by Rachel Kane
“I’ve got something I could do with my bare hands,” he said, and cupped my balls.
“You catch more first thing in the morning,” I objected. “We should get moving now, we’ll have a better chance of…what are you doing?”
Not that there was any question of what he was doing. Unzipping me, kneeling before me.
I looked around. We were outside, where anyone could see!
But that was ridiculous. No one could see, because no one was around, because we were lost.
He kissed my soft cock. “First things first,” he said.
“You didn’t get enough of that last night?”
“Never.”
I gasped as he sucked on me. I was getting hard. Again. This was the effect he had on me, I couldn’t seem to go five minutes without my cock stiffening.
“But Eli…we need to talk.”
He shook his head, with my cock in his mouth. No talking.
I wanted him to keep going, but at the same time, it really did feel like I needed to say something to him. Lay out my worries. Figure things out.
It’s awfully hard to sort out logical objections when someone is going down on you, especially with the happy eagerness of Eli, who acted like this was what he had waited his whole life for.
Honestly, I feel like I’ve waited my whole life for it too.
All those fantasies I couldn’t admit to myself. Staring at a laptop screen, pretending it was, what, curiosity, research? Pounding my cock angrily in the shower, rushing to an orgasm that would fill me with guilt.
Eli washed all that away. His fingers dug into my ass as he went deeper and harder on my cock. He didn’t care about my objections. Maybe he understood that deep down they were based on fear.
And that even deeper down, I was a hungry mess of frustrated desire that wanted to stretch him out beneath me, wanted to fuck him right here on the forest floor.
Yes, I did. I could admit that. His tongue playing over me, his hands caressing my ass, I could admit it: I wanted to fuck him, and be fucked by him, and I don’t want it to stop.
When I came, it was with a groan deep in my throat, as though something inside of me had been unleashed, something I could no longer hide from, something no amount of objections could fight. I gasped and moaned and thrust my hips, his eager mouth meeting every thrust, sucking me down until I was empty.
Rising, he looked at me, a knowing grin on his face. “So what did you want to talk about?”
Four hours until we were rescued, and nothing was biting. That had me worried. We’d only managed to scrounge up one fishing rod, an old bamboo one, and even though I’d seen a couple of flashes in the rocky stream near the cabins, no one was interested in taking the bait.
Four hours. It’s funny to think about it that way, because at that moment, all I could do was worry about us starving. That was the caretaker in me. I was as concerned about Eli’s well-being as my own, like it would be my fault if he went hungry. If someone had told me that by midday we’d be headed back to civilization…
…well, what would I have thought? I wonder if I would’ve been sad, knowing our time together was almost at an end.
“Is this where you tell me not to talk, because it’ll disturb the fish?” Eli was leaning against me, staring into the water.
“I’m done with rules about being quiet. You can see what good they did me in the plane.”
He nodded. “No more silence, ever. Chatter all the time, that’s my motto. Except…you’ve been quiet for a while now. For someone who told me you wanted to talk, you don’t seem to have anything to say.”
I wiggled the bamboo rod, hoping a fish would notice the dancing bait. “I spent the night wondering what happens next,” I said.
“Really? I spent the night dreaming of fucking. We were on this cloud, see, except it wasn’t a real cloud, it was the decoration for a theater set, and—”
I chuckled. “You like to change the subject, don’t you?”
“Yeah, when I worry the subject is going to suck, I do.” He pulled away from me. “Is this where you tell me we need to enjoy our memories of last night, because once we’re rescued, we’ll never see each other again?”
It sounded different when he said it. Inside my head, that thought felt so rational, felt like the obvious logical next step. The only thing that made sense. But when he said it aloud, it sounded so cold and harsh.
There’s something inside me that never wants me to be happy, never wants me to have what I want.
“I don’t know what to do,” I said.
“Sure you do. You’ve got two choices. We either see where this goes, or we don’t.”
“We’ve only known each other—”
He sighed. “Don’t belabor the obvious. Of course we’ve only known each other for a little while. So what? Do you require a decade of secretive glances before you can sleep with somebody? Will a hundred more awkward initial conversations make it easier to admit your feelings?”
I looked back at the water. “What feelings? Do you have feelings?”
He was staring at me. I couldn’t look around to meet his gaze. On the surface of the water, a dragonfly alighted, its wings catching the sun before it flew off again.
“I didn’t plan this,” he said. “You know that. I thought I was going to be up here on my own. But meeting you… Fuck, Jake, it means something to me, okay? I’m not asking for your lifelong commitment or anything, I just want to know if it means something to you too.”
Every objection in the world filled my head. We can’t do this. We don’t know each other. I can’t tell Pop. I can’t tell anybody. You’re going through too much yourself. It’s not healthy. It’s not right. I don’t know how to be like this.
“It means something to me,” I said, the words somehow slipping between all the objections, freeing themselves on the air around us.
“There you go, then. You don’t have to know what it means. We don’t have to ask. I’m not going to harass you about it.” He paused a moment before saying, “I might harass you a little.”
I dropped the pole and turned to him. I put my hand against his chest, and pushed him down until he was lying on the ground, and then I climbed onto him, pinning him, kissing the stubble on his jaw and chin, kissing his lips, his cheek. “I don’t know what to do,” I said. “I like you so much, but my life back in town, it—”
He shook his head. “You don’t have to have any of the answers, Jake. You really don’t. We’re stuck out in the woods for god knows how long, let’s just enjoy it, and when we get back, things will sort themselves out. All right? But right now, stop trying to figure it out.”
The ground was cold, the rocks studding the soil were uncomfortable, but that didn’t stop us from stripping down again by the side of the stream, sucking and fondling and kissing, over and over. In two more hours Eli would first hear the plane overhead, and our lives would begin to change.
Change for the worse? For the better?
We were about to find out.
16
Eli
This will sound awful, but I was secretly glad Jake didn’t catch anything. I prefer my fish completely unrecognizable in a nice crisp batter, so I don’t have to think about it being an Actual Animal. The idea of seeing one yanked out of the water right in front of me wasn’t appetizing, no matter how hungry I was.
And I was seriously hungry. We’d finished the jerky, but I guess we’d been burning a lot of calories these past couple of days. Walking, I mean.
Hungry, in need of a shower, but happier than I had been in a long time.
Sometimes you don’t realize how unhappy you’ve been until something really good happens to you. I knew I’d been down. Knew I’d been stressed. All this stuff with my family, the book, everything. Yet here I was, enjoying the company of the sexiest man I’d ever met, starving, maybe stuck on this mountain for days or weeks, and having a great time. It wasn’t just the sex (okay, like forty-five percent of it was the sex) but the
joy of just finding someone to talk to. Someone you get along with, someone you’re really interested in.
And he had reservations about it, which was great, because usually I was the one with reservations, always making excuses for why I couldn’t be with someone, why I couldn’t be happy. It was fun getting to argue the other side of that. That it was okay for us to enjoy this.
He was scared of what was happening between us, and that delighted me. My big strong pilot, shaking in his boots. Something about that contrast made my heart want to explode.
It was about to get so much harder.
“We shouldn’t stay out here,” he said, tracing his finger over my chest.
I took his hand and brought it to my mouth, kissing his fingertip. “Worried Bigfoot might see us?”
He shook his head and smiled. “All the sunscreen burned up in the crash. It might be nice and cool out here, but you’re naked and I don’t want you to get a sunburn.”
I stretched. So fucking glorious to be naked outside, baking in the sun. I’d never done this before. It felt absurdly natural. “My gallant gentleman, always thinking about my health and safety. Or are you just worried I’ll get gross alligator skin and not be my pretty young self?”
He handed me my shirt.
We did some exploring, once we were dressed, searching the other cabins. No more food, but we did find a solar lantern, and someone had left a rusty pocketknife behind.
“You’re going to get tetanus from that,” I said.
Jake slipped it into his pocket. “I’ll be careful. They really strip these places clean when they leave, don’t they?”
That made me think of Uncle Ron’s book. Don’t be sad, I told myself. It was hard enough being sad yesterday, but today you have something to be happy about.
I looked back in the direction of the trash pit. How deep was the book? Such a loss. Such a ridiculous, wasteful loss.
“You there?” Jake asked. He was outside. I hadn’t even noticed him leaving the cabin.
“Sorry,” I said. “Just thinking.”
He hugged me. “I see that. Don’t worry. We’ll find some food. The fish won’t stay away forever.”
“Nah, it’s not that—although if a plate of norimaki rolls suddenly appeared, I wouldn’t send them away. It’s the book again.”
He gave me a sympathetic look. “I’m sorry about that.”
“It’ll be okay. I’ll just have to face my family like a normal person, right? I mean, not everybody has a novelist uncle who is going to explain all the broken family dynamics in a book, right? Not everybody gets a user’s manual for their folks?”
That lopsided smile of his. I wanted to kiss it. I wanted him to hold me.
“My pop is pretty easy,” he said. “It’s all on the surface with him. He’s either happy or pissed off, not a lot of in-between.”
“But he doesn’t know that you… That you’re…”
He blushed. Blushed! I kissed his reddening cheek when I saw it.
“Nah, Pop doesn’t know anything about that. Nobody does, aside from my ex.”
“You going to tell him?”
Jake opened his mouth like he was going to say something, then closed it. He looked off into the distance.
“It’s okay,” I said. “You don’t have to worry about that now.”
I think what I really meant was, We’re both worried about what happens next, so it balances out.
I wasn’t sure what I was hearing at first. We were back at Uncle Ron’s cabin. Jake had set the solar lantern in a sunny patch to absorb some light, and I was pulling on the branch that had come through the roof, trying to get it free. I don’t know why. There were other cabins to stay in, and water had permanently damaged this one.
But it had belonged to Ron, and I wanted to fix it. It felt important.
I got the branch free, and the tin hummed, vibrating as the wood banged over it and rolled down to the ground.
But there was some other hum in the air, and I looked around.
“Jake?”
He glanced over. “What’s up?”
“Do you hear that?”
We both looked up. “Holy shit,” he said.
The distant sound of an aircraft engine.
“Are they here for us?” I asked.
“Come on!”
We left the cabins behind, pounding down the trail towards the airstrip. I’ve never run so fast in my life. Halfway there, I grabbed his hand, and we ran together.
Bursting out of the trees, we passed the shack and looked up.
The plane was in the distance, banking…turning. Receding. It had been coming this way, and yet now it wasn’t.
I can’t describe that feeling of dismay, watching the plane turn.
“Wait!” I shouted, as though they could possibly hear me. I ran into the field and waved my arms. Shrugging out of my jacket, I used it as a flag, waving it. “Over here! Come on, look over here!”
Jake’s hand was on my shoulder. “They can’t hear you, Eli.”
“Where are they going?” I said. “Can’t we signal them, send up a flare—”
“You know we can’t. We don’t have anything.”
“The matches. Back at the other cabin. We could start a fire. They’d see the smoke.”
I left him at the field. I ran back by myself. I couldn’t understand why he wasn’t upset about this. Why he wasn’t shouting too.
Because he knows shouting won’t do any good. Because he knows this was a false alarm. This isn’t the plane that’s going to save us. Probably someone out for a joyride.
I shoved the box of matches in my jacket pocket and scooped up some of the dry wood. Surely this would be enough for a signal. We should have thought of this yesterday. We should have—
I couldn’t think about it anymore. It was making me frantic. I just had to get to the field and start the fire. That’s all. Worry about thinking later. Worry about Jake’s reaction later.
When I stumbled back out of the woods, Jake was still standing there in the middle of the strip, his hands shading his eyes as he looked off into the distance.
“They’re coming back,” he said.
I dropped the wood. “They are?”
“Pretty sure.” He pointed to the south. “Looks like they’re banking again. Yeah. You know what they’re doing, they’re checking out the crash site.”
“So we are saved?”
He looked down. “Not if you leave that wood in the middle of the landing strip.”
I picked it all back up and dropped it near the shed, and then we listened. Sure enough, the engine sound returned, grew louder. Now we were both waving our arms as the plane made its approach.
“Maybe it’s the plane police after all,” he laughed.
The field made for a rough landing, and the engines were so loud. It was like the real world had come bursting into the quiet forest.
“Oh my god, Jake!” said a woman’s voice as soon as the door opened.
The owner of the voice rushed out and ran straight for him, throwing her arms around him and kissing him on the cheek.
The jealousy was as strong as it was unexpected. I wanted to pry her off of him.
“Glad you made it,” he said to her, cocksure and nonchalant.
“Jesus, we saw the crash, I can’t believe you’re okay, and is this—”
He pulled me over. “This is Eli. My…passenger.”
Oh. Is that how it is?
She looked at me, then at him…then at his hand on my sleeve. “Nice to meet you, Eli. We’ll get you to the doctor when we get back.”
I touched my bandage. Yeah, I guess I’d have to have that looked at.
Then she said, “Pop’s here with me.”
Jake scowled. “You brought him?”
“I couldn’t stop him. When you didn’t show back up yesterday, I got worried. He wanted his buddy George to fly us up last night, but the storm—”
Sure enough, an old man with a red nose was getti
ng out of the plane, with a little difficulty. He really did look like Santa.
He coughed into his handkerchief and said, “You all right, boy?”
Jake’s face was alight with love. It was different than any expression I’d seen on him yet. “I made it, Pop.”
“Don’t know what the hell you did to my plane, but it’s good to see you.”
His hand had left my sleeve, and there were a few more inches of space between us now.
I don’t know why I found anything strange about that. I would’ve done the same thing if it had been my dad coming out to get us.
That’s just the way it is right now. Don’t read too much into it.
“Let’s load ‘er up,” said Pop. His eyes were bleary, though whether that was due to his illness or the sight of his lost son, I couldn’t tell. “I told Marcia you’d be waiting here.”
She shook her head. “He said if you were alive and not too injured you’d be here. Just what I wanted to hear.”
Marcia had her arm around Jake’s shoulder as they walked to the plane. She glanced over at me and met my eyes for a long second.
I know that you know, I thought. Please don’t make trouble for us.
But I did some looking back of my own, just before stepping into the plane. There was the shed, and beyond the shed were the cabins.
It could have been different. I could have gotten here in one piece, stayed in Ron’s cabin, found his book. I would have spent the night reading it, absorbing it, understanding the hidden mechanisms of my family, gaining insight on what to do.
I looked over at Jake. Without anyone seeing, he grabbed my hand and squeezed it.
Yeah. I think I got the better deal. Book or no book.
The plane taxied around and began to gain speed. My stomach lurched at the moment we left the ground. The trees were so close. For a moment I saw the crash happening again, the broken wing and the fire and the noise—
But the next moment we were over the treetops and the world was flying beneath us. We were headed home. We were safe.
I wanted to lean against him. I wanted to put my head on his shoulder, and feel his strength, his calm confidence. To talk to him, to murmur, to be told that when we got back, nothing would change between us, that we’d still be at the start of something amazing.