by Abby Weeks
Hunter took a swig from the bottle and passed it to her. She accepted it indifferently and took a long swig. She hated Heath for being like this. There was no use holding out any hope for him. He wasn’t loving, he wasn’t a good man, and he’d never make her a decent husband. Why couldn’t she remember that when he was being nice? It was all an act.
That round, Hunter got the low card. He opened the buttons on his shirt and took it off. He had a worn-out white vest on underneath it.
“Again,” Heath said and dealt out three more cards.
This time when Aisha got her card, again placed on her lap, face up, it was a six. Hunter got a jack. She watched as Heath turned over his own card, very slowly. It was a seven.
She shook her head. “I don’t care,” she said. “I told you I wasn’t playing, and I’m not.”
“Not fair,” Heath said. “Come on. You were happy to sit there while we lost. Now that it’s your turn, you’re not getting out of it.”
“I was not happy to sit here.”
“Yes you were,” Hunter said.
Aisha looked up at him. She felt as if he’d just slapped her in the face. She felt betrayed. It hurt her even more than Heath’s betrayal. She’d thought more of Hunter. He was supposed to know better. He was older, he had a child her age, and he was on duty, escorting them north on behalf of the company. She felt so utterly betrayed. He met her eyes, but there was no give in them. He looked the same as he always did. He wasn’t kidding.
She looked at Heath. Heath was elated. He hadn’t been expecting Hunter to back him up. She had nowhere to go, no one to turn to. It was the story of her life.
She stood up. Neither man moved.
“Come on,” she said, “guys, this isn’t funny.”
Hunter looked down at his feet, but he didn’t make a move. She could tell he wasn’t proud of himself, but that didn’t help her now. There was no way she was getting past Heath. He was sitting there by the door. It wouldn’t even open without him moving his legs.
Aisha was scared to try to leave. What if she tried and he didn’t let her? What if things got really nasty? She’d been there before. She knew what that was like. She’d built her entire life with Heath around managing him, making sure he didn’t get worked up. She’d built for herself a life of appeasement. Of course, he’d never done anything like this to her.
This was new. It was different. There was another man involved, a man she’d foolishly thought she could trust. A man who should have known better, who should have been better.
“Come on, Hunter? This isn’t right.”
She looked at him. She stared at him, glared even, but he didn’t look up. He kept his eyes fixed on the ground and said nothing.
Aisha weighed up the risk of trying to open the door. They might let her pass. They might do nothing. But then what? She’d be out in the corridor of a freezing cold ship full of other rough men who were every bit as dangerous as these two. And where would she sleep? What would she do when they reached Juneau? How would she get home? She had all of about thirty dollars Canadian in her purse.
She knew she was being a coward, she knew she was falling into the very trap that the counselor had warned her about all those years earlier, but she sat down and kicked off one of her boots.
“Was that so difficult?” Heath said.
Aisha said nothing.
“Was it?” Heath insisted. “Answer me.”
Reluctantly, after a tense pause, Aisha answered. “No,” she said, almost inaudibly.
“Good,” Heath said. “Okay. Hunter, give her a drink.”
Hunter was holding the bottle of vodka, and he passed it to her. She took a long swig, not knowing what lay ahead of her on this thirty-hour voyage, trapped in this cabin which was smaller even than a jail cell. And a jail cell was exactly what it felt like.
“Everyone happy?” Heath said.
No one said anything. Hunter was looking at the ground. Aisha was afraid she would start crying. She was determined not to. They were bullies, that was all.
“Happy?” Heath repeated.
“Happy,” Hunter said.
They both looked at her. She looked up at them. “Fine,” she said.
Heath took the bottle from her and took a long swig from it, then he dealt another round.
This time it was Aisha again who drew the low card. Without even reacting, without giving them the pleasure of a response, she kicked off her other boot. She had to take her boots off anyway if she was going to sleep in there.
She took the bottle of vodka from Hunter and had another swig. She tried to show as little emotion as possible during the next few rounds. She was dissociating herself from the event. They could play their stupid game, they could make her play it too, but they couldn’t force her to be present. She was here in body, but her mind was elsewhere.
During the following rounds, Hunter removed his boots, his socks, and his tattered vest. Aisha saw a muscular, well-chiseled chest underneath it, covered in hair the same color as the hair on his head.
Heath lost a few rounds and removed his boots, socks, sweater and shirt. That left him shirtless too.
When Aisha lost rounds, she removed her sweater, her socks, and her woolen tights she wore as an extra layer against the cold. All she had left was her dress, a floral print of warm cotton, and her underwear.
She still stubbornly refused to look at either of them. Hunter had regained his composure at this point, and was drinking liberally from the bottle of vodka. Aisha noticed it was almost empty, and briefly hoped that the game might come to an end when the vodka did.
Heath took the bottle and noticed that it was coming to an end.
“Hold on,” he said to Hunter. “I’ll go get another bottle. You wait right here.” He left, naked to the waist. She doubted anyone on the ship would have cared.
The way he told Hunter to wait there, it sounded eerily like an order to stand guard over Aisha. She knew that was what it was. They were keeping her there. There was no question about it.
Once Heath left, Aisha confronted Hunter.
“I thought you were more of a man than him,” she said.
Hunter looked up at her. There was some sympathy in his face, some compassion. She knew he realized what was going on, but for some reason, maybe the alcohol, he wasn’t going to do anything about it.
“Look,” he said. “It’s just a way to pass the time. Try and enjoy it.”
“Enjoy it?”
“It’s a bit of fun. A diversion. Stop being so uptight about it. No one’s going to hurt you.”
She shook her head. How could he be so hypocritical? How could he go along with this?
But then, he wasn’t the one who was engaged to Heath. She was. Maybe she should have been asking herself those questions.
“If I stood up right now,” she said, “would you let me leave this cabin?”
“Of course I would,” Hunter said. “Jesus. You haven’t been kidnapped, missy. We’re just whittling away a few hours. This is the way life is in the wild north. You might as well get used to it.”
“You tell yourself that,” she said.
*
Chapter 27
WHEN HEATH RETURNED, THERE WAS a grin on his face and he was holding another bottle of the potent vodka. He sat down heavily. Aisha could tell he was getting really drunk. He practically fell onto the bed. He dealt another hand.
Aisha watched the cards closely. It was starting to matter more, who lost and who won. Heath placed a card on her lap. It was an eight. Not too bad. Then he dealt Hunter a jack and himself a king.
Aisha looked at the two of them and shook her head. “I guess you’re pleased,” she said.
Heath shrugged drunkenly. Hunter said nothing. She reached down to the waist of her dress and pulled it up over her head. She wondered why the hell Heath was even doing this to her. What was in it for him? He could see her naked whenever he wanted. Why did he want Hunter to share the fun? That wasn’t normal.
/> It wasn’t right.
She sat there in her bra and panties and felt extremely vulnerable. Both men were looking at her. Hunter’s eyes slithered over every inch of her—every flaw, every curve, every imperfection. Aisha shivered. It wasn’t particularly cold in the room, but she was so tense that her body shook.
Heath reached out and pulled at the cup of her bra.
“Stop it,” she said. He did stop, but he was too drunk to realize what he’d done.
He dealt another round, and this one didn’t go any better for her. She lost with a five. Both men stared at her as she tried to build up the courage to remove another piece of clothing. She looked at them. They were eyeing her so lustfully. Heath was practically drooling. Aisha didn’t know what turned him on more, the fact that she was stripping, or the fact that she felt humiliated and scared.
“Wait till you see these tits,” Heath said to Hunter.
Hunter nodded, as if Heath had just told him the score of a football game.
Aisha felt scared, she felt vulnerable, she felt humiliated. She reached behind her and opened the clasp that held her bra in place. When the front of the bra fell onto her lap, Hunter sighed out loud. She heard him. She wondered how long it had been since he’d had a woman. It would have taken him a week at least to get down to Washington, now another week to get back up to Alaska. Two weeks maybe, since he’d been to one of the Alaskan whore houses he’d talked about earlier.
While Hunter openly stared at her voluptuous breasts, Heath dealt another round. Aisha felt painfully shy. The light on the ceiling was so bright. Fluorescent lighting revealed everything. There was no softness to it at all. She found herself worrying that Hunter would find her ugly, or that Heath would be ashamed of her. Why was she the one worrying? They were the ones who’d forced her into this situation. She felt self-conscious about the shape of her nipples, the size and color of her areolas, the folds of flesh on her stomach because she was sitting. Nothing about this situation gave her any comfort or confidence. And all the while, she was terrified of what was going to happen when the card game was finished.
“Stand up,” Heath said.
She looked at him.
“Go on,” he said.
She took the bottle from him and had a swig. Then she stood. Both men feasted their eyes on her skin, her bare breasts, her stomach, her navel.
“Turn around,” Heath said.
She turned and faced the little round window that opened out onto one of the coldest oceans on the planet. Two minutes in that water and she’d be dead. That’s what she thought about when she felt a man’s cold, coarse hand graze against her butt cheek. She didn’t know if it was Heath’s hand or Hunter’s, and she didn’t want to know. She was too scared to know.
“Okay,” Heath said and dealt another round of cards.
She took her seat, and this time it was Hunter who lost. He stood up and opened his belt. His pants fell to the ground and he kicked them off his ankles. Aisha glanced passingly at his lap. His shorts looked like a tent with a central pole sticking up in the middle. He had an erection eight inches high underneath the cotton of those shorts. She looked away, but not fast enough. Heath had seen her looking.
“You like that don’t you, filthy slut.”
Heath spoke to her like that sometimes, but never in front of anyone else. Was this something she could expect from now on? Was this the way things were going to be now that they’d left the security of their community in Washington? Was he just going to get crueler and crueler toward her? If that was the case, she didn’t know how she’d deal with it.
Heath dealt another hand. This time he lost and took off his jeans. Aisha didn’t even look at his lap. She didn’t have to. He had as big an erection as he was capable of.
Aisha shivered. She was scared. There was something intensely intimidating about being in that small room, almost naked, with two men who were getting hornier and hornier. It was like being in a cage with hungry wolves. She could see their cocks were stiff as wood. She could sense the tension in their bodies. They were like crouched animals ready to pounce on their prey.
Heath picked up the deck and started shuffling. He grinned at her and Hunter as the cards slid one over the other in his hand. “Who’s going to lose first?” he said.
Very slowly, Heath dealt the cards. For some reason, Aisha knew the game was over. Whatever happened with this deal, that would be it. It had been drawn out to the limit of the men’s patience.
Heath put her card on her lap and she saw that it was an ace. Aces were high. She wouldn’t be the loser. Next, he gave Hunter his card. Hunter turned it over, and to Aisha’s surprise, it was also an ace. Heath would be the loser, she thought. Heath grinned. He pulled the top card from the deck, it was an ace.
Aisha was sure he’d cheated. The chances of all of them drawing an ace like that were one in a thousand. She looked from Hunter to Heath, waiting to find out what the tie meant.
“Everyone strip,” Heath said.
“What?” Aisha said.
She shouldn’t have been surprised, it was the only logical conclusion to the game. But she was surprised. She’d thought for sure they would have put an end to the game at some point before this.
Hunter was already taking off his shorts. Aisha looked at him and then immediately looked away in shock. She couldn’t believe what she’d just seen. She was twenty years old, and to this day, the only man she’d ever seen naked was Heath. Compared to Heath, Hunter looked a lot different. He was older, for one thing, but he was also more wholesome looking. Heath had always had a boyishness to his look. He looked like a child when standing next to Hunter. Hunter had hard-looking, rounded muscles. The hairs on his skin were thick and dark, gray strewn in among them. Grizzled was the word Aisha thought of. She glanced at his penis again before catching herself. It was darker than the rest of his body, as if it was more tanned. She looked from Hunter to Heath. Heath was also naked. There was something surreal about seeing two grown men, naked, standing right next to each other.
“Your turn,” Heath said to her.
Aisha felt suddenly hot, as if the temperature in the cabin had just jumped ten degrees. Her heart was pounding. She put her hand against the wall to steady herself.
They both turned and looked at her. There was an intensity in their eyes, an animal fierceness. It was always the same. When it came to sex, there was very little to differentiate between man and beast. Sex brought the animal out in everyone.
For Aisha there was no escape. There was no way out other than through them, and she knew enough to know she wasn’t going to be able to fight them off.
Her self-preservation mechanism took over. Deep inside every person, every living animal, is a knowledge—a deep, instinctual knowledge of what is required to survive. When you can fight, you fight. When you can run, you run. When you can do neither of those things, you surrender.
“Your panties,” Heath said.
“What?”
“We did our part. Now it’s your turn.”
Aisha would have looked away, but there was nowhere for her to look. Their two big, naked bodies filled the cabin.
“Do it,” Hunter said.
There it was again, that awful feeling of betrayal. What did it say about her life that she’d expected more from Hunter, a company employee she’d known for a few days, than she did from her own fiancé?
“I don’t want this,” she said.
Neither man moved, their faces were blank slates, they didn’t care what she wanted.
“Heath,” Aisha said imploringly, “I thought we were …” but she didn’t finish the sentence. Her words trailed off when she saw that they would make no difference. She wasn’t going to give them the pleasure of seeing her beg too.
She reached down to the waist of her panties and pulled them down to her ankles and stepped out of them. The men stared. Heath seemed more interested in her naked body than he’d ever been when they were alone. The presence of Hunter excited
him as much as she did.
“Stand up on the bed,” Heath said.
Aisha stepped up onto it. She had to stoop a little to avoid hitting her head on the ceiling.
“Look at it,” Heath said. He reached out and touched her tender vagina, spreading open the lips with two fingers.
Hunter was nodding approvingly. “Very nice,” he said.
Aisha was red with embarrassment. She stared at the little window. She wondered what it would feel like to jump out into the icy water.
“You want to touch her?” Heath said.
Hunter looked up at her. She didn’t respond. He reached out touched the soft folds of her clitoris with his thick finger. Aisha didn’t move. She didn’t even breathe. She just stood there, holding her breath, waiting for them to stop what they were doing.
“Turn,” Heath said. “And get on your knees.”
Aisha turned around so her back was to them, and she got down on her knees. Heath pulled her so that she was kneeling up, then he caressed her butt with his hands.
“Give this a squeeze,” he said to Hunter.
Hunter’s hands were colder than Heath’s, and his skin was rougher, like sandpaper. She felt them both holding her butt cheeks, squeezing them gently in their hands as if they were testing the ripeness of fruit. Heath pulled open her cheeks so that they could see her anus. Aisha thought she was going to cry. She couldn’t imagine a more humiliating inspection of her body.
“What are we going to do with her?” Hunter said.
“Whatever you want,” Heath said.
Aisha cringed. Heath was offering her to another man. Since when was she something that was his to give? There was a long pause.
“You can fuck her if you like,” Heath said.
“I don’t know,” Hunter said.
“Go ahead. She won’t mind.”
Aisha heard every word as if it was being spoken about another person.
“No, I don’t know,” Hunter said. “She’s my daughter’s age.”
“She’s an adult.”
“No,” Hunter said again. “It wouldn’t be right.”
