“Do you see a weather radio stuck to my head?” I raised an eyebrow at her. “I have no fucking clue, but the wind is already picking up.”
We brought in everything that could get damaged if it got wet and hung the blanket-towels from the raft up over the open entryway to the shelter as the first of the rain started. It picked up pretty quickly, and before long the rain was coming down in sheets. We both moved towards the back, and I dropped down on the mattress while Raine sat a couple of feet away, staring at the rain coming down outside. The shelter entrance faced east, so rain wasn’t getting in very much – just a little bit of mist near the front – but I could tell after the first hour Raine was getting nervous.
“Why don’t you lie down?” I asked.
“I’m not tired.”
“What does that have to do with it?” I wiggled my eyebrows at her and opened up my arms. She sighed heavily but scooted over and let me pull her down next to me. “It’s all right, baby. The shelter can take this.”
As if to mock me, the wind gusted right then, shaking the long poles at the corners. It held through it, but it didn’t help with Raine’s stress.
“You got me?” she asked softly and granted me a twitch of a smile.
“Yeah, I got you.” I wrapped my arms around her a little more securely, crossing my arm over her chest and wrapping the other one behind her shoulders. She immediately started tracing the outline of my bicep.
“I love your arms,” she said, almost too quietly for me to hear. Her finger trailed all the way down to my wrist, then back up to my shoulder where she outlined the muscles there.
“I thought you loved my dick,” I teased.
Raine chuckled and sighed at me.
“I like that, too, but your arms are my favorite part of you. They make me feel safe.”
“I’ll always keep you safe,” I told her. I tilted my head to the side, looked into her eyes, and smiled down at her.
“I know.” Her finger moved up my neck and over my jaw until she was cupping my cheek. “But when you hold me like this, I feel extra safe, like nothing could possibly happen to me.”
“That’s the way it is,” I said nonchalantly, “and I might never let you go, so you should be good forever.”
She giggled and snuggled against my chest.
“So it’s official; you only want me for my body,” I surmised, knowing it would get a rise out of her and wanting to keep her nicely distracted from the wind outside, which was picking up again.
“Bastian! Of course not!”
“I don’t know…if my arms and my dick are the best parts…”
“That’s not what I said!” Raine defended. I laughed out loud and hugged her a little tighter. “My favorite thing about you is your incredible will to survive.”
“Well, I had to learn a lot of that shit for the tournaments.”
“I didn’t mean knowing how to find food and water.” Raine shook her head, tickling my chin with her hair. “I mean everything you have been through – even when you were a little boy. You always came through it when I think a lot of people would have given up.”
“Not in my nature, I guess.” I shrugged. It wasn’t a matter of getting through it. I tried to find ways of forgetting it. “There’s a lot more to you than there is to me.”
“Oh, really?” Raine questioned. “Like what?”
“Well, there’s your tits…oh, and your ass…I love your ass…”
She smacked me on the chest.
The rain was literally pouring out of the sky in huge sheets now. The collection area in the back of the shelter was full and overflowing. I kept talking to keep her distracted from the weather.
“I like the way you look at me,” I said seriously. “Sometimes when you do, your eyes light up, and I think maybe I could be lucky enough for you to care about a fucked up asshole like me.
“That’s love, you know,” Raine said with a smile. “I see it in your eyes when you look at me, too.”
“It’s easy to love you,” I said, running my hand down her side and over her hip and then back up to her shoulder. “At least, it was once I stopped fighting it.”
“You did fight it,” she acknowledged. “What made you stop?”
“Your…acceptance of me,” I said. “That’s really my favorite thing about you. I don’t know why you put up with my shit, but I’m glad you do.”
“You aren’t that hard to accept, Bastian.” Her hand reached up into my hair. “You were very…trying in the beginning. A lot of that was the alcohol in your system, I think. Considering how much stress you were under, I can understand why you behaved that way. I know my dad would become quite a bear sometimes when his job would stress him out.”
“I don’t think I can just blame it on stress,” I huffed. “I mean, it’s not like I wouldn’t have been like that if you had met me at a bar or something.”
“I bet you could be very charming when you want to be.”
“Yeah, but I would just be hoping to get my dick in you. If you didn’t seem like the type to put out, I would have found someone who would do it for money instead.”
“Bastian!”