by R. R. Banks
Good to know that some of my skills are still intact.
The thought brought uncomfortable feelings into the back of my mind. It had been awhile since I had done a job. After the last one had gone the way that it did, I had taken some time off, sinking back into anonymity for a bit so that I could shake off of the heat and the guilt. Anonymity had its perks, but it also had its drawbacks, a very distinct one of which was a distinct lack of income coming in, which is what had brought me to this boat and the water just off the cruise ship. There was money to be had, but I had to finish the job first, and that was going to be decidedly more difficult from an island in the middle of nowhere with a witness who now had the fairly intimate knowledge of me that came with staring a watery death in the face.
This left me in an uncomfortable position. I needed to finish what I came here to do in order to get paid and be able to keep on surviving for the next few months, which I had become rather fond of doing, but I had also just helped these two get through the storm and was now stuck on an island with them. They had both seen my face and I had been stupid enough in the moments of fearing for my life to actually tell them my real name. I was definitely a bit rusty, but that wasn’t going to excuse me. I didn’t know what I was supposed to do, but I was going to need to make a decision quickly, because this situation was only going to get more complicated the longer that we were here, and from the looks of the empty horizon, beached and completely destroyed boat, and untouched sand, that just might prove to be far longer than I would have liked to think about.
Chapter Seven
Hunter
I reached down toward Eleanor and helped her up the steep path. I looked down at her feet as she climbed up and took her place beside me on the more level ground. Dark, damp dirt was already streaked across her pale skin and stood in stark contrast to her pristine, bright red pedicure. Something about the color was both surprising and a bit exciting to me. Despite the way that she had acted toward me during and after the reception, I had expected something tamer. There was something about her that seemed delicate and feminine, like someone who would paint her toenails pink, not fire engine red. That was a main motivating factor in rejecting her at the wedding. It wasn’t that I wasn’t attracted to her. It was more that behind all of the forwardness and seduction, I could see that that wasn’t really her. She was looking for something that night, and I didn’t feel like I was the person who was going to be able to give it to her.
I had been taken completely by surprise when she had pursued me after the wedding. I wasn’t used to that type of attention. Women usually looked at me and didn’t seem to see beyond my glasses and a personal style that I would readily admit was about ten miles short of stylish but that worked for a daily life of working at Royal and Company and then moonlighting at my brother’s fledgling event rental company trying to help him get the business off the ground. It wasn’t that they treated me with disdain or ignored me, rather than they saw someone completely tame and unintimidating. I didn’t strike them as the type to try to hit on them, and they were absolutely right. Socializing had never been my strong point, even with friends such as Snow, and now that I was inching my way on toward thirty, I didn’t see many opportunities for me to get better at it.
Eleanor was different. There had been a spark in her that I hadn't anticipated. She looked at me as though she saw something more than what anyone else saw when they looked at me. But she was also an intriguing duality. There the soft tenderness and fear that I had seen in her when we were running through the hallway of the cruise ship and when she was curled on the deck of the boat after we escaped from the ship, but there was also strength and vibrancy that rose up out of her every now and then, glimmering through before disappearing again. It was as though something within her was beginning to come to the surface again, cracking through the muted, hardened shell that usually surrounded her. She was proving herself to be more surprising and intriguing than I had thought when walking away from her at the reception, and every moment I seemed to be finding out more about her. The thought of this woman teaching Noah when he was a child struck me as odd. I didn’t know if it was harder for me to imagine Noah when he was younger or this woman standing in front of a class of children trying to teach them to write in script and do long division.
"Do your feet hurt?" I asked.
Eleanor looked down at her feet for a moment as if she had forgotten that she was wandering through the jungle barefoot, and then shook her head. She looked back up with the first hint of a smile that I had seen on her soft-looking lips since I walked away from her after the wedding.
"No," she said. "They probably feel better than they would if I was trying to walk around in those heels out here." She gave a short laugh and shook her head again, looking back down at her feet. "I was barefoot all the time before I married Virgil. I used to love being outside."
The sudden openness threw me off, but I found myself wanting to know more about her and what had led her into this situation.
“I would think that a Cub Scout leader would have wanted to spend time outside,” I said, remembering what she had told me about her husband. “Didn’t he go on camping trips and stuff?”
Eleanor looked momentarily confused and then jumped slightly as if remembering the same thing I had.
“Yes,” she said, a bit too emphatically. “Yes, he did. He loved camping. Sometimes he camped in our yard just to be outside.”
I narrowed my eyes at her, starting to question what she was telling me.
“But you didn’t ever go with him?”
“Well,” she said, “you know. I wasn’t a Cub Scout. I didn’t have all the…. certifications and…badges.” She gestured up and down her body as if to indicate what she was wearing. “No uniform.”
I nodded.
"What exactly happened with your husband?" I asked.
Despite the fact that I was trying to keep the tone of my voice as casual as possible, the smile melted from Eleanor's face and the grey veil of lingering fear settled over her eyes again. She seemed to withdraw even though she didn't move and her eyes bounced between her feet and me and back again.
“Ex-husband,” she muttered.
“Ex-husband,” I said.
She looked up at me, meeting my eyes almost too intensely.
"It was a terrible marriage that took me way too long to get out of," she told me matter-of-factly.
"Why would you marry someone who hurt you?" I asked. “Why would you stay married to him?”
Eleanor sighed as if it was a question that she had asked herself many times. That was a sigh that I had heard come out of my mother throughout my childhood. My father had never been physically abusive toward her, but their marriage hadn’t been a terribly happy one, and there were plenty of times when I saw an expression on her face that said that she would rather he just hit her than to speak to her the way that he did, or to flaunt his countless affairs so blatantly. I knew that she didn’t want to be married to him and I often blamed myself and my brother for her continued misery, thinking that if it wasn’t for us, she wouldn’t have felt like she was obligated to stay with him. It wasn’t until I was nearly an adult that I learned that it had actually been financial pressures that had kept her tied to him. She had given up her education and the possibility of a career to be a wife and mother, and by the time that she decided she really was finished with the relationship, she was so completely dependent on him that she didn’t see any escape. It took years for her to finally find her way out. For the first time, I wondered if there could be similar pressures for Eleanor.
"When we first met, he treated me like a princess,” she told me. “He was so attentive all the time, like all he wanted was to spend time with me and make me happy. I guess that's what men like that do. They convince you that you are the center of their world so that they can get you under their control. It didn't take long after the wedding for me to find out who I had actually married, and within a year I was already in so deep
…"
Her voice trailed off and she looked away. I didn't push her any further. We spent the next few silent minutes gathering as much fruit as we could carry and started back down to the beach. As we stepped out onto the sand, I could see her eyes lock on something ahead of us. I turned and saw that she was staring at Gavin, who had removed his shirt and was standing in a shallow tide pool using a spear he had apparently taken out of his luggage to fish. I could see the fascination and even a flicker of attraction in Eleanor's eyes and felt defensiveness well inside me. I felt like the snap decision that I had made in the cruise ship to run from those men with her had put me in the position of being her protector, and I felt uncomfortable with not only Gavin’s unusual presence in the water, but with the way that Eleanor seemed almost fascinated by him. It wasn’t a reaction that I would have expected to have, and I did what I could to shake it away. It really wasn’t my place to judge Gavin or question anything about him. We were the ones who had flung ourselves off of a moving water vessel and pulled a Black Beard with his boat. They weren’t exactly ranking high on the “not suspicious” meter.
As we settled in around the fire to watch Gavin cook the fish he had caught, there was a sense of tension and unease that made the space around us feel heavy.
"What do you do, Gavin?" I finally asked.
I was just trying to break the silence even though I didn't actually care about the answer. He could have told me that he was trained in the ancient art of grilling pork chops while doing stunts on a tightrope and I likely would have had the same reaction as I would have had to any other answer.
The other man hesitated and I looked up at him.
"Um," Gavin said. "I captain private charters on my boat and I fish.”
"What type of charters?" Eleanor asked, her voice sounding soft and tired.
Gavin looked at her and I noticed that he seemed to be searching for the right answer.
"Anything that the client wants," he answered.
Before I could ask another question, Gavin pulled the fish from the fire and started dividing it up. We fell silent as we ate and I found my mind drifting to the meals served on the cruise ship. Elaborate, delectable, and never-ending, the meals were the thing that I was looking forward to most about the vacation, and what I had been enjoying the most when my trip was cut short by the need to rescue Eleanor. I knew that the food probably wasn’t what should be on my mind at that moment, but as a single man who had never mastered the culinary art of anything beyond a microwave or delivery menu, it was a major sticking point with me. Out of the corner of my eye I noticed that Eleanor was constantly shifting positions and trying to pull the scrap of her dress down to cover herself more as she sat there. It was a bit of a contrast from the way that she had behaved when we were alone together in that hotel room, but I suppose it was a lesson in context. Gavin seemed to notice the same thing and leaned slightly toward her.
"That trunk over there has some clothes in it," he told her. "They’re all mine, but you might be able to find something that would work for you if you wanted to change. There might even be a bar of soap in the kit that you can use. There's a little pool with a waterfall up near the ridge that would make a good bathtub."
Eleanor’s face lit up.
"Thank you," she said and she ran toward the trunk like it was Christmas morning.
She rummaged through and pulled out a light blue button-up shirt. Carrying that, a bar of soap, and what looked like a small hand towel, I watched her make her way up the ridge. Though we had already explored that area together some when we were gathering the fruit that was piled, untouched, in the sand beside the firepit, I still didn't feel comfortable with her being completely on her own. I waited for a few moments and then followed her. When I reached the top of the ridge I listened for the sound of water, following it toward an edge that looked down over a crystalline pool constantly refreshed by a picturesque waterfall. Eleanor had her back to me in the water and was rubbing the bar of soap between her hands. She reached to rest the soap to the rocks on the edge of the water, and the movement angled her body enough that I was able to see the swell of her breast. Her head tilted back as she began smoothing her hands along her skin with the soft while bubbles that had formed on her hands.
I could feel my body reacting to the sight. I knew that I should turn away, but Eleanor turned slightly and I watched her hands glaze over her breasts and then up her slender neck and into her hair. It was intoxicating and I couldn't take my eyes off of her. I stood in place until I saw her move toward the edge of the pool and climb out, reaching down for the towel to dry herself. I rushed back down to the beach, grabbed one of the blankets that we had found in the cabin and carried it off to a different section of the beach so that I could create my own camp. I needed to keep my mind clear if I was going to keep us alive and find a way off of this island.
Chapter Eight
Eleanor
The men were already awake when I woke the next morning. I felt like I had been sleeping for days. It was as if my body had fought to stay asleep so that I didn’t have to completely come to terms with what was going on. Though after the turmoil of my escape and the storm, I had craved the controlled protection of a manmade shelter, I hadn’t been able to bring myself to brave the water again to get to the crashed boat. I knew that I was going to have to get to that place at some point if we were going to spend more than a couple of days on this island, but right then I just couldn’t stand the thought of feeling the sand disappear beneath my feet again. Instead, I dug out a shallow trench in the sand, lined it with a blanket, and tucked myself in to sleep, my only reassurance the gorgeous weather and cool, salty breeze that helped to ease the fear of being so exposed.
Tilting my head back, I glanced up at the shimmering blue sky above me. Deep in the recesses of my mind I could remember the summer days that I had spent with my father and brothers in the woods. In those days, it had seemed like I was barely ever inside. Those were far simpler times. Though my family had never been lacking money, during my childhood, I hadn’t been really aware of our wealth. I knew that their main home was extremely large and had a staff to help us, and that we had several other homes in different spots that we liked to visit for vacation, but it had never really occurred to me that that was any different than other people. My parents weren’t like the stiff, stilted rich people we encountered in town or at the parties that my parents would throw. I couldn’t stand the guests at those parties. I never understood why my parents would invite people like them to our house. They were cold, pretentious, and boring, a total contrast to both my mother and my father. It wasn’t until I was older that I realized they had invited them because they were our social circle. In fact, we were the wealthiest of them, our fortune built on the backs of businesses that many of those guests ran, but didn’t own.
I figured out later that much of the unpleasantness of those people was likely inspired by envy that they were never able to achieve the level of success that my family had, and I was always grateful that my family hadn’t let our money change us. If it had, I wouldn’t have been able to find my refuge in the outdoor leisure and camping trips that we frequently took. I far preferred nature to buildings and animals to people, and though I had strayed far from those adventurous trips as I got older, what I had learned remained tightly held in my mind as a lingering reminder of who I had been.
Given the position of the sun in the sky, it was clear that I had slept through the morning. It seemed to be about noon and I could only assume that the men had been awake for several hours. They had managed to move around me asleep on the beach without waking me, which was somewhat disturbing. I would have liked to think that I had a more developed system of self-preservation than to be able to sink so deeply into sleep that I wouldn’t be woken even by men going through the motions of trying to create livable surroundings for us. Apparently, however, I needed the sleep so much that my mind and my body had completely shut down, unwilling to sacrifice even a mi
nute of rest to be aware of what was happening around me.
I stretched and turned to watch the men on the boat, occasionally exchanging a few words that were too low for me to hear over the breaking of the waves on the shore.
"Good morning," I finally called out.
Both men turned to look at me and Hunter waved.
"Come over here," he called to her. "We have some things we want to show you."
I walked across the sandbar and stared at the water. In the light of morning it didn’t seem as intimidating. I could see to the bottom. No sea monsters. But I still wasn’t willing to just wander into it. A thought popped into my mind and I went to work. A few moments later I knelt on a large trunk and used a long, thick branch from one of the trees to push myself toward the beach, feeling proud of myself for coming up with it. It was something that my father would have thought of immediately, and I hoped that somehow, he was able to see me and that he was proud. When I got to the side of the boat, Hunter climbed partway down the ladder to meet me. He secured the trunk and branch to the ladder with a rope so that we could use it to go the other direction and reached down a hand for me.
"Come with me," Hunter said.
I climbed up the ladder onto the boat and walked with Hunter over to where Gavin was standing. He pointed at the beach.
"We put that together this morning," he told me.
In the sand across the water in front of me was a large collection of seashells arranged to spell out "HELP" against the backdrop of the beach. The creation was fairly impressive, but I worried about it being seen by people who might be passing by the island in the air.