by Rae Renzi
“Popular film.”
Jack sat up slowly. “So you’ve studied all the actors, directors, producers, films—things like that?”
“Of the forties and fifties.” Casey took a slurp of wine. “My research has to do with the impact of the film industry on social standards, mostly looking at factors like financial success and how that played into future filmmaking decisions.”
“But the current industry?”
“Not so much. Hopeless, actually. It doesn’t interest me.”
Jack lifted an eyebrow. “Why not?”
Casey tilted her head at him. “Well, pushing social boundaries used to be a big risk in filmmaking. But now? There are hardly any boundaries left. Except, I guess it could go the other direction. Hmm…now there’s an idea…neo-repression…”
“Wouldn’t hold my breath.”
“Nah, I won’t. Are you in the military? An enlisted man gone AWOL? Is that your baggage?”
Jack snorted. “You’re deranged.”
She swirled the water around with her hands, remembering the reoccurring vision. “But the thing is, I have this picture of you in my mind, and you’re wearing some kind of uniform, like fatigues or something. It just seems to be so…real.”
Jack’s face was blank.
“Guys in the army do have tattoos, don’t they?”
He relaxed. “Yeah, I guess some do. But, no. Military life is not for me.”
“No surprise there.” Casey thunked her foot into the pool, splashing Jack. He returned the favor. They got into a boisterous foot-splash contest and eventually, energy pleasurably expended, they quieted again.
“You know, Jack,” Casey said, “I like you. Your mind, I mean. I really do like your mind.” Under the present circumstances, she thought it best not to mention that she thought his body was lovely too.
He looked at her with surprise. “My mind?”
“Yes, you know. That which resides in, or is the consequence of—a little theoretical conflict on that—your brain?” She reached for the wine and tipped the last few drops into her cup.
“You like my mind?”
“Yep. I like the way it works, and also the way it doesn’t work. You know what I mean?”
“Not entirely.”
She drained her cup. “I mean, you’re fun to talk to, in a sharky way, and smart. I like you. Too bad we don’t have more wine.”
Jack, subdued, laid his head back down on the edge of the pool and looked up at the deepening sky. “I am totally fucked.”
“What?” Casey asked, not sure she’d heard him right.
“Nothing. It’s getting cool in here.” Jack stood and slipped out of the pool. He reached for a towel and wrapped it around his waist.
Casey stood and contemplated the best way to exit the pool without harming, or worse, embarrassing herself. The tarp was slippery, and the pool a bit too deep for her to step out daintily. Crawling out seemed pathetic.
Jack, noticing her plight, held out his hand in assistance, which she gratefully accepted. He hauled her out. She, struggling to remain upright, lost her balance and fell against him, her fingers splayed across his chest. He put his hands on her shoulders to steady her and suddenly went still.
Casey realized something was happening, but in her fuzzy state, she didn’t know what. That is, she did know what, but didn’t know what to do about it. Her eyes inched up until they were snared by his, now burning like embers in a banked fire. Shivers raced down her spine.
Jack’s hands glided from her shoulders down to her wrists before lifting her fingers to his cheeks and then to his mouth. Closing his eyes, he kissed her palms, then the fingers on each hand in turn, lingering over them. Casey knew she should break away but didn’t move a single muscle. She was trapped in her own mind, locked into a spiral of sensation.
Barely opening his eyes to look into hers, still holding her wrists, Jack guided her hands across his face, drawing her fingers down his neck and onto his chest. Casey was mesmerized, like a bird in the thrall of a snake. His eyes never left hers as he moved her hands down his body. His skin felt warm and smooth, his muscles taut, his chest moved to meet her fingers as if to increase the contact between the two of them.
Casey felt both disturbed and excited. Unfamiliar feelings welled up inside her. Jack traced the contours of his chest with her hands, sliding her fingers across his nipples. They contracted instantly, becoming tight and hard. She stroked them again. He moaned, his breath coming faster. Something deep inside Casey ached. He pulled her hands lower, leading them to explore every ridge of muscle on his flat stomach, until they were at his waist. Then he stopped. Casey’s heart pounded so loud she could hear it over the wind.
His gaze never left her eyes as he lifted her hands away from his body and up to hers. Interweaving his fingers between hers, he floated their hands together down her face, touching her skin like a feather. She closed her eyes, her senses hummed. He traced her lips with his thumbs, then pulled her hands down her T-shirt until they rested on her breasts. He moved his hands to cover hers, closing her thumb and forefingers on her taut nipples, squeezing them softly. Her knees felt weak, and the heat between her legs spread upward until her whole body was on fire. His breath came hard and fast, his chest heaved. His eyes were glued to her.
“Jack,” she whispered, “this isn’t…”
He ignored her, his eyes half-closed, his gaze hypnotic. He skated her hands around the swell of her breasts, to cup them, squeeze them, his face a study in heated longing. Leading her hands down, he traced the curves of her waist and continued lower and lower. Then, without releasing her hand, he pulled the string on her shorts and let them slide down her legs.
Now was the time to tell him to stop, to stop right there. She knew she should…but she didn’t. She didn’t do anything but follow the dangerous path opening before her.
There was no escaping his hold on her, his consuming intensity. He leaned into her, eyes devouring her. She could feel his heart thundering. Her skin was hot where their bodies touched. He dragged her hand lower, inch by inch, guiding it between her legs.
“Are you wet?” His voice trembled, his hand covered hers. She nodded, tingling with something like fear.
He moaned, closed his eyes and strained toward her, hard against her leg. “Do it.” He pressed her hand deeper between her legs. “Please.”
Compelled by his urgency, she stroked herself, hesitantly at first, but with increasing fervor until her body undulated of its own accord. He held her close, his head against hers, his hand over her hand, his body pulsing in rhythm with hers, the intensity building until she exploded in ecstasy, her body arching with waves of pleasure.
Jack said nothing, only looked at her, his face a mask, his eyes dark and luminous. He reached up and tenderly touched her cheek, then took a ragged breath. He exhaled and gently released her onto a nearby boulder, then turned and walked away.
“Oh, God, what just happened?” She’d never experienced anything like this before. It was so strange—during the whole intense episode, he’d never touched her, except her face and hands, never even kissed her. And yet…she’d felt utterly a part of him. Still in a fog, she didn’t know what to think.
“Maybe I do have post-traumatic stress,” she said, casting around for some rational explanation for her cooperation with this act of…what? Self-flagellation? God, what will he do next?
Or worse, what would she do next?
Chapter Fourteen
Jack sat on a boulder at the water’s edge, staring into the inky night. He could hear the turmoil of the river, but it had nothing on him. He’d never been one to try to impose control on his life—it didn’t work anyway, so what was the point?—but he was beginning to see the appeal. He felt like he was suffering from emotional indigestion—the indulgence had been pure pleasure, but he was paying for it now.
He got up and, feeling his way in the almost complete darkness, returned to camp. Casey had lit the lantern in his absence a
nd dragged her sleeping bag away from the cavern wall, obviously feeling somewhat claustrophobic. He could tell from the way her shoulders tensed she knew he was behind her.
“I need to talk to you.”
“No.” She whirled around to face him. “I don’t want you anywhere near me. I can’t handle it. I think I’ve lost my mind.”
“Casey. Listen, I have to talk to you. There’s something I need to tell you. About my life.”
A wrestling match between anxiety and her curiosity played out across her face. “Okay, we can talk, but you can’t touch me.”
“Yeah, okay. Whatever you want.”
They settled themselves in the camp chairs near the small fire Casey had built against the chill. Jack leaned forward with his elbows on his knees, trying to think of a good way to start the conversation. “My life…it’s complicated.”
“Most lives are. I hope you don’t plan to use that as an excuse for that…whatever it was.”
“No. No excuses. What happened was simple—I lost control. You probably think I railroaded you, but I think it’s the reverse. You, these—” He shook his head, frustrated by the inadequacy of his words. “These feelings, or whatever they are, they overpowered me.”
Casey leaned back. “Oh, that is so not fair. You…you…silver-tongued cad.”
Jack’s mouth quirked on one side. “‘Silver-tongued cad?’ I guess that’s better than ‘fucking asshole.’ Anyway, I’m sorry.”
Silence poured off Casey. Not a freezing silence, not the silence of a rock, but a twisting, turning, seeking silence, a hard-working silence that eventually—as he’d hoped—churned its way into something that felt like acceptance.
Of course, she didn’t know the whole story yet.
“Well, at least you regret it.” She nudged a stick of wood farther into the fire with the toe of her shoe. A spray of sparks sailed up into the sky, adding their jittering light to the myriad stars.
“No. Oh, no. I do not regret it. I loved every minute of it—let me be clear about that. What I regret is not being honest with myself, and with you, about wanting to kiss you.” And about why he shouldn’t.
“Kiss? A kiss? A kiss is what it wasn’t!”
“Well, I thought I had a better chance of not losing control if I didn’t kiss you.”
Casey snorted eloquently. “Yeah, right. I didn’t exactly notice a whole lot of control going on.”
“Then you weren’t paying attention. Here’s a hint—it’s been over two years since I last had sex.”
Casey sat in silence, presumably working it out for herself. But when she spoke, it was clear her mind had gone haring off in another direction. “Two years? You haven’t…? Then how do you earn…? Oh. Oh, you’re not—oops.”
Jack looked at her and raised an eyebrow, hoping for enlightenment, but she moved from the detail—two years—to the main point, which was his almost superhuman—from his viewpoint—restraint.
“Oh. Uh, okay. You’re right. It could have been…more…um…”
“Invasive,” Jack supplied. He stood and walked to the ledge, needing the movement to distract himself from the inevitable images that formed in his mind.
He heard the chair shift when Casey stood. There was no point in trying to imagine what she was thinking, so he just waited.
But she didn’t speak, so he did. “The bottom line, Casey,” he said over his shoulder, “is that for reasons I don’t want to get into, you need to stay away from me.”
She spun around. “Me stay away from you? That’s rich.”
“Look, babe,” Jack said through clenched teeth, “I am more than willing to take some of the blame, but don’t even pretend you didn’t launch yourself into my arms, both in the tent and at the bath pool. You can’t lay it all on me. There’s plenty of blame to go around. Just stay out of my way, and I’ll stay out of yours. That’ll keep us both out of trouble.”
Casey looked daggers at him, her fists clenched at her sides, her mouth working like a fish. “Fine,” she spat out, and she stomped away into the night.
Chapter Fifteen
Casey made good her word to avoid being close to Jack. In the cool of the early morning, she pulled on a pair of pants and a long-sleeved shirt with the intention of exploring off-trail for edible things to augment the offerings of their dwindling pantry. The raft had been provisioned for a dozen people for six days, so there was still a reasonable amount of food. However, the fresh fruit and vegetables were heading towards extinction, either from consumption or decomposition. The intermittent rain had coaxed out new growth all around the campsite, so she hoped something she recognized as food had popped out of the ground. She crept around the kitchen, trying to be quiet while she made coffee. It wasn’t that she didn’t want to awaken Jack—he was not especially deserving of consideration—but remaining distant from him would be easier if she neither saw nor spoke with him. Although, short of setting up a separate campsite, those conditions would be difficult to achieve.
Before she managed to get out of the camp, Jack crawled out of the tent, fully dressed for a change. But she need not have worried about staying away from him—he was as distant to her as the moon.
He shuffled over to the coffee pot, poured a cupful, muttered, “I’ll be at the river,” and without a glance at her, took his leave. His coolness knocked her back a few notches. The prospect of spending days in this glacial suspension turned her stomach.
She tied a pink bandana around her neck, picked up her backpack and trudged into the brush, away from the path to the river.
Poking and prodding every green thing she encountered for hours didn’t reveal any feral corn or peppers. Nor did a wild chicken cluck into view.
The sun was directly overhead, and Casey’s stomach was growling. She peeled off her shirt and wiped the sweat beading on her brow, then found a small rock spill to elevate her enough to get her bearings. Once her head cleared the bushes, she recognized her location by orienting against a distinctive rock formation on the other side of the river. To get to the camp, she should bear left. Perversely, she went right—quietly working her way to a bluff overlooking the river. She crouched down and stretched out on her belly, wriggling her way up to the edge.
Through the sparse brush, she spied Jack sitting on one of the mid-stream boulders, facing away from her, his feet dangling in the river. He’d stripped off his shirt. His skin glowed like a copper penny, his hair like burnished gold. The angle of the sun set his long muscles in high relief, like a sculpture in a lighted showcase. From this distance the tattoo on the back of his arm was a graceful arabesque.
Every so often he threw a pebble into the still-churning water with an impatient snap. Eventually he turned to gaze at an orderly pile of grapefruit-sized rocks on the riverbank. Casey watched him curiously when he swung around and jumped down to pick up two rocks, walked a few feet to the left and carefully placed them in the sand. As he stood, he looked up the trail as if he expected someone. He shook his head, wiped his arm across his face and reached for more rocks. His movements were easy and smooth, a natural extension of thought. Each time he reached, or bent, or twisted around, Casey experienced pleasure, like small, slow laps of an ice cream cone. The river was a perfect backdrop for her guilty indulgence, the roaring water a mask for any noise she might make.
It took Casey a few moments, but she eventually realized he was building a low table or a bench, something to sit on at the river’s edge.
Finally, after far too much time, she shimmied backward, ashamed and satisfied. She crept away from the bluff and renewed her search for plants with desperate vigor.
A couple hours and many botanical disappointments later, Casey stared at a twisted and gnarled tree with a few pinecones attached. On the ground beneath it more pinecones were scattered. She picked one up and examined it. Pine nuts?
She rushed back to the campsite brandishing a pinecone, only to meet Jack racing headlong from the other direction waving a book. They each opened their
mouths to speak then stopped dead in their tracks, glancing at each other awkwardly.
Casey was the first to speak. “I, uh, found this. I’m not sure, but it think it’s a pinecone.”
“A pinecone. And that’s good because…?”
“Pine nuts, Jack.” She shook the pinecone until a small white seed fell out. “See? Except I’m not sure if all pinecones are edible. Do you happen to know?”
He smiled. “No. But I bet—” he looked down at a small paperback book in his hand, “—K. Farnsworth, PhD does.” He handed Casey a guide to edible plants of the Southwest and how to prepare them. “I found it in one of the bags we took off the raft. One of your fellow travelers came armed.”
Casey flipped through it and found, even in the first few pages, some familiar-looking plants. “Jack, this is awesome! With this, we can…”
“Have fresh green salads?”
She laughed. “Well, no. But we can probably avoid rickets, or scurvy or whatever diseases people get from not having fresh veggies and fruits. See?” She moved toward him to prove her point with the book.
Suddenly, Jack’s face changed and the wall was up again. “I’ll see what else in the bags might be useful.” He spun on his heel and left.
The afternoon passed slowly. Casey took the book, collected a few likely specimens, and slowly and carefully identified them using the taxonomic key in the index. In addition to the pine nuts, at least two of the ten plants she brought back were edible—prickly pear, which was plentiful but daunting in its defenses, and a kind of dandelion, which, after tasting, Casey decided she would eat if they were desperate but not before.
After sorting through the few remaining bags, Jack busied himself with other little projects that mostly kept him away from Casey. Other than an occasional despondent look at her, he behaved as if she didn’t exist or, perhaps, as if he didn’t exist. All day long they acted like two separate gyros, whirling up their own dust.
That lasted until dusk.
