“Well, then you are fired. All of the three-year-olds can do that.”
“Those are some very young Cub Scouts.”
“Start ‘em young. That’s what Virgil always used to say.”
That one wasn’t entirely a lie. He really did used to say that. Well, except for the “’em” part, and he most certainly wasn’t talking about Cub Scouts.
I hadn’t realized it, but as we were talking, Hunter had guided me into the water and suddenly we were most of the way to the boat. The water was up to my chest and I started to flail, screaming as I felt my legs buckle and slipped down beneath the surface. Hunter grabbed me by my arm and yanked me up.
“Stand up,” he said. “Stand up!”
I got my feet under me and realized that the sand was still solid beneath my feet, and the water was only to my shoulders at its highest point. We took the final few steps to the boat and Hunter guided me up onto the ladder ahead of him. I scrambled up onto it and turned to glare at him.
“That was a mean trick,” I sputtered at him.
“It wasn’t a trick,” he said. “I just figured if I could distract you I might be able to get you to the boat without you realizing that you were in the water it might not be as traumatizing for you.”
“Well that worked out exceptionally well, didn’t it?”
“If you had held off noticing for just a few more minutes it would have been fine.”
“I don’t think that leading someone into water that is up to their chests when they don’t realize that they are doing it is a very helpful thing to do.”
“It would have been if you hadn’t noticed.”
“I noticed,” I hissed.
“Apparently.”
Turning away from him and the futile conversation that we were having, I looked around the boat. It was definitely the worse for wear since the storm, but it was still lodged in place and I had another flash of the sea creature that I just knew had a hold on the broken vessel and just wasn’t going to let go.
I was going to need to go back to therapy.
“Do you want to look in the cabin?” I asked.
“Sure,” Hunter said, walking past me toward the door that was now barely hanging by one hinge.
I was so grateful that he agreed to that. I wasn’t fond of Gavin, but just as I hadn’t wanted to think about him being torn apart by the storm or shredded into little survivalist pieces by strange island monsters, I didn’t really relish the idea of being the one to find him floating around in the cabin. As Hunter walked past me I noticed the way his pants cupped to his ass and memories from the night before created a surge of desire within me.
Oh, this is so not the time.
Hunter pulled the rest of the door open and took a peek inside. When he pulled his head back and shook it at me, I let out a sigh of relief.
“OK, good. He’s not dead in the boat.”
“But that still doesn’t tell us where he actually is.”
“True.”
I turned slowly and looked around the boat. Suddenly something caught my eye and I crossed the deck. There was a narrow metal box hanging on the side of the boat and the top was open, revealing nothing but a single life jacket inside. I immediately knew what it was.
“Holy shit,” I muttered.
“What is it?” Hunter asked, coming toward me.
I wanted to kick the box, but in my current shoeless state, that wouldn’t have been a good idea. I didn’t know if I would be able to fashion a splint for myself out of twigs and dried banana leaves.
“It’s an emergency kit,” I said, gesturing toward the box. “Well, it used to be. This box had a life raft in it.”
“A life raft?” Hunter asked, coming to my side and looking down into the box.
“The son of a bitch left us,” I said. “When you were unconscious he told me that he was going to come get some supplies, but he didn’t come back. Turns out he just jumped ship.”
Hunter looked at me with a pursed face.
“That’s probably not the best choice of words.”
I looked at him.
“How could he do this to us? How could he find a life raft and just leave by himself?”
“Does that really surprise you?” Hunter asked. “He hasn’t exactly been the most civil to us throughout this experience.”
“He saved your life when the snake bit you.”
“I don’t think that that necessarily counts as civil. I think that that is more along the lines of human.”
“Where do you think he went?” I asked.
“Well, it depends on when he left. If he left long enough before the storm, there’s a chance that he might have gotten somewhere, but even before the storm hit here, it would have been out in the water. Something as flimsy as a life raft wouldn’t have been able to withstand the kind of water conditions that would have been out there. In that case, he probably went to the bottom of the ocean.”
“So, what do we do?” I asked.
“I don’t think that there’s much that we can do,” Hunter admitted. “Him leaving doesn’t really change anything. We’re still here and we still don’t know how we are going to get away, which means that we still need to figure out how we are going to survive here. That’s our first priority.”
“Stay alive.”
“Yes.”
“Good priority. Where do we start?”
“I guess we clean up. We’ll find the supplies and salvage what we can, clean up the debris from the shelter, and then…”
“Rebuild the damn shelter.”
“Rebuild the shelter.”
“Fantastic. I suppose we’re going to try the geodesic dome this time?”
“Gavin isn’t here to tell me no, so unless you are going to stop me for some reason, I still think that that’s the way to do it.”
“I’m sorry that he was so awful to you,” I said, realizing that I hadn’t said that to him yet.
“You have no reason to say that you’re sorry,” he said. “You didn’t do anything.”
“I still feel like I should apologize for him. There was no need for him to treat you like that. And I did plenty. I haven’t exactly been helpful since we got here.”
“You’ve been dealing with a lot,” Hunter said. “You did what you could.”
“Complained and asked stupid questions?”
Hunter laughed, but shook his head.
“You did more than that.”
I felt heat shook between my legs, settling into my core as I thought about exactly what I had done the night before. We stared at each other for a few long seconds before he stepped up to close the space between us. He wrapped his arm around my waist and pulled me up against him, staring at me for a moment longer before leaning down to touch his mouth to mine. It was soft at first, almost hesitant as if he was trying to remember the way that we had kissed the night before, and I rose up slightly on my toes to encourage him. This seemed to give him greater confidence and he deepened the kiss, holding me tightly against him.
I was starting to reach up to bury my fingers in his hair when the deck beneath our feet lurched. I gasped and clung to Hunter’s shoulders.
“What the hell was that?”
The deck lurched again and I heard an ominous cracking sound.
“We need to get off the boat,” he said.
“What?”
There was another crack and I felt the wood of the deck drop several inches.
“Get off the boat!” Hunter demanded.
He pushed me gently toward the ladder and I followed his guidance, scrambling down the rungs and back into the water. Hunter followed behind and he was barely off of the bottom rung of the ladder when I heard a series of loud, deep cracking sounds and the boat seemed to collapse in on itself. He reached out and curled around me, turning his back to the boat until the majority of the sound deadened and then guiding me to swim toward the beach. I splashed my way through the pool and up onto the sand. As soon as I was a decent distance away, I turned and watched as the boat split and pulled away from the sandbar that had been holding it since we crashed onto it.