excited about something. “We don’t exactly have melted butter here, babe. And it’s a North American delicacy anyway.”
“Doesn’t matter,” she says. “I’d eat lobster any way I could.” Then she frowns and tugs on a lock of her hair. “Maybe we can find shellfish. As long as you’d promise to cook it? I can’t stand listening to the screams when you cook lobster.”
I snort out a laugh as I begin preparing the fish. She grimaces and looks away. “A woman like you chasing down criminals gets all girly when cooking lobster? Jesus. Anyway, Nadine, lobsters can’t scream.”
“They do,” she says. “Have you ever boiled them?”
“Of course,” I respond. “It’s the sound of the water in the shell. Crustaceans are incapable of screaming like mammals. They don’t have any vocal chords.”
“Believe whatever you think,” she mutters, but her cheeks flush a faint pink.
“If my hands weren’t all fishy, I’d give your ass a
smack,” I tell her, as if the threat will do a damn thing to get through to her.
“Why?” she tosses back at me.
“Because you’re stubborn as fuck.”
She frowns and her eyes fall on her bag in the corner of the room. “And when are you going to give me my things?”
“When I’m good and ready,” I remind her. I don’t want her under any illusion that we’re on equal footing here. She’s headstrong and defiant. We’re not friends, we’re certainly not lovers, and it’s crucial to me that she focus on obeying me.
She frowns but doesn’t respond. After a moment, she turns to me.
“Do you think the two of us could go to the waterfalls today?” she asks. “I still haven’t had a proper bath since I’ve gotten better.”
I nod, placing the fish in a bucket of ice cold water, then dunking my hands in a fresh pail to clean them. “I’ve gone for a run and just gutted fish,” I say to her. “Damn straight I could use a bath.”
She wrinkles her nose but smiles. “I was gonna say something, but…”
This time I do swat her ass. She runs away, squealing, while I gather up the things we need. A few minutes later, we’re heading to the waterfalls.
“Did you ever go to France?” she asks.
I shake my head. “Up until I moved to my last location, I’ve never been out of the country.”
She nods. “I haven’t been far,” she says, “or to many places. My mom did take me to France once when I was just a little girl, though. But I remember every detail. And one of them was visiting the Sillans de Cascade.” The way she says the name sounds like butter on her lips, rich and smooth, with none of the jarring American-French accent I’m accustomed to.
“Oh yeah?”
“I mean, they’re like way bigger. Huge. Magnificent. But still, when I see the waterfalls here it reminds me of that visit.”
So the waterfalls are her happy place. They bring back fond memories. I’ll remember that.
“The only memory I have of a waterfall was visiting Niagara Falls on a grade school trip,” I tell her. “And they were amazing, but all I remember about that trip was how Frankie Deleanor stole my lunch money and I ended up sharing a stale peanut butter and jelly with Mrs. Grave.”
“Aww,” she says, but she’s smiling. “Seriously. You had a teacher named Mrs. Grave?”
“I did,” I tell her. “And she was so very, very… grave.”
She snorts.
We reach the waterfall just when the sun is high in the sky, but it doesn’t matter since here, light filters through the rooftop of trees, leaving a pattern of stippled light on the water and rocks.
Under the change of clothes, I’ve brought her a surprise. She doesn’t know the rest of her toiletries are stored here, as well as her razor I’ve recently sharpened for her, and all the lotions and little bottles she brought with her. She went through quite an ordeal, and even though our latest interactions have been fraught with snarky comments, she deserves a little treat.
I place our things by the side of the water and beckon her to me. She doesn’t look away shyly like she has in the past but meets my eyes as I strip her panties off. I take my time, now, enjoying the feel of her soft skin in my hands, her pebbled nipples under my palms, and the way her mouth parts with a soft little moan when I stroke the underside of her breasts.
“You’re beautiful,” I tell her. “Covering this body up in shit like bras and jeans and heavy, cable-knit sweaters would be an absolute travesty.”
“Eh,” she says with a twinkle in her eye. “You say that to all the girls.”
I reach for her hair and undo the little knot she’s formed at the top of her head. Golden silk cascades down over her shoulders, covering her pert breasts. I brush one length of hair aside, bend over, and stroke my tongue against her hardened bud. Her breath hitches and her eyes go half lidded. I continue to suckle her breast while I weigh the other in my hand, gently kneading her nipple.
“Oh, God, that feels good,” she says, throwing her head back and widening her stance so I have full access to her sweet pussy. I release one breast while still working the other with my tongue, letting my fingers travel from her breast, down the center of her navel, to the full softness of her thighs, then slowly between her legs. She whimpers at the first stroke of my fingers, then gyrates her hips.
Someone’s ready to come.
“I brought your bag with me,” I say. “And today, you get almost everything in it.”
“Almost?” she breathes, moving her pelvis so that she rocks against my hand.
“Yeah. You have a toy bag that you aren’t getting back.”
She freezes, then realization dawns on her. “Holy shit.”
I found a small, velvet bag with a thick vibrator and a dildo in it.
“Didn’t know someone like you would bring something like that with them, to be honest with you,” I admit. “Especially on a business trip.”
“I had no idea how long we’d be there,” she responds. She moves her hips faster on my hand. “And if it was a long time, well… you know, I’m almost thirty.”
I know she is. I found her wallet and I.D. in the bag.
“Yeah,” I say.
“You’re thirty-seven,” she blurts out, reminding me she knows details of my life. That I was her prisoner. There are no delusions about our roles here.
“Well thirty years old is a woman’s sexual prime,” she chatters on while I continue to fondle her folds. Her breathing gets faster and faster.
“Yes, so they say,” I respond. “But in a kink club scene, sexual prime is only just beginning at thirty.”
“Really?” she asks. She reaches for my shoulders to brace herself as she’s getting closer and closer to climax.
“Yes,” I grind out, my cock hardening as she gets closer and closer to release. “People wired that way find it an aphrodisiac. It’s a total myth that a woman’s sex drive plummets.”
“And you’d know, because…?”
“Ok, well, not from personal experience,” I admit, removing my hand for a split second to remind her that I can, that her tone is getting a bit snarky. “But I think that there’s still plenty of sexual life left after thirty.”
“Excellent,” she says with a chuckle.
She tightens, just about to climax. I bring my mouth to her ear and whisper, “You don’t need those toys anymore, sweetheart.”
“You got rid of them?” she asks, her brows furrowed in concentration.
“I sure as fuck did,” I respond. And I did. I took that bag and whipped it so far out to sea, she’ll never see them again. Fucking wannabe dicks. Poser cocks? Yeah, not with my girl.
I don’t regret it.
“You only needed those toys because you were never with a real man,” I say, removing my fingers from her clit and shoving them in her core. She arches and braces herself by tightening her grip on my neck. I bring my mouth to her ear and breathe, “Never had a real cock.”
She grumbles, “Those were really, really expensive ones.” This time I remove my hand entirely.
“Please, no!”
“Please, what?”
“Sir. Please, sir? Please don’t stop. I’m sorry.”
Good. She’s learning.
“Alright, then” I say. “Good girl. Come whenever you’re ready.”
She doesn’t need any more time. In a scream that makes the hair on my arms stand up, she lets herself go. Her arms encircle my neck to steady herself as she screams and writhes. Jesus, it’s good to give a woman an orgasm she appreciates so damn much.
When she slumps against me, I hold her until she’s steady again, then lift her in my arms and head to the water. I think she likes being held. She rests her head on my chest as if this is comfortable for her. She’s so small, it’s easy to carry her. I like it.
At the water’s edge, I place her down so she’s standing next to me, and quickly strip. We use the shower some, but the showers are so short and the water cold, i
t’s nice to come here to bathe once in a while.
We’ve milked this bar of soap since we got here, only bathing fully a few times a week. It’s slimmer, and when it’s gone, we’ll have to make use of the coconuts and other island amenities. I’m fine with it, even with my longer, shaggier hair, but I wonder about Nadine. It isn’t as easy for a woman to give up the comforts of home.
I go into the water first, then reach a hand out to Nadine. She stands above me, the wind rustling her hair over her shoulder, several wisps cover her face, and she laughs as she brushes them away. Her naked body, still flushed slightly after climaxing, is a picture of perfection.
When I first met her, I wanted to fuck the self-assurance right off her face. I wanted to inspire terror in her eyes and make her heart pound in fear when I neared her.
I never thought of raping her. I took what I wanted and set her on edge. It doesn’t take much to turn me the fuck on, so I’d bang one out in the shower or whenever the hell I felt like it. I made damn sure she knew she belonged to me, that she forfeited her rights when she tackled my ass to the ground and cuffed me. That we were no longer on equal footing.
Were we ever?
My need for vengeance has passed.
But my need for control has only grown. Now I want to fuck her until she forgets her name, until her body aches to be filled by me. Until she breathes in my scent like a drug, chases her pleasure with my name on her lips, and falls to sleep counting her fucking orgasms instead of sheep.
We bathe on one side that’s separated from the falls, in silence. I take my time lathering her up. Once she’s clean, I clean myself. She watches me, her eyes roaming hungrily over the muscles in my neck, my shoulders, my torso. I worked my body hard in confinement, kept it up on the island, and the lean diet and hard labor have helped. She lingers on my abs when I soap up, licks her lips, and swallows. But when her eyes meet mine, she quickly turns away, leaps over the small barrier that divides where we bathe from the waterfalls, and swims away from me.
“Careful,” I chide her, placing the soap on the shore before I follow suit. She turns over her shoulder, winks at me, then dives below the surface of the water.
