She sat for a minute just looking at me, probably trying to decide if I was lying to her or not. I took a few deep breaths, trying to calm myself back down, but it was too fucking hot to relax, and my head really ached now. Finally, she moved back over to me tentatively, like I was going to fucking bite her or something. She managed to finish after about four more stitches.
“I need something to cut the end of the thread.”
“I got it,” I said, pulling my jackknife out of its home in my belt. I reached up, felt for the thread, and quickly cut off the end. I kissed the flat part of the blade before sheathing it again.
“Why did you do that?”
“Do what?”
“Um…kiss the knife?”
“It’s my lucky knife,” I mumbled.
“Why is it lucky?”
I sighed. This was shit I really didn’t want to discuss. Maybe if I gave her a little taste, she’d get the idea and stop asking.
“Because it sliced me open and I didn’t die. Seems lucky to me.”
She looked at me for a minute, and then her eyes flashed to my arm and back again.
“Is that the big scar on your back?”
I flinched.
“Yeah.”
“It’s from that knife?”
“Yeah.”
“How?”
“I cut myself shaving,” I sneered, then sighed. I really was just seriously tense. I wasn’t this much of a sarcastic dick under normal circumstances. Well, not quite this bad, anyway. “Somebody fucking cut me, what do you think?”
“Did you need stitches?”
I had to laugh at that one. I mean, it’s a seventeen inch scar – two inches across my right triceps, then the other fifteen continuing on across my back.
“A hundred and twelve inside, just to hold the muscle together,” I said. “They stapled the skin – one hundred and forty-seven of those mothers.”
“Did it hurt?”
“No, I’m quite the masochist, so I fucking loved it. Are you for real?”
“I meant the staples. Did it hurt when they took them out?”
“Of course it fucking hurt.” I shook my head in disbelief. “There were staples in my skin. A section of it got infected, too, so it was a lot of fun having them removed.”
“What happened to the person who did it?”
“Well, let’s see,” I started, using my most impressive sarcastic tone, “considering he cut me, and I ended up walking out with his knife, what the fuck do you think happened to him?”
“Did he go to jail?”
“He went to the fucking morgue.”
“Are you just saying that to scare me?”
“No,” I said, “I’m saying it to shut you up.”
It worked for a little while at least. Her silence wasn’t helping though because I was still melting in the heat, agitated, annoyed, and wanting a drink about as bad as I wanted to jack off – and it was only the first day. I pretended to be absorbed in some of the survival instructions that were sealed in one of the pouches. Most of what it said was all common sense shit. If you didn’t already know at least as much as what they had written, you’d never get as far as finding the fucking instructions.
Then she started in with the questions again.
“Were you always a sailor?” she asked.
“No,” I said. “I just bought The Oblation a couple years ago.”
“What does that name mean?”
“Oblation?” I clarified. She nodded. “It’s an offering, like, to God or something. Like communion. John Paul named it. He claimed we were offering ourselves to the sea or some such bullshit.”
“What did you do before you started sailing?”
Here was a topic best avoided.
“Not much.”
“You must have done something.”
“Not necessarily.”
“Well, you had to have done something to be able to buy your boat, right?”
“It’s a ship. Or it was. Boats are small, and size fucking matters.”
She gasped, looked down at her hands in her lap, and twisted her fingers around themselves nervously. Like my cock had fucking ears, it decided it needed to prove my point about size. I had to shift sideways to not be so noticeable. How the fuck was I going to survive with this annoying, smoking hot bitch that I simultaneously wanted to fuck and kill?
I really, really needed to relax.
“You had to have money for your ship then,” she finally said, all soft as the teeth marks in her full bottom lip began to fade. “Did you inherit it?”
“No, I didn’t fucking inherit anything,” I said, stifling a laugh. “You have to have a family to inherit something from them.”
“Oh,” she said, “I’m sorry.”
She looked so repentant that I decided to at least give her a little something. It would be better than her starting to ask questions about my fucking family.
“I was a fighter,” I said, not looking at her.
“As in boxing?”
“Something like that.”
“My dad watched boxing all the time,” she mused. “Would he have seen you on television or anything?”
“I seriously doubt that,” I said. I didn’t say anything else. I didn’t miss the past tense reference to her dad, and I wasn’t going to ask about him.
“What happened to them?”
“What happened to who?”