by R. R. Banks
I tried to get us far enough from what remained of our shelter that we weren't walking through the pieces of it that the storm had thrown across the sand, but no matter how far we walked there wasn't a stretch of the sand that wasn't studded with pieces of bamboo, palm fronds, and other debris. It was surprising in a way, looking like there were more pieces of it once it was blown apart than there had been when it was actually solid. We walked along in silence until we got to the edge of the water and stood letting the cool foam wash up over our feet.
"How much do you really know about what your husband did?" I asked.
Oh, what the grimy-living-holy fuck was that? Where did that question come from? I had absolutely no intention of continuing on with that train of conversation and yet…there it was.
"Ex-husband," Eleanor said with bitterness in her voice.
"I'm sorry," I said. "Your ex-husband."
She shook her head and stared out over the waves. Her hand didn't grip mine tightly, but I continued to hold it, not wanting the connection between us to end. I couldn’t get the thoughts of our night together out of my mind. I could still feel her skin against my palms and her breath on my neck. I could still hear the whimpering, cooing sounds that I had made tumble from her lips just from the light touch of my hand on her breasts. I craved more of her, but I could also feel my heart drawing toward her as much as my body was. Every time that she mentioned her ex-husband and everything that he had put her through, I got angrier, filled with a primal need to protect her.
I wondered if she could feel that energy coming off of me, but by the way that she held herself, I doubted it. She seemed smaller and withdrawn, the age more apparent around her eyes. I knew that she was self-conscious about them. So much of how she presented herself seemed focused around concealed the years that made themselves visible in the corners of her eyes, but I preferred her this way. Each of those lines meant something. They carried with them the testament of all that she had survived and all that had persevered even through the suffering that she had endured. I wondered which of those lines had been there, even in their earliest incarnations, when she met Virgil. Which of them had formed from the days that she had spent smiling and laughing before he darkened her life? Those were the lines that were the most precious. They were the ones that proved that no matter what he put her through, she was still, at her very essence, her.
"I'm not sure," she finally said. "Obviously I don't know the full extent of everything. I'm sure that if I did I wouldn’t be standing here with you.” She gave a short laugh even though I wasn’t exactly sure what she found funny about that. “I know just enough that it is dangerous to him."
"What do you mean?"
Eleanor looked up at me and stared into my eyes for several long seconds as if she was trying to find something in them.
"When I met him, I was completely starry-eyed. His confidence and the power that he seemed to have absolutely won me over. I hate even admitting that about myself." She looked back over the ocean. "I wasn't always this person. I used to be so much stronger. I never would have wanted someone to have power like that over me.”
She had expressed the same sentiment to me before, but this time it sounded more like she was trying to convince herself.
"I like the person you are," I said.
Eleanor gave another short, emotionless laugh.
"You don't even know me," she said. She glanced up at me and then away again. "I don't even know me anymore. I told you that I used to spend a lot of time outside."
"Yes,” I said. “But you didn’t have the right uniform so you weren’t allowed to go on Cub Scout campouts.”
She looked at me with a glimmer of a question in her eyes and then they widened and she nodded.
"Right. Well, before all that, I would go camping with my father and my brothers. We did it every summer. We never really knew when we were going to go. My father was not exactly a planner. He would just get up one morning and come into our rooms fully dressed in his camping gear and tell us it was time to go. We'd be on the road right after breakfast."
"Do you still camp with them?"
I knew that she was going to say that she didn't. It was obvious that she had separated herself from that part of her long ago. I just didn't want her to stop talking.
"No," she said, shaking her head. "We stopped when I was a teenager."
"Why?"
Her head dropped and I saw a tear forming in the corner of her eye. I wanted to brush it away, but I worried the touch would break the stream of thought that she was now following. It seemed like something that she had had coiled tightly inside of her was starting to loosen and I wanted to give her the opportunity to let out whatever she needed to.
"There was a storm," she said weakly, as if she was unsure of whether she even wanted to say the words. "The weather was supposed to be clear the whole weekend. We were out on the lake in the little canoe that my father loved. The clouds came in so fast. We barely had time to react. It was like it went from day to night in seconds. By the time that we headed back to shore the rain was already making it almost impossible for us to see. My brother stood up to try to grab a flashlight from our kit." She drew in a shuddering breath and I tightened my grip on her hand. "He went over the edge. We could see his face bobbing in the water in the flashes of lightning. I could see his mouth open. I knew he was screaming, but the thunder and the rain on the water was so loud that I couldn't hear him. We didn't find him until the next day."
"I'm so sorry," I said, not sure what else to say.
Now it was painfully clear why she had been so afraid when the storms came. I wished that I had known the story before so that I could have comforted her.
"We tried to keep up our trips after that, but it was just too hard. They got shorter and then we missed a year. They just tapered off. My father put all of his camping stuff in storage and we just never talked about it again. Storms have been really hard for me ever since."
"I'm glad that I was with you last night, then," I said.
She looked at me with a blend of emotion in her eyes and I immediately felt a pang of guilt. She turned away from me, dropping my hand and walking a few steps in the opposite direction. Her head was down as if she felt bad about the way that she had weathered the storm the night before rather than spending it afraid and sad as she imagined was her usual response.
"Eleanor," I said, starting toward her.
"Is there something that you wanted to talk to me about?" she asked, turning to face me.
I didn’t know what to say. Something had shifted in her tone and I felt like she had put everything away in a neat little file cabinet, closed the drawer, and walked away, not ready to see or think about it.
“I just wanted to make you feel better,” I said, feeling like the sentiment fell flat. “I want you to know that I’m here to help you and protect you if we face any danger here.”
"I feel like I was already in some pretty serious danger literally running for my life through a cruise ship."
"I know and I'm sorry that I didn't find you faster, but the point is that I did find you. I found you and I got you off of the ship safely."
"You threw me off of the side of the ship."
"I didn't throw you. I helped you jump."
I absolutely threw her.
"And now we are on quite literally a deserted island with absolutely no way of getting off."
"I know. There’s not really anything that I can do about that. I wish that there was. That wasn’t really what I thought was going to happen when I got us off the ship.”
“Really?” Eleanor asked. “What exactly was going through your head when you scooped me up and tossed me into the ocean? How did that situation play out in your mind?”
“I didn’t honestly have any plan beyond that. It was a bit of a split-second decision. I hadn’t really thought anything through.”
“Good to know that I’m in such analytical and quick-thinking hands.”
; I smiled at her, relieved to hear some of the levity in her voice. Eleanor let out a sigh and looked around. It was almost like she was seeing the damage from the storm for the first time, as if her mind had erased her reaction and was allowing her to re-evaluate. This time it seemed that she was seeing the carnage from a more practical and logical place rather than one fueled by emotion, and that was a place where I was comfortable camping out for a while.
“So, what do we do now?” she asked.
I looked around with her, trying to let my eyes follow the same path that hers did so that I could see what she had and hopefully get some of the same perspective.
“I don’t know,” I finally said. “There’s so much to do, I don’t even know where to start.”
Eleanor let out a long sigh.
“I thought Noah said that you were some kind of organizational wonder,” she muttered, more under her breath than to me.
“What?” I said.
She looked at me as if surprised either that I had heard her, or that I was actually going to call her out for it.
“Hmmm?” she said with mock innocence.
“Did you say something about Noah?” I asked.
She stumbled and stuttered for a few moments and then nodded.
“Yes,” she said shortly. “It’s just that he has told me that you work for him at the advertising agency and that you are really good at your job.”
I narrowed my eyes at her.
“He told you that?” I asked, the comment striking me as strange. “I didn’t realize that you kept in touch that closely. How often do you talk to him?”
Eleanor’s eyes widened slightly.
“Pretty often,” she said with another slow nod. “I guess that you never get over being someone’s guidance counselor.”
“Third grade teacher,” I corrected, tilting my head at her.
“What?” she asked.
“Third grade teacher,” I repeated. “I thought that you said that you were Noah’s third grade teacher.”
“Yes,” she said again, the voice almost exploding out of her. “Third grade teacher. Guidance counselor. Mid-term soccer coach and spring jubilee coordinator and costume designer. That was a tight year for the school budget. We all kind of chipped in and did our best.”
"We need to find Gavin," I said, trying to give myself time to process what she had said. That was a lot. "He's been gone for too long. He could have gotten hurt in the storm."
Chapter Fourteen
Gavin
I nearly sobbed in relief when I felt the bottom of the tiny raft hit something nearly solid beneath me and realized that it was sand. The last few hours had been nothing short of terrifying and I was done with being in the water. In fact, I was at the point when I was drafting the insurance claim for my boat in my head and was planning a move to somewhere fully landlocked so that I never had to see a body of water bigger than a mudpuddle ever again.
Not even a fucking swimming pool. I might even tear all of the bathtubs out of my house.
I was done with water. Fully and completely done. The fact that I had just washed up on the beach of what looked like an even smaller and more desolate island than the one that I had left, though, didn’t bode well for my decision to impose a life-long ban on any large quantities of water. Heading out in the raft hadn’t been something that I had thought through very extensively. With Hunter unconscious and Eleanor reaching what seemed like a mental breaking point, I had been the one that was left to try to keep gathering supplies and ensuring that we were going to actually get through this Gilligan’s Island shit as unscathed as possible. I was prowling around in what was left of the boat looking for anything else that I could salvage from its pathetic skeleton when I found the emergency raft still stuffed in its lockbox on the side. I felt like an absolute, unequivocal idiot when I pulled it out, examining it to confirm that there were no tears or other issues in the material that would compromise its seaworthiness, as it were. How could I have possibly forgotten that this thing was in the boat? With all of the flailing and Eleanor’s MacGyver-ing of a vessel to get her across the tidal pool, I never once thought about the equipment that was actually put on the boat to get me through situations like this.
As soon as I saw the raft, though, I knew that I had to leave. Something about the shriveled green raft made the fog disappear from my mind and I was able to look at the situation clearly. I had let my instincts and training take over far too much during our days on the island. I had been hired for a specific job, and when the Universe seemed to be giving me a gift of making that job far easier than it might have otherwise been, I decided not to accept it and instead go completely against it. I wasn’t necessarily supposed to kill Eleanor. That hadn’t been in my job description. By the wording of the description and the objectives, however, I couldn’t imagine that my client would have frowned too hard when discovering that Eleanor had been tumbled around in the spin cycle from hell and spat out on an island to wither away. In fact, if I could convince them that the ocean had teamed up with me to do the kidnapping and that eliminating my client’s need to handle the unpleasant dirty work that often came after such a kidnapping personally, I might even be able to secure myself a bonus. That would go toward the acres of very dry, very high land that I intended on finding and never leaving.
I was aggravated at myself for even allowing the situation to get to me the way that it had. It was like the time that I was forced to take away from my work had somehow melted the portion of my brain that ensured I made the right decisions and handled each job properly. I was suddenly soft and sympathetic, and those were not descriptions that were useful in my line of work. As soon as I had realized that the sopping, terrified woman that had clawed her way aboard my boat during the storm was Eleanor, I should have pitched Hunter’s ass back out into the waves, tossed her into storage below deck, and hightailed it to the mainland so that I could collect my paycheck and go about my life. Instead I had not only gotten them through the storm, but I had actually helped them survive on the island.
I was feeling far too much camaraderie with these people and that had to stop. I didn’t know what she had done or why she was so much of a problem, but there was a stack of cash waiting for me when I brought Eleanor in, and that was all that needed to matter to me right then. Finding the raft had been an omen. It was time to dislodge myself from what was happening on the island and let the situation unfold however it was going to. When I found a way to communicate with the outside world, I would get in touch with my client, let them know what happened, and do my best to direct them to the island. What happened to Eleanor and Hunter from there was their issue. They could use their skulls as accent points for the turrets of sandcastles for all I cared. By the time they got the moat dug, I would be paid and well on my way to the anonymity I got to enjoy after finishing a job.
Of course, that meant that I was going to have to figure out where the hell I was and how I was going to get in touch with anyone. The distance between the islands had taken far longer than I would have wanted it to, but the reality was that it likely wasn’t very far. I had wrestled the tiny-ass float across the waves as much as I had ridden it, and I was well beyond the point of believing that it would get me anywhere else. Unless I had somehow done exactly as we had hoped when finding the first island and stumbled on a cruise line stopping point, I was going to have to figure out my own way to get rescued. Since I didn’t hear any tinkling steel drum music or see any half-naked women limbo dancing their way toward me with tropical drinks, I was pretty well certain that the first option was out. That meant that I was either going to have to find my way to another island, or hope to get rescued.
Fan-fucking-tastic.
****
Snow
“What cruise line did you say that your Aunt Eleanor chose for the bridal party?” I asked, drying my hair as I walked into the lounge area of the hotel room.
I was staring down at my phone in my hand and when I looked up I saw
that Noah was sitting in a white lounge chair beside the open door to the balcony, his naked body bathed in the morning sunlight streaming into the room. I couldn’t help the smile that came to my lips. My husband was gorgeous.
My husband.
That thought was still surprising to me and I had to remind myself that it was true every time that it almost came out of my mouth. Of course, the massive ring that still felt heavy on my hand helped make it as real, but it was the sight of this beautiful man, the man who I loved more than I ever could have even begun to imagine that I would love somebody, smiling back at me, that made me really feel like a wife.
“I thought that we agreed that we weren’t going to use our phones during our honeymoon,” he said with a mild hint of chastising in his voice.
“I know,” I said, “but going totally off-grid for three weeks doesn’t seem realistic when you have a company to run.”
“There are people who are doing all of that for me,” Noah said, swinging his legs down from where they were draped over the side of the chair so that he could stand up. “Remember? Mr. Royal said that he would be happy to take over for me for the next couple of months so that we could just enjoy our marriage.”
“Do you think that’s weird?” I asked, my shoulders sagging slightly under the thought that we might be taking advantage of the darling, trusting elderly man who had given me my career and then almost destroyed it forever by marrying the blast from the past bitch who had made it her life’s goal to ruin me throughout our youth. “I mean, you took over his company. Like straight took it out from under him. He went from owning the company and running it on his own to being an occasional contributor to the newsletter.”
“It wasn’t like it was a hostile takeover that involved months in court and a military coup,” Noah said, walking toward me. I could feel my mouth watering as my eyes traveled over his body. “He had been planning on selling the company to my father for a long time. Mr. Royal was ready to retire. All the nastiness with Lucille was just a hiccup.”
