“I thought we were going to an island paradise?”
“We are… Maggie Island.” I’d already figured out that “Maggie” was the islanders’ nickname for Magnetic Island. “It’s bloody gorgeous. Unfortunately it’s also home to stingers, sharks, crocs, and the biggest population of death adders in all of Australia.”
“Death adders? Is that some sort of snake?”
“Yeah. Kinda fat and stripy, not that you need to know what they look like. They tend to hide under the sand, completely out of sight. You won’t know you’ve stepped on one till it bites you on the ankle. Then it’s quick sticks to the hospital before paralysis and respiratory failure sets in. But no need to get all panicky, you’ve got at least six hours before all your organs shut down completely.”
Abruptly I stood from the bed. “Forget it. I’ve changed my mind. You can go visit Skull Island all by yourself, thanks very much. Clearly you know how to handle yourself. You’ve avoided shuffling off your mortal coil for this long, so clearly you’re doing something right. As for this lily-livered little bookstore owner, I think I’m quite happy staying right here in Mulligan’s Mill. We all know I prefer to keep my death-defying adventures at arm’s length… in the pages of a novel.”
Cody responded with a playful pout. “Aw, come on, babe. You’re gonna be just fine. I’ll keep you safe, don’t you worry about a thing. I’ll fight off all the killer creatures, no matter how big or small.” He hooked my hand and pulled me close, and I let him.
“Including the death adders hiding in the sand?” I asked, pouting playfully myself now.
Cody grinned. “If you get bitten by a snake, I’ll suck every last drop of poison out of you.” He gave my hand a good yank, pulled me onto my back on the bed, then straddled me with a mischievous glint in his eye. “Although if I’m gonna have to suck that hard, I should probably get some practice in.”
He unbuckled my belt.
“Cody, what are you doing?”
“What does it look like I’m doing?” He unzipped my pants and my cock twitched to attention inside the cotton of my boxer shorts.
“Cody, we don’t have time for this. Our flight’s this afternoon and I have to repack my bag.”
He yanked my trousers down. “Relax, babe. Rule number two of long-haul travel:neverget on a plane horny. The mile-high club isnotwhat it’s cracked up to be. Have you seen how small the toilets on a plane are?”
“Well…” I caved way too easily, “I wouldn’t want to ignore all your good travel advice.”
He grinned. “Wise decision.”
With that he jerked my underwear down the length of my thighs…
He took my suddenly aching cock in his firm grip…
And slowly he lowered his handsome, smiling face.
The reason for our trip to Australia was simple—Cody wanted to introduce me to his island home. Or at least the home he lived in some of the time. Ever since we fell head over heels in love, we had decided to call Mulligan’s Mill home for most of the year, with Cody packing his bags every now and then to cover a story on the Northern Lights in Lapland or a tango bar in Buenos Aires or an overnight train ride on the Orient Express. But it only seemed fair that between Mulligan’s Mill and his travels around the globe that we also make time for what he called “a little island time” at his beach shack on Magnetic Island.
Of course, I had happily agreed to all that before making the sleepless, soul-sapping, delirium-inducing trek halfway across the planet, something I wasn’t quite prepared for. Maggie—the person, not the island—had offered to drive us to the airport in Eau Claire, a journey one might describe as do-or-die in and of itself. But that was simply the beginning of our odyssey. From Eau Claire we caught a flight to Chicago, from Chicago we flew to LA, from LA we crossed the Pacific to Brisbane, from Brisbane we caught another flight to Townsville, and from there we caught a ferry to Magnetic Island. The entire journey, door to door, took more than forty-two hours, although time and reality often seemed to lose all meaning throughout the trip… like during the eternal wait at the gate at O’Hare… and again atthe awful Mexican bar and grill at LAX… and sometime after the fourth gin and tonic when our flight to Brisbane seemed to cross over into the Twilight Zone.
“How do you do that as often as you do?” I mumbled in a half-conscious state, fanning myself to battle the North Queensland heat, as the cab from the ferry drove us over the mountain in the middle of the island to the relaxing sandy shores on the other side, or so I was promised.
“Do what?” Cody asked, gently squeezing my hand to keep me conscious, like a doctor squeezing the hand of a patient about to slip into a coma.
“How do you fly from one country to another all the time? All that waiting and queuing and endless hours in the air with the mind-numbing drone of the plane’s engines in your ears, hour after hour.”
He hitched one shoulder casually. “I try to switch off. Relax. I do a little reading. Sometimes I’ll write. Sometimes I just sit back and enjoy the flight, just like the captain suggests. It’s about making the most of the journey, not just the destination.”
I squinted at him, partly because of the blinding daylight outside the cab and partly from sheer exhaustion. “How is it nothing ever seems to faze you?”
“What do you mean?”
“Oh, don’t give me that innocent, happy-go-lucky smile of yours. You know what I mean. There you are, all sunshine and sparkles like a unicorn who just arrived from over the rainbow, and here I am trying to figure out whether I caught the zombie virus from one of the other passengers or if I got it from that day-old chicken burrito I ate at LAX.”
Cody wrapped an arm around me. “Brooks, you don’t have the zombie virus.”
“How do you know?”
“Would I do this if I thought you did?”
