by Gabi Moore
“Ellie? Ellie, I’m sorry,” I said, dumped my bag of mussels on the sand and came to sit beside her.
“I’m sorry too,” she said, and her fingers kept working, flicking the long thin leaves up, over and down again. I tried to help by feeding her the next branch when she reached the end of her current one. We worked together for a while like this, in silence.
“What happened, Ellie?”
Her hands paused.
“I went out. I met up with him. He saved my life. Nothing happened.”
I hated that she seemed to be using as few words as possible. At least she knew how bad it looked.
“You dressed up,” I said quietly. Her dress seemed to be disintegrating all around her. I had the wild thought of it falling to pieces completely, leaving her some kind of wild beach woman with a coconut bra and a grass skirt. I hated that I still wanted her. Badly.
“I’m not mad, Ellie.”
“Good, you have nothing to be mad about.”
Silence.
“I fetched some mussels for us.”
“Great. Once Todd makes some fire, we can cook them.”
Fucking Todd. I bristled at the mention of his name.
“Ellie, can we… let’s go somewhere private. I just want to speak to you, alone.”
She looked at me.
“We are alone.”
I sighed.
“I just want some privacy…”
She seemed to understand what I was saying. She gently let the frond fall from her fingers and stroked her hands over her thighs.
“Of course. Can you carry me though? My foot is really fucked up.”
I caught her eye and we stared at one another for a moment. She was the same Ellie as always. Only now there was an entire storm between us. And there was Todd, taking up too much fucking room.
I leant forward, gently took her in my arms and she dutifully linked her own arms around me and rested her head gently against my chest. Without a word, I carried her into the dark green forest at the heart of the island.
It was a dream. A dirty, delicious fantasy. My woman. Half naked, unable to flee. I was hungry, and angry, and who knew if either of us would see another day.
She was heavy, but I knew she was sensitive about her weight and so I tried as hard as I could to not show any strain. None of us had had a drop of fresh water or a bite to eat since the night before, but I wasn’t going to let that get in the way. I picked my way over twisted branches, and the light grew dimmer around us as we crept deeper and deeper into the growth. It was an alien landscape, all broad leaves and twisting plants that clamored over ones another, so that you couldn’t make out one individual plant in the whole mess. Maybe she’d be more thrilled to come out here with me if I was brandishing a manly machete.
“Is this really happening, Anthony? How did we even get here? I still can’t believe that any of this is happening. Like this is all just a dream and any second I’m going to wake up in my bed, on the ship, and you’ll be there with me and none of this would ever have happened…”
We had come to a clearing in the trees, and I lowered her down onto a soft mat of moss ringed loosely with ferns. It was completely shaded, silent, and cool in this place.
“It feels like a dream to me as well,” I said.
It was the kind of landscape out of which a jaguar could appear, or else a mysterious pygmy warrior. And ancient place. All around us was shadowy, and smelt like damp wood and crushed leaves. I crouched down beside her and stroked my hands down her legs, lingering gently over the scratches and bruises on her pretty skin.
She was strange. Receptive, but different somehow. She couldn’t look me in the eyes, but her hands easily went to mine and followed my tracing, guiding them up higher on her thighs to lift the ragged lace of her dress. There was nothing but the sound of our breathing. Even here the wind and soft roar of the ocean was muffled by the wall of vegetation surrounding us.
“I never want to lose you,” I said, fingertips finding her naked skin.
Her only response was to lay back a little, and pull her knees up closer around her. She looked like she had something just on the tip of her tongue, something she wanted to say. When she didn’t speak, I cleared my throat and spoke myself.
“When I thought you were gone I… it suddenly made me see things so clearly, you know? I don’t know I was pushing so hard for the wedding, Ellie, but when it comes down to it, that’s not what really matters. I don’t mind if you want to wait another few months and--”
“Shhh!”
I looked at her but her eyes were glued to some spot in the trees behind me.
“Ellie?”
“I think there’s someone there,” she whispered and pointed.
The bulge in my trousers was clearly visible when I sprang up and stood between her and the noise. She noticed it. And I noticed her noticing it. She hobbled to her feet, winced silently and came to creep beside me as we moved to a parting in the trees and tried to find the source of a soft rustling noise. My heart was pounding in my ears.
I pulled some long creepers aside and created a window we both looked into. To my amazement, her hand went down to touch me. Like a secret little mouse, her fingers ran over my body and cupped loosely over the bulge there. Still staring straight ahead, she began to stroke me idly. I couldn’t tell if I was terrified of what was in the bushes or so maddeningly turned on that the she didn’t even think it necessary to stop what she was doing. I throbbed painfully in her hands, the thrill of her touch shooting all through me and making it very hard to focus indeed. But in a second, the source of the noise became clear.
“Look, it’s them,” she whispered so quietly it was almost inaudible.
Two pale, naked bodies appeared out of the dense jungle. It was hard at first to understand the writhing knot of limbs in front of us, but one thing was clear: they were having sex. Right there, a few yards in front of us in a similar mossy clearing secluded by tangled branches. They hadn’t seen us. I felt like everything in my body stopped working – my breath, my brain, my heartbeat – and I suddenly became one thing and one thing only: my cock.
We both froze on the spot; no motion except for Ellie’s deviant little hand moving slowly but smoothly over me. Outrageously, her hand now slipped under the band of my trousers and onto my naked flesh, pulling long, secret strokes over my stiff cock. I snapped a glance over at her but her eyes were glued on the squirming couple in the bushes ahead. The sense of everything being a dream was getting deeper, and weirder.
I could do nothing but watch. And feel. And swallow hard as her expert fingers still seemed to remember where to touch me. At least some things hadn’t been destroyed by the wreck. My mind switched off and I found my body responding on its own to what was unfolding around me.
I was hungry. I was dehydrated. Maybe even traumatized. But there was something so disgustingly hot about watching those two, knowing that Ellie was watching everything as well, and that she liked it, and that I could feel how much she liked it when the pace of her hand slowly picked up…
The geometric tattoos on the guy’s shoulder rippled and pulsed as he curled again and again into the softness of his wife’s body beneath him. I couldn’t make out much of her form, except for an outstretched thigh that clung to him desperately and the full curve of her bouncing breast. They fucked feverishly, secretly, trying to stay quiet. It was wrong, watching them like that, but my body had already approved and I soon felt myself edging closer, panic rising as I wondered how I could stifle a groan in the dark, leafy stillness of this weird Eden we had stumbled into. Ellie stared and stared, hypnotized. She was timing her strokes with the wet slapping sounds coming quietly from the couple before us. It was the sexiest, dirtiest thing I’d ever done. And I couldn’t believe I was doing it with her.
When I whimpered, she shot me a wide-eyed look and then darted her eyes back to the couple. I nearly had a heart attack to see that they had stopped moving, and were now pricking their ears, a
ware perhaps that they weren’t alone. I tensed my muscles and made as though to dash off, but Ellie stood firm, holding me tightly and giving me a strange pleading look. I swear she was close to making me come there and then, and she knew it.
What happened next was nothing I could have expected. The couple exchanged some quiet words with one another, and, easy as can be, the woman twisted her head to the side, turned her face fully to where we were hiding and immediately made eye contact with Ellie. But she didn’t flinch. In fact, neither of them did. It was as though they were both bewitched by the other. He buried into her neck and, to my amazement, began to slowly fuck her again; all while her eyes were pinned shamelessly on Ellie.
I was about to say something but Ellie’s hand started to work desperately over me again, stroking more quickly this time, and it felt so good I could scarcely summon the will to push her off. We stayed locked together like this, the woman and Ellie holding each other’s gaze, them screwing over there and Ellie stroking me quickly to an orgasm over here. Is that what we’d come to? Barely a day on this island and we were rutting in the forest like depraved savages?
As angry and uncomfortable and disgusted as it made me, my cock was still rock hard and threatening to explode any second. I was sure I was well-hidden, and I could barely see the other two that well, but that didn’t matter. It was in the eyes. It was in how utterly brazen Ellie was being, how she didn’t hesitate, not even for a second. My eyes nearly popped out of my skull when a rustle made me look down and notice that Ellie’s other hand was under her dress, bobbing just as furiously between her legs as the other one. Her knees bent softly and parted, and she bit her lower lip again and again as she gawped at the spectacle.
When the woman in the bushes came it was like a sexy chain reaction that couldn’t be stopped. It was a strangled, tortured little moan that began as an animal-like whimper and then, with each successive thrust of her husband’s hips, escaped her control and shattered the silence.
“Fuck!” she cried, and he grunted hard on top of her, delivering a few last violent thrusts before collapsing heavily on top of her. Still, even still she held Ellie’s gaze, and in the next heartbeat Ellie’s legs seemed to buckle under her and her spine arched as she threw her head back and succumbed to her own orgasm.
The sound of that hot, sweet little surrender from her lips was enough to push me right over the edge, and I shot big, juicy gobs of cum all over her hand and onto the dark green leaves hiding us.
I groaned and shuddered in her small hands as she squeezed and milked me, the waves of her own orgasm not distracting her from her rhythm. Pulsing hard and twitching as I came down, I looked over to see her with a strange, naughty look on her face. She was squeezing her knees together, her eyes nearly rolled back into her head. Looking to the couple again, I could no longer see them anymore, and realized that they were probably already moving out, getting dressed quickly and running off.
It took me a moment to catch my breath. I stared at Ellie. She stared at me.
“You liked that,” I said. I didn’t know if it was a question or a surprised statement.
“You did,” she said and wiped the white off her hand on the front of my trousers. I mean, the evidence was certainly there.
“Are you gonna get us out of here?” she whispered.
Gathering myself, I reached over, hoisted her up and tried to pad my way through the growth and back to the shoreline. I could feel her heart beat against my chest. I could smell the sweat off her.
“They saw us,” I said.
“Oh yes, they certainly did.”
“They didn’t care,” I said.
She paused before replying.
“I don’t think I cared either.”
“That was wrong, Ellie. I don’t know what to say but …what happened back there, that was…”
“Kind of hot?”
I said nothing. This whole situation suddenly took on a dirty, sour tone and I didn’t like it one bit. She disgusted me. The couple we had ‘spied’ on disgusted me. But more than all of that, I was disgusted with myself, and the fact that I had come harder than I had in as long as I could remember.
Chapter 11 - Todd
She had torn the lower half of her shirt off, turning it into a tight crop top that exposed her midriff. She claimed it was to make more bandages for Ellie’s leg. But I knew why she had really done it.
We had worked for the last hour to put together our little sand dwelling: a seven foot by seven foot cube in the cool, packed sand, bolstered on the inside by tree branches and protected overhead by Ellie’s woven palm frond roof.
It had come together surprisingly fast, and when the daylight seemed to reach its apex and wind down into the late afternoon, I felt more confident that we’d be OK through the night. Another storm was definitely brewing, and the mood around our ‘camp’ grew darker as the light slowly left the sky. But I knew we’d be OK. We had made it this far. If I could only find a way to beat off Charlie’s advances and get something to eat by the time the sun went down, I’d call this day a success.
She was standing over the fire now, looking triumphant.
“You’re still mad, just admit it,” she said as she looked down at the flames.
“Would you drop it? I don’t care anymore, really.”
“You don’t care somebody tried to drug you?” She pushed some sand around the fire with her foot to make a windbreak.
“Well, shit, Charlie, what do you want me to say?”
She shrugged and frowned, crouching down to shape the sand with her hands.
“It’s hard for me too, Todd. I don’t know why I did it. But last night, when I didn’t know if any of us would even live to the morning, I really got to thinking…”
I tried to ignore her yacking and focus on the task at hand. I was exhausted and my muscles ached, but I wouldn’t stop till I knew I’d tied these branches on as firmly as I could.
“I realized that I want to live my life differently, Todd. I had a breakthrough moment, and something just …snapped. I had an insight. Why I am like I am. I felt so bad about what I did to you, and it seemed like the end was so close, you know? And I realized, I needed to change, I needed to be different…”
“Could you just hold this for a second?” I said. She came forward and held down a piece while I twisted some fiber around it to bind it to the others.
“Are you even listening?” she asked as I worked away. I tied a knot, wiped my brow and looked out over the choppy ocean water.
“Charlie, no offense, I’m glad you’re feeling better, but I think all that stuff’s your own business.”
Her expression fell.
“I was just trying to apologize, to explain--”
“You don’t have to explain anything,” I said and looked her straight in the eyes. “I get it. I’m not mad. Can we just stop talking about it, please?” I had the strong sense that this conversation hadn’t exactly gone the way she planned it.
“So, you and that girl… what’s going on with that?” she said, trying to sound casual.
The look I gave her was harsh, but I didn’t feel too guilty about that. She immediately shut up.
“I’m done talking Charlie, about this or any other topic.”
We both worked silently on our pit for a while, she tamping down the sand walls and me checking for holes in the ‘ceiling’. I wanted to see Ellie again. I didn’t care about her meathead fiancé. I didn’t care that I couldn’t have her. I just had to see her again. As pathetic as it was, the thought that I may get the chance to huddle close to her in this two-bit dwelling tonight was something small to look forward to.
Charlie was over at the fire again, this time swirling around the mussels in the ashes with a stick, sending steam billowing into the air.
“You know, you might as well forget about her,” she said quietly.
“What?”
“That girl. She’s taken. It sucks but you’re not going to get anywhere with that.”
I said nothing.
“But I’m here.”
I stopped my work and looked at her.
“You can hate me as much as you want, but we work well together, Todd, and you know it. I’ve kept quiet for a long time, but I don’t know, I guess being out here and with things being the way they are, I can finally just be blunt with you. I’m available. OK? I’m here. Maybe it’s fate. But the offer’s there. I want you. There, I said it.”
I let out a long, low sigh.
“Charlie, I told you how I feel about relationships, and how I’m not ready to--”
“Who said anything about a relationship?”
She stirred the mussels again, their blue shells clinking in the fire. It wasn’t enough food. Not by a long shot.
Why was I resisting her, anyway? If help didn’t come to rescue us, I didn’t see how we’d survive for long out here. Charlie made me uneasy, and she always had. But did that matter now? With my brief little Ellie fantasy gone up in a puff of smoke? I frowned as I realized Charlie wasn’t exactly being unreasonable. She was a fit, no-nonsense woman and she was offering me sex. Could I live with myself if I took her up on her offer? If I wasn’t even going to live anyway, did that change anything?
“Tonight,” she said, “after it gets dark, let’s go off somewhere, just you and I. I think I saw some interesting things over that way. What do you say?”
Before I could answer, some rustling in the bushes announced the arrival of the married couple, who came marching over towards us with a bundle of roots and leaves tied up with a vine. They both looked a little flushed. I’m not sure what I was expecting, but they seemed almost suspiciously happy for people who were stranded on a desert island and had no escape in sight.
“We have no idea what this stuff is but we tried some and it tastes OK, no ill effects so far,” Carl said and dumped the bundle by the fire. “I don’t know what these leaves are but Livvy says they taste a bit like rocket, so we could try eating them.”
Charlie and I started to examine the bundle just as Anthony came clamoring through the same bushes with Ellie in his arms. They, too, had strained looks on their faces. Nevermind. Everyone’s nerves were fried, that was understandable. Charlie and I exchanged knowing looks but I put my head back down and got to work stripping the tough skin off what looked like an edible tuber.