by Dawn Steele
Her red hair sprawls across the ground, spilling over her crooked arm, which she uses as a pillow. I take a tendril of this and finger it, careful not to wake her.
Something in my heart twists painfully.
I swallow and turn away. The feelings that consume me are like a vortex, restlessly churning. I have never felt this way about anyone before. Not even Adeline. I realize that my relationship with Adeline now was a schoolboy crush compared to this. Only I never understood it at the time.
What I have with Rebecca now is more adult – as though we have both been through the hardships of real life and surreal life, like what we are having now. And we have both made the best of it up till now. It’s kind of like a relationship that has survived through the most intense of circumstances, forged through fire and starvation and steel.
Rebecca stops snoring and stirs in her sleep. I hold my breath, not wanting to disturb her. I like watching her sleep. There’s something very peaceful about her when she sleeps. Her entire face goes into repose like a marble cherub on an ornately decorated church ceiling. When she is awake, a concentrated furrow comes to her forehead, and she always looks extremely intense, as if she is hell bent on achieving something significant before the year is up.
She murmurs something.
I think it’s an almost inaudible: “Kurt.”
I can’t help smiling. So she’s dreaming of me too. I wonder what she’s dreaming of. Of having her legs entwined around my waist, driving me further inside her? Or are her dreams of me more pensive, like holding hands as we walk down the deserted beach – knowing that a cruise ship awaits us a mile out, of course?
Rebecca’s eyes flutter open.
Ooops. I have woken her somehow. Maybe it was the dream ‘me’ who had woken her up and not the ‘me’ outside.
She smiles up at me, and her expression is so full of love that my heart twinges with a pang.
“Happy dreams?” I ask.
“More than happy.”
She reaches out with her arms to me again, and I go to them gladly. We kiss again, exploring each other’s mouths. My cock stirs again, and within seconds, I am as hard as I can be. Rebecca does that to me.
She gazes down at it and grins.
“Ready for another round?” I ask.
“Wait. I’ve wanted to do something to it from the very first time I saw it.”
“You want to do something to my cock?” I raise my eyebrows in mock horror. “I hope you’re not thinking of hanging your newly laundered underwear on it.”
She giggles. Coming from her, it is such a delightful, girlish sound. Rebecca sometimes acts too much older for her age.
“No.” She flips me onto my back and makes sure I am grounded. “I’ve always wanted to do this.”
‘This’ involves the descent of her head onto my cock. She takes the whole thing into her mouth, and I am in bliss. Her sucking ability is just like everything she does – intense. She swallows me almost whole, and I almost come in her mouth then and there.
‘God,” I groan, “that is so good. If you don’t want me to come in your mouth, you have to quit doing that.”
She nibbles at my shaft and her tongue takes a long, loving swipe around my crown. She comes up for air for a moment and smiles at me slyly.
“Maybe I want you to come in my mouth.”
“Be careful what you wish for,” I warn her.
She swallows me again, and this time, she stubs the tip of her tongue into my ultra-sensitive slit. That’s it. She has done it. I climax violently. My balls contract and my semen spurts out in a geyser deep into her throat.
Oh, oh, oh, oh!
“Fuck,” I say when I manage to catch my breath.
She seems to relish the taste of my sperm, and she swallows every drop of it, refusing to let my still hard cock abate in her mouth. Soon, I feel my sap pouring from my balls into my penis again, making it semi-turgid.
“I don’t believe it,” I say with a laugh, “but I think I’m hard again.”
“Mmmmm.”
She continues to suck and lick my head and my shaft, until my cock becomes rock solid for the third time in less than eight hours. Only then does she pause to admire what she has created.
I stare down at my saliva-slicked cock.
“What do you want to do with it, missy?” I tease.
She smiles as she raises her hips and straddles me. As my cock goes into her tight, sweet pussy, I allow myself another groan of immense pleasure. I love the way her pussy circles around my hot flesh like a vise, gripping it. Her vaginal muscles knead me and stroke me and squeeze me into oblivion. I am profoundly shaken by the pleasure she is giving me. But I must make myself last until she is pleasured first.
It is difficult. Boy, you have no idea how difficult. I have to rein in every ounce of strength in my body to hold back that threshold . . . until I open my eyes and see her pretty face convulse into a paroxysm of sheer bliss.
She arches her back and cries out – an ululating sound in the stillness of the night. The cicadas stop chirping to listen to our weird animal sounds.
“Get off,” I say in a ragged voice before I can lose control. “Get off me.”
She lifts her hips. My cock slips out of her pussy, and not a moment too soon. I climax again, shooting my sperm upwards in impressive arcs. The whitish liquid lands on my stomach, thighs and part of her breasts.
She collapses onto me, heaving. I hold her until both our gasps subside and we are able to breathe normally without hurting our sides.
I stroke her hair, and she entwines her fingers with mine.
“That was so good,” she says.
“I know.”
“I can stay like this forever with you beside me.”
I am tempted to say ‘Ditto’, but that’s not really where I want to be.
“I’d rather we be on an inhabited beach somewhere, with chilled pina coladas waiting for us on a side table under an umbrella.”
“I know what you mean.” She sighs. She fingers my navel. “Do you think we’ll ever get off this island? Or are we doomed to grow old here and die?”
“We’ll get off eventually.” I sound more confident than I feel. “Rebecca? I need to talk to you about Adeline.”
She tenses against me. I can feel her shoulder blades bunching and her jaw gritting against my body.
“It’s not what you think,” I say. “I need to get this off my chest. I need to tell you why I left her . . . and why she left me.”
Rebecca does not say anything, and so I plow on.
“I was young. I wouldn’t say foolish. But I knew what I wanted. As bad as this sounds, I have got to say it, because it’s the truth. I left Adeline – a mutual parting decision – because I didn’t want to be saddled with someone crippled . . . someone I had to look after for the rest of my life . . . when I didn’t even know what I wanted in my own life.”
I pause as I swallow, my mind churning. I was selfish, yes. Regrettably.
And yet it was something I had to do.
“I was only her boyfriend. I wasn’t her parents. I wasn’t a blood relative. I had the option to walk out of the door. I could stay . . . and we’d hate each other for the rest of our lives, or at least for a couple of years. Or I could walk. It was my choice. A choice she gave me.
“And so I walked. I think she was hoping I’d do the honorable thing and stay with her, and yet she didn’t want me to. She was a mess. I was a mess. But things weren’t the same between us anymore, and I couldn’t be the person everyone except my mother wanted me to be and stick with her no matter what. Like I said, I’m not proud of myself – the person I was back then.
“But what happened happened . . . and I don’t regret what I’d done. If I hadn’t done what I did, then none of what followed would have happened to me. I wouldn’t have realized my dreams. Dreams I didn’t know I had.”
I halt again, well aware that I sounded selfish and small. But that was the way it was. I can’t change t
he past. I made a choice, and now I’m explaining myself. My motives were extremely self-centered.
But what would any eighteen-year-old boy have done in the same situation? What would you have done if you were in my position?
I keep stroking Rebecca’s hair, the hair I have always found so glorious. She has gone very still against my body, and my anxiety mounts.
I pull in a sharp breath.
“Rebecca? Are you all right?”
She must hate me now. More than she has ever hated me before. I have affirmed all her opinions of me. I am scum. Every bit the dirt bag she had always reckoned I was.
Her shoulders start quaking, and I become alarmed.
“Rebecca?”
I turn her to gaze at her face, and I am surprised to see tears staining her cheeks.
“Rebecca?” I cry, anguished. “What’s wrong? What did I do?”
She shakes her head. “It isn’t you. It’s me. You were honest enough to tell me the truth.” Her breath is coming out in sobs now. “I’ve been blaming you all my life because you were a convenient scapegoat. But in truth, I was finding excuses not to see her too . . . because I couldn’t bear to see her like that.”
“Rebecca.” I get up on my elbows to hold her.
“I went to college, and when I came back home, we had grown apart as well. And I was relieved. Some sort of best friend I was . . . when my visits to her home were getting less and less. And all because we couldn’t do the things we used to do so much anymore. Things had changed, and I didn’t want to push her wheelchair around all the time either.”
She is tumbling over her words, swallowing half of them. She is so upset.
“So it’s not just you, Kurt. It’s me too. And I took out my anger at myself on you, because you walked first. And I was going through the motions. I am such a terrible, terrible person for feeling the way I do, and I’m not surprised that God decided to punish the two of us now by stranding us on this island. It’s our Purgatory, I tell you. We are being punished.”
I let her cry into my shoulder and my hair. I completely understand her guilt. I feel it every single day of my life too.
“I know,” I keep saying. “I know what it’s like. We can’t turn anything back. It’s not our fault it happened to her. But we have to go on. We have to survive this.”
Our catharsis out in the open, we hold each other long into the night until the fire dies down in flickering flames and the darkness drowns out our shame.
KURT
We have to go on, we decide, and so we pack up the dead guy’s things and trek up the contour of the coast. I can’t even call it a beach anymore because there is no sand, merely rocky ground that plunges steeply into the sea.
We make love often, sometimes three times a day during our rest stops. We figured that if we were going to die out here, we might as well make the most of our time.
Then on the fifth day during our sojourn out, we hear the sounds of the motorboat.
A motorboat!
I know. We have been attuned to ‘not’ hear it for so long that when we actually hear it, it’s as if we don’t really believe we are hearing it.
Rebecca turns to me in amazement.
“Am I dreaming this?”
“No.” I rush to the shore, or at least, the edge of the high ground that overlooks the sea.
The motorboat is there all right, combing the island from where we stand.
“Hail it!” Rebecca is so excited that she almost loses her footing and slides off the ground.
“Wait,” I caution. “It could be the people who murdered the man. Don’t forget he hasn’t been dead for long.”
I can’t forget the face of the dead guy. In my inexpert opinion, he could only have been dead for a couple of weeks, judging from his state of decomposition – which I won’t go into detail here.
“Right,” Rebecca breathes. “But it might not be the killers, and it might be the only chance we have of getting out of here.”
I am thinking furiously. But a motorboat means that we can’t be very far away from human habitation. Motorboats are not exactly designed for going long distances from shore. This means we are very near civilization.
Only, where the hell are we? And where do we head next to find it?
The motorboat putters and slows down. I can see two dark figures in it. It goes around the bend of the cliff and disappears.
“Damn,” I mutter. “Come on, let’s observe them.”
We creep through the tangle of forest towards where the boat disappeared. Just over the end, where the ground slopes steeply down to a stretch of beach, we can see and hear the motorboat sputtering and its engine dying down. One of the men inside the boat jump out into the water to drag the boat to shore.
We hide behind some leafy bushes to observe them. From where we are, the beach is only twenty feet or so down. We have to be very careful not to be seen.
“Look,” whispers Rebecca. “They are unloading something.”
Indeed, the men are starting to haul some crates off the motorboat and onto the beach. I hold my breath as two other men come into sight from where they were initially hidden on the beach. How many people are there on this island?
Instead of feeling relieved that we finally can be found, I am treading more cautiously here than ever. There is something sinister about these men and what they are doing. OK, hauling crates off a motorboat isn’t all that sinister in itself. But it’s the surreptitious way they are doing it – so orderly and precise.
And why are they loading crates onto a remote island anyway? There isn’t a township here to support industry. What exactly are those crates filled with?
“So what do we do now?” says Rebecca beside me. She is wearing an oversized shirt and a pair of shorts from the dead guy’s backpack. She must finally be glad to be free of that restrictive green dress.
Um, I’m not sure exactly what to do now.
“We watch them,” I say.
“And then what?”
Good question. We watch them. They leave. And then what? We are stranded her again for goodness knows how long.
But what about the men on the beach? Where did they come from? Have they been here all this while or have they just arrived, like the others, on motorboat?
“Lookee what we find here,” says a voice behind us. “A white boy and white girl.”
I whirl around.
A black man stands there, pointing a rifle at us.
Oh fuck.
The fact that this doesn’t look good is an understatement.
REBECCA
The man grins, showing white teeth as he points the black barrel of the rifle at us. He is flanked by another black man, his companion, also holding another rifle.
Oh shit.
We are sprawled on our tummies, and we slowly rise to our feet. My heart is palpitating at a hundred and forty beats a second. Kurt raises his hands and I follow suit. It seems like the only wise course of action.
The other man barks something in another language to the first man, and he replies.
“You.” The first man gestures with the butt of his rifle to Kurt. “How you get here?”
His accent is Jamaican, I think. But I can’t be sure. The people who live around these islands may speak in the same patois.
“We were lost,” Kurt says carefully. He has shaven, and his beautiful auburn hair flows wild and free over his shoulders. He is now clad in the dead man’s khaki clothes and resembles a romance book cover version of a Great White Explorer. “We fell off our ship in a freak accident and we were swept here to this island.”
The two men contemplate this by inspecting us as if we are insects. The first man’s eyes roam up and down my body, sending little shivers through my spine. I don’t like the way he is looking at me, as if I’m something edible to be savored.
Kurt sees this and tenses.
Stay your ground, Kurt, I beg him. Don’t do anything stupid.
The knife is in the backpack
, which is strapped behind Kurt’s back. I know he is thinking about it, but there’s no way a knife can take down two rifles.
The first man jerks his rifle. “Come with us. Go this way. Now.”
Great. Now we are prisoners. So much for finding civilization.
With our arms held up in the universal gesture of surrender, we slowly make our trek downwards to the beach. There, the other men are waiting for us. They are all black, all probably local. Crates are stacked on the shore. They watch us like predatory hawks, as if we are goods to be bartered.
Our captors prod our backs with the butts of the rifle.
“On your knees! Now!”
We sink down to our knees, hands behind our scalps. I am really scared now. Somehow, this is all going wrong, wrong, wrong. I remember the dead man up on the promontory, knife embedded in the back of his neck and body placed so that he was staring into the sea like a sentinel. Or as a warning to those who would chance this island.
“Let me do all the talking, please,” Kurt murmurs to me.
I don’t say anything.
A man comes forward. He is tall and very commanding, with a black bristly beard and with his head in a skullcap. Our captors brief him in patois on the details of our capture.
“What are your names?” he asks.
“I’m Kurt,” Kurt says, “and this is Rebecca. Please don’t hurt us. We mean you no harm. We don’t know where we are and we just want to go home.”
“Kurt,” says the man. He strokes his short beard. “Missing off a ship, you say?”
“Yes.”
His eyes narrow. “Kurt Taylor? The famous singer? The newspapers are all over with news of you.”
OK. Now we are getting somewhere, but I’m not sure if it’s in the right direction.
Kurt visibly swallows. I can see his Adam’s apple moving down his throat.
He decides to go for broke. “Yes, I am Kurt Taylor.”
I cringe. I’m not sure where this will lead us, but with men like these, I can tell from the sudden gleam in their eyes that there would be money involved. Major money.
Kurt rushes on, “If you see my companion and myself safely to the nearest town where we can find passage back to America, I will see that you are paid handsomely. Very handsomely indeed.”