Yeah, you’d think after all this time the cravings would go away, but they fucking didn’t. Sometimes I wanted a drink just as bad as I had the first night on the raft. I’d go through DTs again just to get my hands on a fucking fifth of most anything.
Raine reached the tide line and walked tentatively into the water, testing the temperature with her toes before walking straight in. I didn’t know why the fuck she did that – it was a pretty constant temperature so there weren’t any surprises or anything. She always did it, though. She walked in slowly, then shoved her toes underneath the sand and wiggled them around before she finally got around to actually getting in the water.
I continued to watch her ass as she wandered slowly into the calm waves. She was so fucking beautiful, it drove me nuts. She walked around naked most of the day unless she was going to go forage in the jungle or something. It meant my cock was hard a good portion of the day, but I made good use of that, so I fucking loved it. The new diet had brought back her curves, and though she had always been beautiful, she was simply stunning to look at now that she wasn’t so thin. I had lost several pounds while on the raft as well, but as far as I could tell, it was mostly back. If someone asked me to bench four hundred pounds, I might still have been able to do it. Maybe. Once the shelter was complete, I took to moving rocks around just to keep my muscles built up even though I didn’t really need them for anything. Sometimes I moved them from one side of the beach to the other. I got plenty of exercise existing around here, though, so it probably wasn’t completely necessary, but I did it anyway. I wasn’t as buff as I had been when there was a gym readily available, but I guess I was still built enough.
Our Survival 101 grade was pretty much an A+. We had water, shelter, and plenty of different food sources. Between the shorts I wore, Raine’s shorts, my boxers, and one T-Shirt, we didn’t have much in the way of clothing, but we really didn’t need it, either. Raine washed everything out every couple of days and hung it in a bush to dry, so it kept clean, but they were all getting pretty worn. That was part of the reason for going in the buff most of the time – it saved wear and tear on the clothes for when we needed it.
I smoked the last of the cigarette and tossed the end of it into the fire. When I leaned forward a bit and rested my arms on my knees, my leg cramped up. My leg was still sore sometimes, especially when I sat in one position for a long time and when I first got up in the morning, but overall it wasn’t bad. The scar was pretty nasty, but it just added to my collection. I stretched my leg out in front of me and then pulled it back in close to my chest. After doing that a couple of times, the cramp went away. I glanced around the beach, then up to the shelter, wondering if there was anything I ought to do before nightfall.
The lack of any real need to get something done was nice, but it gave me a lot more time to think. Sometimes that was good, and sometimes it wasn’t. The nightmares never went away completely, but they weren’t as bad as they had been right after Raine was attacked. They had me considering what kind of fruits there were around here that I could ferment into alcohol, but I really didn’t have more than a rudimentary understanding of how to do that, and Raine would fucking kill me if I tried. The smokes were bad enough. I got the shakes still when I thought about drinking, so I tried not to think about it at all. Unfortunately, sometimes it just popped into my head whether I wanted it there or not. I’d get pissy then, and Raine would take the brunt of it. I didn’t know why she put up with my moody ass, but she always seemed to forgive me once I calmed down. I guess she really didn’t have much of a choice. It’s not like she could talk to anyone else around here, so she was pretty much stuck with me.
Even after she laid into me during the storm, it was those kinds of thoughts that tried to send me over the edge. It was one thing to hear her say it and believe her while I had her wrapped up in my arms, but something entirely different when I thought about how things would be if we were somewhere else or if there were other people here. It made my stomach hurt to think about it because somewhere deep inside of me, I was scared shitless of loving her and being loved by her – not afraid of the love itself but what it would do to me if it suddenly wasn’t there anymore. I didn’t know what I was doing, and I knew I kept fucking up. Someday I was going to fuck up in a way that my violet wouldn’t forgive, and that scared me enough to shut down again. I didn’t, though. I told her I’d try, so I would.
I looked over the beach and watched Raine rise out of the waves and walk back towards me. When she got closer, her eyes narrowed and she placed her fists against her hip bones, glaring down at me.
“What are you looking all contemplative about?” she demanded.
“What?” I asked, a little startled.