“Whatever,” she mumbled. She sounded just like me, which made me smile even more.
“Just another minute here.” I reached up to the crack in the rock where the portion of the gutter system was lodged. There was a scrap of the raft’s side walls wrapped around the end of it, and I had stabbed a bunch of little holes all over the middle of the piece. One of the clamps that had been used to hold the ladder on the raft pinched the end of the gutter canal, holding back the water stored in a larger piece of the raft’s canopy – the clear plastic part which had been used on top of the solar still. The water had been there over the past two days, soaking up the heat from the sun’s rays on top of the rock. I released the valve and tested the temperature of the water. It wasn’t hot by any means, but it was pretty warm.
I took Raine’s hand and held it out, letting the warm water dribble over her from the holes in the homemade spigot.
“Open your eyes, baby,” I whispered against her ear. She did, and her eyes narrowed as the water splashed in her palm. “Want to take a shower?”
“Oh my God,” Raine gasped, looking up over her head. “Are you serious?”
“As a heart attack.” I grinned, unable to contain myself any longer. I kissed her softly on the lips, then placed the end of the spigot back at the top of the rock overhang and released the valve completely, so water began to pour out of it. I took Raine by her arms and guided her into the warm stream.
“Oh, Bastian!” Raine screeched. “This feels fantastic!”
“It’s all fresh water, too, baby. Less dry skin, right?”
Raine tilted her head up into the stream and closed her eyes, a smile plastered on her face. Her arms went up and gathered her hair together, holding it under the spout and letting it fall over her face and shoulders as well.
“There’s only enough water for about three minutes,” I admitted, “and it takes a couple of days to really warm up enough, but you should be able to use it about every other day as long as there’s enough water to fill it.”
“This is fantastic!” Raine turned in a circle, letting the warm turrets of water pour over every inch of her. My cock took notice again, but I told him to shut the fuck up. This was for her, not him. Raine hummed as she turned her face up into the stream again. She twirled, she laughed, and she made me feel like a million fucking dollars for making it happen. Way too soon, the water slowed, then stopped, but her smile continued.
“Want this?” I asked, holding up one of the blanket-towels for her to use to dry off. I wrapped one of them around her body and then used the second one to dry her face and hair.
“Bastian Stark,” Raine said, looking me straight in the eye, “you are the most incredible man I have ever known.”
I beamed and stopped drying her face long enough to kiss her.
“You like it, then?”
“Like it?” she cried. “I love it! Thank you, Bastian. Thank you so much.”
She wrapped her arms around me and hugged me as tight as she could. When she loosened her grip, she leaned back and gazed up at me.
“This, Bastian Stark,” she said, waving her hand towards the shower, “this is why I love you.”
I didn’t know if it was doing something like that for her or just her reaction to having it done, but something that afternoon was a turning point for me. I felt different. I felt lighter, more at ease. It’s not that I ever doubted her feelings for me, but maybe I was finally starting to really accept them. Whatever it was, I didn’t have that particular dream again, and the others slacked off a lot, too. They didn’t go away – they never went away – but they weren’t nearly as frequent.
Over the next couple of weeks, we got into a pretty picture-perfect rhythm – we’d wake up shortly after the sun rose, mess around in bed for a while, then eat and do whatever it was we needed to do that day. There usually wasn’t much, and we did most shit together, so it went by pretty fast. We’d go up the hill to get water if it hadn’t rained recently, but usually we only needed to do that every three days or so. If the weather was bad, we usually had enough food gathered and enough fish dried that we didn’t need to go out in the wet. Raine told me more stories about Lindsay, and honestly, I think I was afraid to ever meet the girl; she sounded fucking crazy. I told her how I met John Paul at the shooting range where Landon took us for target practice and how he used to make me work out in the fucking gym six hours a day.