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I looked over to her, my eyes dropped down her body and back up again, but for once I wasn’t actually thinking about getting her naked. I was actually wondering if she’d be adverse to me using her in a totally different way.
“How much do you weigh?”
“Excuse me?”
“You heard me.”
“That’s kind of a personal question,” Raine said, her face turning red.
“Maybe a hundred pounds?” I pressed.
“One-fifteen, if you really have to know.”
“Maybe when you first got here,” I said. “I bet you aren’t more than a hundred now. Good enough, though. You can be my weight room.”
“What in the world are you talking about now?”
“I want to start with bench pressing you, and then see what else might work. I have to get rid of some of this energy, or I’m going to go ballistic.”
“There is no way I am going to let you bench press me,” Raine said, her voice firm.
All right, she had a point. Though I was pretty sure I could do it, the logistics of the act inside an inflated raft floating around on the sea would be a little difficult. Fucking her would be really interesting, though. For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. That could be extremely interesting…
I had to stop thinking like that.
“Maybe next time,” I shrugged, turned, and dived in the water, almost wishing I had forgotten the tether. I sank into the waves, toying with the idea of just untying the damn thing, though I would never actually do it. Aside from the fact that my death would pretty much seal Raine’s fate, giving up just wasn’t something I did. No matter what, if you just kept fighting you could persevere in some form or another. Shit, with what I had been through, if I was going to off myself, I would have done so already.
I swam against the waves, mostly doing a basic crawl stroke and kicking furiously behind me. I wasn’t into form or anything that might be considered value-added strokes – I just wanted to get as much energy as possible out of my body before it exploded either in anger or something much worse.
Stroke, stroke, kick, kick, breathe…
I focused on telling my body what to do, breathing, and not thinking until the buildup of lactic acid in my muscles told me I had probably had enough. I lifted my head and treaded water as the waves lifted me into the air and lowered me again. I looked back over my shoulder and saw the raft bobbing up and down on the swells – a bright orange blob in the middle of the Caribbean Sea. I thought about the woman inside of it, and my mind wandered to the sensation of her hand against my face.
Stop thinking.
I tried floating on my back and staring up at the clouds for a few minutes, but the waves were a little choppy and kept trying to dunk me under. I also couldn’t stop my mind from thinking back to Raine – how smart she was, how brave she was, and how she refused to put up with my shit. It made me smile and cringe at the same time. I reached down to my waist to grab the tether and hauled myself back to the raft, ignoring the burn in my biceps.
I pulled myself onto the edge of the raft and shook water from my hair. I sat there for a moment and watched the waves crawl up my dangling legs and then recede back down again. My head hurt, and the light from the setting sun was amplifying the pain. The swim might have been good for relieving some stress, but the saltwater soaking into my skin wasn’t going to help with my headache too much.
After I had officially wasted enough time staring at the sea, I shook my hair out again, twisted around, and slipped through the opening of the raft. Raine was on the other side, turned sideways and graciously looking down at her hands in her lap. I toweled off and pulled my shorts back on because keeping them off would annoy her, and I really didn’t want to do that anymore. I should have done it anyway because pissing Raine off was in her best interest. Despite the swim, I realized at once that I was still fidgety and, quite frankly, still conflicted and bitchy.
After a quick drink of water, I lay down on my back right where I was without looking at or speaking to Raine. I tapped my fingers against the floor of the raft and stared at the ceiling. I wasn’t sure how long I lay there without speaking, but I had counted well over two hundred taps on the floor, and I hadn’t started counting right away.
“Are you ignoring me now?” Raine asked, her voice quiet and full of trepidation, like she thought I might bite her or something. It probably wasn’t a completely unreasonable assumption.
“Possibly,” I answered. I decided not to elaborate, so for a while there was more silence.
“Mister Fluffy used to chew through his lead when he was left outside too long,” Raine said, totally out of the blue. I felt the muscle tension return instantly. “He would go and hide in the crawlspace underneath the house, and I’d have to crawl under there and get him out. Dad thought when he was alone too long he forgot he had a family and got scared again, like he was when he was first brought to the shelter. I always wondered if it wasn’t because he thought too much. He really was pretty smart.”
“Are you comparing me to your fucking dog again?” I snapped.
“Not necessarily,” Raine said. “Why? Is that what you are doing now, hiding in the crawlspace?”
“Fuck off,” I growled. There was something inside of me that wanted to apologize to her, but I shoved it down. Apologies were pointless, and I wasn’t sorry. Shields at full strength. Engage! “Your analogy is not only insulting but fucking stupid, and I’m pretty fucking tired of hearing it.”
I could feel the tremors in my hands again, signifying either the ineffectiveness of the swim or a reaction to the knot forming just below my sternum. I tried to swallow and couldn’t. I was going to hurt her but only because it was for her own good. If I didn’t do it now, I would certainly do it later. It was better to do it quick – rip that Band-Aid off.
“I wasn’t trying to insult you,” she whispered. “Please stop shutting me out.”
