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“Raine,” I whispered as I slid my arm up around her head and held her closer. I buried my face in her hair and inhaled, wishing I could offer her some sort of comfort but resigned to the fact that I could not. She continued to cry, and I continued to have nothing to say of any value for quite some time. Eventually, her crying subsided and she sniffed loudly.
“I want a fucking shower,” she growled.
I let out a short bark of a laugh. I didn’t really mean to, but as infrequently as Raine uttered a curse word, her timing choice was usually pretty fucking funny.
“I know, baby,” I said.
“Why am I so upset now?” she wailed. “It’s better here than on the raft, and I didn’t do this then.”
“Because you didn’t have the energy then,” I told her. “I think you usually let it build up in you until you fall apart, which drives me nuts, by the way. I wish I could do something to make it better.”
“You do.”
“Heh – right. I’m probably the cause of half your stress.”
“When you get upset, you just explode over and over again,” Raine said with a nod and a somewhat tearful giggle. “It makes you feel better, and you make me feel better.”
“I never feel like I can do anything to make you feel better,” I admitted.
“You hold me,” she said softly, her fingers tightening into my skin. “You keep me safe.”
“Anytime you want,” I said. I had to swallow hard to get past the lump in my throat. I didn’t know where it came from – probably just from watching her cry.
I kept my arms wrapped around her until she slowly drifted back into sleep. It was just a little bit brighter at that point, but I didn’t move to get up. If all I could do was hold her, I was going to fucking hold her until she told me to let go.
She couldn’t tell me to let go as long as she slept, and she slept well into the morning, so I kept holding her well into the morning. When she finally did wake up, she still looked tired, her eyes all red-rimmed from crying, and she complained of a headache. I tried to make her tea out of some flowers that kind of resembled chamomile, but apparently it was pretty fucking awful, so I dumped it out and tried warming coconut milk instead. That also failed, but at least she was smiling a bit. I managed to grill a couple of crabs, which she seemed to like more than the other seafood, which got me a more genuine smile and a kiss.
We didn’t really do much else during the day, and the early evening brought rain, so we were stuck inside. It wasn’t a big-ass storm or anything, just enough to soak me through to the skin when I had to leave the shelter to piss. We finally gave up on the day, lay down on the mattress, and I fucked her slowly, holding out as long as I could and feeling her come all around me three times before I gave in. Afterwards, I held her and listened to her breathing as she came down from the last orgasm and slowly drifted off into sleep. I held her a while longer, listened to the rain ebb and finally stop, then rolled into position with my leg draped over hers and my arms wrapped securely around her body. I lay my head on top of hers, inhaling the scent of her and letting it take me into sleep.
* * * * *
Her hand traces down the edge of my jaw, and I lean into the sensation. When I open my eyes, she is smiling up at me, but it’s not from happiness. Her smile is…sad? She shakes her head slowly.
“It’s all right” she tells me. “I know you would rather stay here.”
She is walking away from me, down the beach to a small motorboat anchored in the water. John Paul and Landon are there, waiting for her. They help her on board, telling her she has to be careful in her condition…
I take a few steps down the beach, intending to go after her, but the engine has started and they’re leaving me behind…
I woke in a cold sweat. Though I wasn’t nauseated by this dream, it left me with a feeling of dread unlike any other I had experienced. My chest was so tight, I wasn’t sure if there was enough room for my heart to keep beating or my lungs to keep sucking in air. I had to get out in the open before I completely freaked out.
I extracted my arms and legs from Raine and pushed myself onto my feet. Fishing my lighter and a fist full of the homemade cigarettes out of my belt, I took off down to the beach.
“It couldn’t fucking happen,” I told myself under my breath as if hearing the words out loud was enough. “I had the operation verified. Twice. There is no way for me to get her pregnant.”
It wasn’t the idea of getting Raine pregnant that had scared the shit out of me, though. I’d be concerned because there were things that could go wrong in pregnancy and delivery, but it didn’t actually scare me. It was that look on her face – the one she had in the dream when she got on the boat without me. The one that said she was leaving me behind. The look that said goodbye. I wouldn’t be seeing her again. I’d never see the baby. Never.
“Raine wouldn’t do that to me,” I heard myself choke the words out, and I felt hot tears stinging the back of my eyes. “She’s not like that…she wouldn’t…she wouldn’t…”
But I didn’t think Jillian was like that either. I loved her. I was going to fucking propose to her. I thought she loved me. She told me she did so many times. Sometimes, if I allowed myself to think about her or about the…the baby…I could still feel the ache in my chest. As much as I could feel the remnants of Jillian’s betrayal, the idea of Raine ever walking away from me like that – knowing I wouldn’t see her again – made my entire body constrict, and it felt like all my organs would burst with the pressure. I couldn’t breathe. I was pretty sure my heart slowed down under the pressure. If she ever did that – if Raine left me – it would kill me. I didn’t doubt it at all. The pain of her being gone would definitely kill me.
I shoved one end the smoke into my mouth and lit the other end. I took several slow, deep drags, smoking half of the thing in under a minute. It burned in my lungs, but that was better than the feeling of compression throughout my body. As soon as I was done with the first one, I lit up a second, then a third. The sun was starting to come up, and I needed to get my shit together or be forced to deal with all of her questioning. I wasn’t up for that. Not now. Not yet.
My feet carried me down to the edge of the water where I stripped off my shorts and went for an early morning swim. The water was pretty cold on my skin, so I didn’t stay long. I pulled my shorts up over my wet body, not giving a fuck about how uncomfortable it was, and sat next to the cooking fire. I picked up a coconut shell I was trying to carve into something useful, but I wasn’t sure what the fuck I was going to make. I took out my jackknife and started whittling away at it, just to give me something to do.
“You’re up early,” Raine noted as she came out of the shelter.
“Had enough sleep, I guess,” I said with a shrug.
