“It's clean,” Maddox said, taking a seat across from me.
I wanted to tell him he was full of shit, that I didn't believe him. But I couldn't form sentences at this point, let alone words. I was so arid, so parched, my lips were literally glued together.
I brought the bottle to my mouth and drank. And drank. And drank.
“What did I say about the little sips?”
I flipped him the bird.
He chuckled to himself, and shook his head. I was so amusing to him. His funny little plaything.
The water helped, though. A tiny amount of clarity through the fog that had wrapped around my head. He was setting his silverware oh-so-properly on either side of his plate – the steam from the fish and vegetables drifting up into the air – the smell of the food coating my mouth in a slick of saliva.
“Looks good, huh?” he leaned forward, waving the steam to his face. “Smells good, too. I can't cook for shit, but they've got a ton of pre-prepped stuff in the kitchen. Gourmet crapola that comes with instructions. Pictures, too. Like the IKEA for food,” he laughed at his own, stupid joke. It wasn't even halfway funny.
I glanced over at what I supposed was my plate. There was a big slice of fish seated beside a few stalks of asparagus. Next to them a huge chunk of bread dripped butter from the crust.
My stomach did the talking for me.
Maddox took a big, heaping forkful of salmon, and stuffed his wretched face with it. He chewed, nodded with approval, then dabbed the corner of his mouth with his napkin, even though there was nothing there.
“Oh, how thoughtless of me,” he put his hand on my plate. “I don't want to be rude. You must be starving,” he said, pushing the plate toward me, then he stopped. “First things first, though. Lose the shirt, babe.”
I narrowed my eyes.
“Different kind of dress code around here, senorita. It especially applies to people who point guns at my head.”
“I couldn't have been the first to do that,” I said, surprised at the sound of my own voice. It was raspy, like a lumberjack with a four pack a day habit. I hit my chest with my fist. “You're a soulless fuck, Petersen.”
“Not going to argue that point. But, if you’re as hungry as you look, you’ll need to get naked.”
He took his hunk of bread, sopped up some of the butter with it, and popped it in his mouth.
He was a special level of sadistic, this guy. If there was a God, he'd choke on that sourdough. But he didn't. He just kept chewing, and chewing, and raising his eyebrows up and down.
I didn't want to take his salmon, or the asparagus, or the bread. If I were to keep up my strength, however, I'd have to eat something, sometime. I reminded myself I wouldn't have to be wearing clothes to kill him. Although how that was going to happen at this particular juncture in time was anybody's fucking guess.
The opportunity would present itself, though. Opportunities always presented themselves. You just needed to keep your eyes open because opportunities were sneaky little bastards. And if I was weak with stupid hunger, I wasn't going to be aware of shit. Stay awake, stay alert, stay alive.
Where had I heard that before? I'd heard that somewhere before, but my mind was still in a hazy cloud. I couldn't remember.
I got to my feet, bobbling just a bit. Between the rocking of the boat, and the vertigo caused by the Rohypnol, getting my legs to comply was proving a challenge. But I'd sailed before, I was a gymnast before, and my balance began to return, slowly.
I started to slip off the shirt, and watched Maddox the entire time.
One sleeve, and his eyes were eager.
The other sleeve, and they were glistening.
I held it in front of my chest, and studied him. His breath was coming quicker, his eyes wider. His brows higher. His eyebrows… there was something weird with them. Not necessarily bizarre, but something… something…. holy shit.
He dyed his eyebrows.
What kind of dude dyes his eyebrows?
“You're not a natural brunette,” I said, still holding the shirt to my chest. He flinched, just the corner of one eye closing for a microsecond, like a tic. “You should find a new stylist. 'Cause that's some sloppy ass work. You don't do it yourself, do you? Maddy?”
The problem with poking a tiger with a stick is there's a distinct possibility of pissing it off. Which is exactly what I had done.
Maddox shot up from his seat, his jaw and his fists clenched, because I was a wise ass little bitch and he was going to teach me a lesson.
I dropped my shirt to the deck.
He stopped.
Water lapped at the sides of the ship. The gull was gone, long gone, and all there was now was the sound of the Atlantic, splashing against the hull and the moon, the stars, as well as the lights from the transom illuminating Maddox's in a strangely natural, yet unnatural glow.
His jaw moved slightly from one side to the other as he ground his teeth together in a freaky kind of coping mechanism.
There was something inside this son of a bitch. Something deep and hidden that went far beyond deviant. All I'd done was point out a bad dye job. It was enough, though. Enough for me to discover that there was a nerve on which I could touch. All I had to do now was keep touching it. My revenge wouldn't survive, otherwise.
Stay awake, stay alert, stay alive.
That was from Endure! An insidiously popular reality show I'd tried out for when Leslie was in the last stages of her cancer. Money wasn't tight, it was gone, and the grand prize for living like a savage for six weeks was a cool million dollars. I'd actually made it to the final round of auditions, and was sitting in the producer's office when I got the call from the hospital. Leslie was gone.
Rebecca would soon follow.
What a fucked up ass time for me to remember.
“Take off the skirt,” Maddox growled.
I didn't.
“I said, take off the skirt.”
I gave it a beat, then another, before I did as I was told.
I undid the button, then the zipper, and pulled it down. The fabric puddled at my feet, and the sea breeze blew cold against my bare ass. In that moment, I wanted to die. There were girls who were stripping to pay their bills. Girls who were taking their clothes off by choice. I respected them. I tried to convince myself that doing this didn’t mean my dignity was gone. Like them, I was taking my clothes off to put food in my belly. Even more than that, I was doing it to save my damn life.
Maddox took a long draw from his beer, and returned to his seat. He looked at me, took his eyeful of my body, dancing his gaze up and down, up and down. I was his exhibit. His specimen. His plaything. And I gave him nothing. Not a glare, not a sorrowful plea for mercy. Nothing. I thought of ice. I thought of Leslie. I thought of Becca's last words to me.
Maddox wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, took up his knife and fork, and dug into the fish again. Then he cast a glance over at me. Smirked. And pushed my dinner across the table.
I didn't have any silverware. Nor did I have china. His own food was nicely plated while mine was pushed onto a paper plate. He wasn't stupid, after all.
“And if you think for a minute I'm going to give you a knife, or a fork, even a spoon, think a-fucking-gain.”
I picked up the meat between my fingers, but it slipped back to the plate with a sad, greasy splat.
Salmon is a very flaky fish, it barely cooperates with utensils. Without them, it’s a disaster to eat. But I was hungry. So damn hungry. Now was not the time to pretend that I was too good to eat with my hands or not hungry enough to go against whatever stupid as shit rules Maddox wanted me to abide by.
I would do him one better, though.
I brought the plate to my face, and began shoveling the food into my mouth. Like a barbarian. A monkey. A chained, naked animal here for his pleasure.
I never took my eyes off him.
“You enjoy looking at me,” he said, pleased with himself.
I licked the butter from m
y finger.
“No. No, I don't. Not even a little bit,” I replied, not looking away.
He seemed to enjoy watching me suck my fingertip, however. Of course, I wasn’t going to do anything he liked on purpose. I picked up my napkin, and wiped my hands.
“I enjoy looking at you,” he said.
“Whatever. Prick.”
“Nasty girl, aren't you?” He put his elbows on the table, steepled his fingers together, and smiled. He was enjoying the unobstructed view of my boobs, and as he spoke, it was as if he was talking to them rather than me. “I couldn't find out who you really are, Sofia. And as nice as I've been to you, I don't think you're going to tell me the truth.”
“You can't handle the truth.”
His smirk grew wider. “Jack Nicholson, A Few Good Men. Pretty good flick. Totally overrated, though.”
“It's a great movie, asshole, and why the fuck are we on a boat?”
“You're feeling better, with some food in you. That's good. That's… really, really good.”
I picked up an asparagus spear, and bit the tip off. “What I don't understand is how an idiot like you got so rich. Must be Daddy's money. That's what you're playing with, isn't it? Martin's the brains behind the operation,” I waved the half-eaten asparagus at him. “What does that make you?”
“Something terrible, apparently. Something bad enough for you to try some half-assed, retarded assassination plot. That was fucking sad, Sofia. I'm so glad it didn't work out for you.”
I threw the asparagus onto his plate. “What if I have people wondering where I am, shit head? You ever think of that?”
“Everything's been taken care of, darling. Don't you worry your sweet, sweet, Mexicali cabesa over it.”
“Don't ever call me 'darling', and while we're at it, my parents were from El Salvador.”
He licked his lips, drawing his tongue across that fucking dumb ass smirk of his.
“You seem to forget who’s in charge here. And you know what the beauty of being in charge is? No. For starters, I can call you whatever the fuck I want. And I don't give a damn where your parents were from.”
Maddox smoothed the front of his shirt, stood up, and walked over to me. With his hands on either side of my head, he curled his fingers into my hair.
“Would you like dessert? Or should I say, would you like to be dessert? I mucho gusto dessert.”
“Your Spanglish sucks. Maddy.”
He'd reacted badly the last time I referred to him as 'Maddy'. Like a tiger in a cage. There was something about the name that bothered him, and I wanted to keep poking at it.
That last time, however, I had my sexuality as a weapon. Dropping my shirt stopped the tiger in his tracks. I really should learn to think these through before I act on them. Because now, I was unarmed.
His face grew dark, angry. The cut I'd inflicted only added to the overall macabre of his presence. His huge, shadowy presence. Like a villain in a slasher movie, waiting beneath the stairs.
“Do not. Call me. Maddy.”
“Why not? Maaadee?”
The thing about being in a depleted, depressive mental state such as mine, was that I didn't care anymore.
I didn't care about prison.
I didn't care about dying.
I didn't care about caring.
I had nothing to lose by poking the tiger, so why the hell not?
Maddox yanked me off the lounger as if I were no more than a doll. His biceps were rock hard, nothing but muscle, no skin to pinch or twist and so large I may as well have been trying to wrap my hands around a tree trunk.
He spun me around, driving me into the side of the cabin. The side of my face squished against the window. His solid, brick wall of a body crushed against my backside. For the first time, I could feel his sex against me. Harder than those arms of his. And maybe, just maybe, just as big.
His idea was to teach me that lesson from behind.
My shackled leg, however, was preventing the intention. It was almost comical, the way it must have looked. My leg pointed out straight behind, as if I were striking a pose for the balance beam.
He started cursing. Damning me, damning the boat, and fumbled for the buckle of the restraint.
Undoing a buckle can be difficult enough on its own. When you’re angry or in a rush, though, it’s a game that drags on. Your fingers fight against themselves, and nothing works. The more you struggle, the worse it gets, and trying to unlatch a hook with a gargantuan erection, a flailing woman, and a rocking boat was making it even more impossible for him to get the chain off my leg.
That's what was so strange. The boat was pitching forward and backward. This was a huge fucking vessel. No way would two people wrestling with each other be enough to cause it to sway the way it was. I couldn't understand. It made no physical sense.
The shackle fell away just as the alarm began to sound.
Breep, breep, breep...
I was still squashed against the cabin, Maddox was as big as a linebacker and held me against the fiberglass wall, but his attempts at taking me anally were suddenly a very low priority.
Breep, breep, breep...
“What the fuck?” he shouted, still behind me, using me as a brace against the careening of the boat-versus-ocean.
The previous gentle lapping of waves grew more aggressive. It was no longer a quaint soothing sound people have on their white noise machines to lull them to sleep. This was an angry sound. A scary sound. The ship itself seemed to be crying out, the alarm getting louder, more intense, as it demanded someone's attention.
A red light flashed on the control panel. Being that my face was still jammed against the window, I could see it blinking on and off, next to the diagram of the yacht itself. An electronic, crimson anchor. The shit head had dropped it, yes, but it never hit the ocean floor.
We were too far out at sea, and had been drifting, unawares, as I ate salmon naked and my captor gleefully watched.
“You are so fucking dumb,” I said.
A wave slammed against the side of the Insatiable. I knew what she was called, now, as her name was etched in gold above the control board. Right next to the blinking anchor, actually.
Maddox was thrown off his feet because he was a lummox. I had myself on my side, however, because I was an agile little thing. Screwed up knee or not, I was still an athlete. So even with the ship bouncing against the waves, its bow rising like a plane from a runway then slamming back down again, I could stay upright.
And I could do even better than that. For the first time since my failed plan of premeditated murder, homicide, manslaughter, what have you, I was free. I had the upper hand. No shackles to bound me. No footing for Maddox to stand on. The ocean was angry and it was angrier at Maddox than it was at me.
I grabbed hold of the door to the pilot house and flung it open just as another wave crested and took the bow up, up, up. Maddox's reflection shone in the glass – he tried to stand, got as far as his knees, but not further than that. Maddox was huge and gravity was not at all on his size. In fact, it got the better of him and knocked him backward hard. He tumbled toward the stern like a sack of asshole potatoes.
Adrenaline fired through me, washing away every trace of the Rohypnol that might have been left. When the keel plummeted again, waves from the impact wooshed up on both sides of the ship. Out there, I would no doubt be swept away faster than a leaf in a storm. In here, I was safe. Well, safe-ish. Safer than Maddox, though – that much was for sure.
Quick as I could manage, I locked the door behind me. I was in, he was out, and I wasn’t going to make stupidity extend him the upper-hand again. I looked back out to see a less intimidating Maddox clutching the rail, way too close to the swim step for comfort. ear
That’s not to say that I was comfortable as a pig in shit. The alarm was louder in here, screaming its breep, breep, breep, and I had absolutely no idea what any of these other dials, bells, and whistles did.
There was a button next to the fla
shing anchor, though, so I pushed it. The light went from red to green, but the alarm was still shrieking, assaulting the hell out of my eardrums. I pressed my palms over my ears, trying to think, trying to see if there was anything I remembered from a book or a movie or a documentary that would tell me what to do next. Except, I couldn’t think of anything productive. My head filled with panic, the fact that we were in trouble clouding everything logical that might have wanted to stick out to me.
Yes, we were in trouble, I reasoned. But was I in any more trouble now than I was while Maddox had me tied up. Not really. If anything, that was a fucking win.
“Sofia!” Maddox screamed from outside. We'd leveled out for just a moment, giving him enough time to stumble up toward the pilot house and begin pounding on the door. “Let me the fuck in!”
I started laughing. Was he fucking serious? God, what an asshole. What a delusional asshole!
This was it. My plan, coming together through forces of mother nature, and a fucked up, pretentious rich asshole who thought a boat ride with a kidnapped sex slave would be a dandy idea.
But the waves were gentler, now. I don't know what the hell we drifted through, if it was just some rogue sea storm, but it would give captain Petersen and his nonexistent sea legs more than enough time to break down the door.
Never look a gift weather event in the mouth, though. I didn't know a whole lot about sailing, or boats – Rebecca and I both got our Water badges back in our Girl Scout days – but what I did know was where the throttle was.
I don't think the term is 'flooring it', necessarily, but that's precisely what I did.
The Insatiable was a grand, expensive, and powerful craft. When I pushed the throttle all the way upward, she took off as if launched from a cannon.
At nearly two thousand horsepower, this girl had the kahunas other ships could only dream of, and after a quick calculation of knots to miles per hour, the result was sixty. Sixty magnificent miles per hour, and the sudden propulsion sent Maddox back on his ass, and tumbling toward the stern.
Violent ocean spray hit him like a fire hose, his feet slipped out from underneath him, and in a desperate act of self-preservation, he hooked his arm around the railing. He held his fist with his other hand, trying like hell to keep himself stable.
Forbidden Sensations: A Dark Romance Page 9