by R. R. Banks
“He’s right,” Hunter said.
“What?” I asked, swinging my head to look at him.
“He’s right,” Hunter replied. “I thought that it was going to be better if I went off on my own, but I’ve been thinking more about it, and I don’t think that it would be a good idea for us to fracture. As much as none of us really relish the idea, we need to rely on each other right now. The reality is that we really don’t know how long we’re going to be here. Of course, we would hope that the people on the ship would have noticed by now that we aren’t there anymore, but that doesn’t mean that they would know how to come find us. And to be completely honest, they might not have noticed. I assure you that those men who were chasing us didn’t go to the head of security and tell him what happened. The people with the wedding on the cruise might notice that we weren’t at the activities, but it’s entirely possible that they would just think that we decided to have more relaxing vacations and were just not going. It could be quite a while before they’re able to retrace their steps, figure out when we went overboard, and then find us.”
“So, we’re just screwed is what you’re trying to tell me?” I asked.
“No,” Hunter said, his tone telling me that he was trying to keep me calm. I wondered if he had seen the flail. “What I’m telling you is that all of us hope that we’re going to get off this island soon, but we can’t let that hope keep us from doing what we need to do in order to stay safe until that time comes. If there’s going to be more bad weather, the last thing that we need is to be just out in the open. We might not be able to build a resort, but we can put together something that will at least protect us a little bit.”
I stayed silent as I stared at him. I knew that there was really nothing that I was going to be able to say that would make any impact at all. It seemed I was the only one who had any intention of believing that we were going to be off the island before they even had a chance to build a shelter, and they were refusing to make any concessions for the optimism that I was quickly starting to believe was delusion. I started away from him, not really knowing where I was going to go, but not wanting to be on the beach with the men any longer. When I reached the edge of the trees, I turned and looked back over my shoulder at them. They were standing in the sand seemingly locked in an intense conversation, and then they broke apart, Hunter stalking toward the trees and Gavin heading for the boxes of supplies that were stacked high enough on the sand that they wouldn’t be caught up by the waves when the high tide rolled in. I was afraid that Hunter was going to disappear again, but instead he reached out and grabbed onto one of the nearby trees.
“These are what you should be using,” he said forcefully.
Gavin scoffed.
“Are you kidding me?” he said. “Do you see how that thing is bending? And under even your strength. That would never be able to support a shelter. We need something far stronger and more stable.”
“It’s bending, which means that it can be curved,” Hunter said, his voice tense as if he were trying to force himself past Gavin’s crack. He bent the tree to demonstrate what he meant. “And what is the strongest structure in the world?”
“The United States military. USA! USA!”
“Charming. No, the geodesic dome.”
There was silence and I knew that Gavin was just as in the dark about that one as I was. I knew that I had heard the term before, but it wasn’t one of those bits of information that I kept filed under “ready to use facts” in my mind. Hunter stared at Gavin and I could almost hear his brain starting to fizz with frustration.
“Geodesic dome,” Hunter repeated. He gave a deep sigh and closed his eyes. “The big spiky ball at EPCOT.”
“Oh, yeah,” Gavin said. “I remember reading about that.”
“Great. Then you know that it is the strongest structure that can be built. Far stronger than any other shape. If we build the shelter as a dome rather than as a square, it has much more of a chance of withstanding a storm or other influences.”
“Other influences?” Gavin asked, putting a voice to the worry that had just flashed through my mind.
“Well, we haven’t encountered any of the wildlife here other than fish, but I would venture to say that with an island this large and with this variety of flora, there are going to be animals. Just because we haven’t seen them yet doesn’t mean we won’t. In fact, chances are the animals that do inhabit the island have been watching us and trying to understand our patterns, and when they are more comfortable, they will make themselves known.”
Fabulous. Something else to be afraid of on this shore excursion of the damned. Somehow, I doubt that he’s talking about the squirrels and deer from my old camping trips.
“I don’t care what shape you think it should be. We just need to start building. Start cutting whatever trees you want.”
I leaned against the nearest tree and watched as Hunter stomped over to the supplies and grabbed at one of the boxes. His hand hit a box next to it, sending it toppling to the ground where the lid popped open. Several items fell out, including a large stash of condoms that spread across the sand, their multicolored foil packets glinting in the sun. Everything went silent, at least in my mind, as I stared at the condoms. I swallowed hard, my mind immediately running wild with thoughts of how I could put those to use.
Hunter cleared his throat, seemingly thrown off by the appearance of the condoms out in the open on the sand. I looked up at Gavin and saw him roll his eyes. He stalked over to the box and scooped everything back into it, bringing along with the stack of foil packets a liberal amount of the beach.
“They’re condoms, Hunter,” he said mockingly. “Don’t you know what those are?”
“You just carry a supply box full of condoms around with you on your boat?” I asked.
He looked at me and I saw an angry look in his eyes.
“I use my boat for more than work. Sometimes I have some company with me and I don’t know their names much less where they’ve been, so I’m not going to risk anything, if you know what I mean.” The words made my skin crawl and it worsened when he looked at Hunter with a vicious sneer. “Don’t worry, Hunter. Go grab a banana and I’ll teach you how to use them.” He looked him up and down. “You might want to go ahead and cut it in half for accuracy.”
I braced myself for Hunter to lash out at Gavin, but he didn’t. Instead, he calmly picked up a knife, turned around, and walked deeper into the jungle toward more of the bendy trees that he had chosen. For a few moments, he cut at them aggressively, tossing the stalks that he chopped down to the side to create pile. As the pile grew, sweat started to bead on his forehead and his shirt seemed to stick to him. He set his knife on the ground and peeled off his shirt. I had to withhold a gasp when it revealed a smooth, chiseled chest, rippling stomach, and tight waist.
So that’s what was hiding behind that suit.
Hunter went back to his work and I watched as his muscles tensed, contracting and releasing with the movement of his cutting. He paused for a second to comb his fingers back through his hair and I felt my body respond with a rush of arousal. He was nothing short of delicious and the fact that he seemed to be the complete opposite of Gavin in how he thought of women made him even more attractive. I had to drag myself away from staring at him so that he didn’t catch me, and headed further into the jungle. I suddenly felt the need for a bath.
The water rushing over the rocks and down into the small, blue pool at the bottom deadened any other sound of the island and sent up a cool spray that was refreshing as it touched my skin. I quickly slipped out of my clothes and stepped down into the pool. My skin was hot from the sun and had been sent to searing by the sight of Hunter without his shirt, and the water sliding up over it brought cooling, relaxing relief. I dipped my head back into the water, rubbing my scalp with my fingers to loosen the sweat and dirt that I felt had collected there. The feeling of my own touch was suggestion enough to my mind for the arousal that I was already feelin
g to spiral upwards.
I encouraged it, slowly running my hands along my body to clean my skin and increase the feeling of need that was growing between my thighs. Finally, I made my way across the pool to where the waterfall tumbled in. The floor of the pool rose up at this point, leaving piles of rocks that rose up out of the water on either side. I sat on one of the lower rocks so that the level of water was up to my breasts and leaned back against the rock behind me. The water running down into the pool agitated the surface, causing it to bubble and dance across my skin. I closed my eyes and sighed, letting my hand run across my breasts in time with the bubbling. As I touched, my legs opened slowly, as if naturally drawn apart by the promise of the touch of the water. I slid down slightly further on the rock so that I could tilt my hips, opening myself to the rush of the water, and immediately felt a surge of pleasure flow through me.
Biting down on my lip to contain the moan I felt forming in my throat, I arched slightly into the flowing water. The sensation intensified and I cupped my breast, squeezing it and letting my fingertip and thumb pluck my nipple. The combination rocketed between my thighs and I felt my clit become more sensitive as it emerged, seeking more of the stimulation. Images of Hunter filled my mind and played against my closed eyes. I thought of his incredible body, the hidden sexiness that I would have never expected to discover. Even when I had him in the hotel room with me, his body stretched out across mine, I hadn’t known that that was what was waiting for me just on the other side of his shy, nerdy exterior. His reaction to the condoms brought the thought to my mind that while he might not be as inexperienced as Gavin taunted him about, it might not have been too far off.
Somehow that idea was unbearably sexy. I imagined what it would be like to get through that outer shell and show him everything I knew that that body was capable of doing. I imagined undressing him, finding more of the muscles and smooth, velvety skin. If it was anything like the rest of his body, I knew that the cock waiting for me would be long, thick, and incredibly hard. My mouth watered as I thought of wrapping my hand around his shaft and feeling the skin move over the tight muscle beneath. I imagined running the soft head across my lips and tasting his fluids, then taking him in to suck him nearly to the brink of his control.
The feeling of the water was becoming deliciously intense as my mind wandered to Hunter touching me. I imagined that it was his hand cupping at my breast and kneading into the flesh, his mouth coming down to suck the other nipple. My hand slid down my body as I thought of his mouth trailing along my skin and settling between my thighs so that he could taste me the way that I had tasted him. My fingers pressed past my entrance as I imagined that hard cock sinking deep within me. I could feel how hot and wet my walls were, reflecting how much I wanted him. I lifted my hips higher into the swirl of the water as I pumped my fingers inside of me, mimicking the thrusts that I so craved.
It took only seconds to feel the pressure building through my body and the dizzying heat rush across my face and chest. Suddenly I felt my climax crash around me and I forced my fingers as far inside of my body as I could, pressing against the furthest wall as I cried out in response to the powerful contractions that flowed in waves across me. I rode the feeling, giving myself over to it and the thought of Hunter crying out as he came within me, until it slowed and then gently withdrew my fingers and slipped off of the rock to rinse and cool off again beneath the stream of the waterfall.
****
Hunter
The sound of Eleanor whimpering and gasping as her hand moved beneath the water was too much for me to handle and I pumped my hand harder. My cock was like a rock in my palm, swollen until it felt like it was going to burst. This was the last thing that I expected to find when I went into the jungle for a break to wash the sweat away from my face. I had intended to just rinse off and go back to work on the shelter, but when I came over the slight hill and saw Eleanor down in the water, her face expressing pure ecstasy, all thoughts of anything else that I might be doing completely left my mind.
She was incredibly gorgeous, even sexier now with her hair wild and wet, her skin lightly touched by the sun, than she had been all dolled up on the cruise ship. The movements of her body caused her breasts to surge upward, occasionally breaking the surface of the water so that I could see them fully, her hand grasping one as the other remained between her thighs. She arched slightly and I saw her fingers inside of her body, and there was nothing that I could do to control myself. My erection was already nearly painful it was so hard and I had to have relief.
I watched Eleanor enjoying herself in the water and let my hand stroke my cock at the fast, intense speed that I would have used if it was plunged deep inside her. Her sounds told me that she was getting closer and closer to her climax, and the more those sweet little sounds filled the air, the more intense the feelings of my own pleasure became until I felt that I was only seconds away from orgasm. I held off until she screamed out and then let myself go, feeling the hard throb of my own blinding climax and then the heat as I spilled out onto the ground. My hand slowed, stroking gently as my cock twitched and pulsed in my palm. I gasped for breath, not wanting to make any sound. I didn’t want her to know that I was there, and yet all I wanted to do was get down in the water with her.
Even if I was, though, I wondered if I would ever be able to cause those sounds to flow out of her and create the powerful feelings that she had just given herself, and that thought alone was enough to pull me away from her and head for the narrow creek trickling through the trees so I could rinse off and go back to the shelter.
Chapter Eleven
Gavin
It was our fourth day on the island and our shelter was coming along better than I had hoped it would, which, to be honest, wasn’t really saying much. I hadn’t thought that either of these people were going to be terribly effective at gathering the materials that were available on the island and converting them into any type of structure that was going to actually provide us with any protection. Eleanor had pretty much fallen right into step with what I anticipated, roaming around the island and doing nothing to help us with any of the preparations we were trying to make. In the time that we had been working, however, Hunter had surprised me. The man seemed distinctly more withdrawn than he had since they climbed onto my boat, but he was willingly going along with the project, working harder and with greater strength than I ever would have expected him to have. Though I was grateful for the benefit that the harder work offered the shelter construction, it didn’t escape me that this could make my job all the more difficult when it finally came time to finish it.
I turned my attention back to the shelter and surveyed what we had accomplished. We already had the basic shape of three rooms framed out with the stiff, sturdy stalks from palm trees and bamboo and were now concentrating on adding a roof that could protect us from the storm that seemed to be hovering just on the edge of happening, grumbling on the horizon like a really pissed off woman. As soon as I had noticed the clouds rolling in, I pushed the construction work into high gear, not wanting to get caught in another storm without anything to protect us. I knew that once we started seeing the wisps of black and red along the sky, heavy rain was soon to follow, and just as I had told Eleanor, when severe weather struck, we weren’t going to be able to rely on the boat to provide us with any form of shelter. Its structural integrity wasn’t enough for us to trust it, which meant that it was just us and the island.
I took the knife from between my teeth and started sawing through the thick stalk of bamboo in front of me, trying to decrease its integrity enough that he could snap it. The fibrous plant was giving its survival the old college try, but I wasn’t going to let it defeat me. I had already taken down a few dozen of its brothers, and I was going to get this one, too.
Oh, dear lord, I was starting to snap. I had inhabited the island with anthropomorphized bamboo. I don’t care how much money this job was worth, if the plants started talking back to me, I was leaving Elea
nor behind and swimming to the next closest island.
"What are you doing?" Eleanor asked as she walked up behind me.
I turned around and noticed that she was wearing another of my shirts and a pair of running shorts rolled several times at the waist to keep them up. She was going through what little wardrobe I had on the boat with me fast and we hadn’t yet come up with a feasible solution for washing clothing unless we were going to get primal with it and start pounding my polyester blends and well-worn cotton on the rocks at the edge of the tidal pool.
"I'm cutting poles for the shelter,” I told her, not even trying to disguise the disdain I felt for her.
"What shelter?" she asked, her voice annoyingly high and innocent as if she had just wandered out of a five-star resort and really did have no idea what I was talking about.
I let out an exasperated sigh and started cutting through the pole again.
"We already had this discussion. A few times. We have to build a shelter if we’re going to get through our time on this island, however long that might be. That storm is going to be nasty and it’s going to get here soon.”
"I know what you’ve said,” Eleanor said, some of the sweetness gone, “I’m not as stupid as you would like to think that I am. But we haven't even planned anything. We haven't talked about where this shelter is going to be, much less how we should build it."
I was officially at a loss. Where in the living hell was this woman’s mind that she hadn’t noticed the work that Hunter and I had done already? She had spent the last two nights sleeping in the cabin of the boat, despite my greatest efforts at warning her not to because we didn’t know when the storm would hit, but that meant that she crossed onto the beach directly across from the shelter every morning. How could she not have noticed it?
"There doesn't need to be a 'we'," I said, finally snapping the stalk and tossing it aside. "Hunter and I can do it ourselves."