“I need your boxers back now.”
“Oh…um…yeah, I guess you do.” I snickered a little, dropped my pants, and watched her shimmy my boxers over her legs. She checked herself in the dressing room mirror to make sure they weren’t showing. I pulled my shorts back on and then realized Raine’s torn panties were still in my fist, so I shoved them into my pocket. Raine leaned over and picked the lounge pants, a pair of shorts, and two shirts up off the floor. She held them up for a moment and then shoved them into my hands.
“These will all fit you,” she said with a nod.
“How do you know?” I asked.
“Bastian.” Raine looked up and smiled slyly, “there is nothing I know more about than your body.”
I guess I couldn’t argue too much about that.
“If you ever want a refresher course, you make sure to let me know, okay?”
“I just might do that.” Raine smiled, took my hand in hers, and opened the door.
There was a decent-sized crowd when we stepped out of the dressing room, some glaring, others smirking. Lindsay looked at me with narrowed eyes, and I met her stare. I pulled the panties I had torn off out of my pocket and tossed them at Raine’s friend.
“She’s gonna need a replacement for these,” I said with a smile and then sauntered off towards the checkout area.
*
“Hey, Raine,” Nick gave her a big, warm smile which made me want to punch him. He held up a large bath towel. “Since we didn’t get you guys to a hotel or anything, I figured you might at least want to spend a little time in the shower. It’s a tiny thing, but the water’s heated.”
Nick had rented the four-room house near the docks about a month prior, and the three of them had been using it as a base of operations while searching for us. Lindsay had been here since she discovered John Paul hadn’t given up hope, and she and Nick had obviously hit it off pretty well. We had been there all of about fifteen minutes, and he was asking Raine to get naked. All right, it was obvious that he was with Lindsay, who was also standing right there, and he was only trying to be nice, but it still fucking pissed me off.
“Oh my God, that would be awesome!” she responded, clasping her hands together. I was torn between being happy for her because she was happy and pissed off that he, instead of I, had said something that made her so happy. Even after the dressing room fuck, I was on edge. I was seriously fucked up. Once Raine disappeared into the washroom, I went outside to get some air. John Paul apparently noticed.
“Hey, you want one?” he asked quietly. I leaned heavily against the porch railing and moved my eyes from the harbor lights to the pack of Marlboros he had in his hand.
“Fuck, yes,” I said as I took one from the pack and lit up. I drew on it heavily and turned around, leaning my back against the railing.
“You doing all right?” he asked.
“I guess.”
“You’re kind of quiet,” he noted. “Not sure what I expected, but this isn’t it. Or is this just you sober?”
I chuckled.
“Nah, I’m just not sure what to think right now.”
“Been an interesting couple of months?”
“You could say that.” I took another puff, then another. “Fuck, I’m getting an actual nic buzz off this thing.”
John Paul laughed.
I finished the smoke and tossed the butt into the street.
“What happened to The Oblation?” I asked, not completely sure I wanted to know.
“Underwater earthquake,” John Paul said without missing a beat. “We were basically right on top of it. It wasn’t a big one, but it was enough to cause the wave that knocked us over when it first hit. There was a second one about five minutes later, which flipped us back but took the mainsail with it. Combine that with the rainstorm, and we didn’t have much of a chance, especially not at night. I couldn’t see a fucking thing.”
“Did everyone else get to the lifeboats?”
“Most of them,” John Paul said quietly. He looked away for a minute before turning back to me abruptly. “The bodies of two of the passengers were found the day after they picked us up, near the wreckage. They looked for you for a week, figuring you’d drowned, too. It wasn’t until divers finally found the wreckage that we realized the inflatable wasn’t there, and everyone started looking for that.”
John Paul stopped and turned to me, his eyes intense.
“I didn’t know, man. I didn’t know you were on that piece-of-shit emergency raft. We almost didn’t even put that thing on the ship! If I had known, Bastian…fuck…I would have tried to find you that night. I thought you were in one of the other lifeboats. It was a day and a half before the coastguard picked us up, and you weren’t there. Holy shit, I just about had a fucking heart attack.”
He looked like he was going to cry or something.