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Raine continued to stare right back at me before she broke out in a smile and nodded slightly. She pulled her hand out from under mine and reached up to run her fingers over my cheek and into my hair where she knew I liked it best.
“All right,” she finally agreed. “We’re even.”
As far as I was concerned, what she had done for me outweighed any of the shit I had done for her. When I thought about why I pulled her out of the water in the first place…well, I didn’t really know why. Maybe it was because she was there or because I didn’t have anything better to do at the time. It could have been because I was the captain and she was a passenger, and I felt some kind of fucking duty. Maybe I didn’t know what else to do. I certainly didn’t save her from dehydration – the fucking rain did that. Maybe this last time was different. I felt my muscles tighten for a moment, but her hand in my hair kept me from getting too worked up. It’s not like I thought about it – I just reacted. They had to die, plain and simple. What she had done for me…it meant more.
Actually, what she had done for me – that was completely different from any of the stupid or instinctual shit
I had done. She kept pushing even when I was being a royal asshole. She pulled things out of me I never wanted to talk about, and for the first time in four years, I was sleeping without alcohol, and the nightmares weren’t too bad as long as I was holding her tightly. She gave me her warmth and her touch, and she took care of me when I was hurt. I felt her lips touch mine as I let the ramifications of her final gift to me warm my soul.
She gave me her love. On top of that, she showed me how to love her, too. She wasn’t holding my past against me though I know it certainly wasn’t something she approved of or anything. She was accepting what I was and who I was even when I was being a moody little bastard, and she loved me anyway. Not only did she bring me back from almost certain death from infection, she was teaching me to care about life again when a month ago I had been pretty convinced my future consisted of nothing but drinking myself to death.
I guess I was going to live after all.
Chapter 15 – Grow
It took over a week to complete the shelter, but in the end it fucking rocked. It was about ten feet on each side and had a floor that was placed up on rocks to keep it off the ground a little to avoid any flooding if we had a good storm. So far, it had only rained on us a few times, and those had always been light showers. It rained enough to fill up our water containers and keep us from having to trek over to the water source for a couple of days. The three sides of the shelter made the whole thing nearly six and a half feet tall, so I could walk around inside without stooping over. The roof had a skeletal structure of woody branches topped with the sides of the raft, which I had completely ripped apart. Raine had nearly become hysterical when I started tearing it up. Apparently, she thought we might need to use the raft to get off the island someday. It took some convincing, but she finally realized if we ever left here, it wouldn’t be on that piece of shit. The parts of the raft were a lot more useful to us than the whole of it would ever be. I asked her if she ever wanted to be in the same position again – low on water, unable to find more food – and she agreed that she didn’t, but that didn’t stop her from crying over it for an hour.
Fuck, that woman could cry when she wanted to. I couldn’t say that I actually minded or anything, but sometimes it scared the shit out of me. I didn’t know what to do other than hold her and wait for her to be done. She said that’s all she wanted, but it still made me feel fucking useless.
On top of the roof there were palm fronds laced together above the raft parts, so there was no way any rain could get inside. The roof tilted slightly towards the back, and I had included using some of the gutter system from the raft to direct the water from the roof off to the side, where part of the raft’s former canopy would collect it for drinking and cooking.
Inside the shelter, Raine had lined our sleeping area with dry grasses covered by the floor of the dissected raft. It wasn’t a designer mattress by any stretch of the imagination, but it was reasonably comfortable, and it kept me from bruising her backside when I fucked her.
A couple of the mats she wove were kept by the fire so we didn’t have to sit in the sand, and the others were at the entrance to the shelter. There wasn’t a door or anything, but the palm frond roof reached out a little farther in the front so it stayed dry just outside, too. We found a bunch of larger clam shells to use as dishes and shit like that. I didn’t really care, but Raine seemed to like having her food on some sort of plate. She also taught me how to use chopsticks to eat, which I had never tried before. All right, so they were two little branches about the same size, but the idea was the same. They took a while to get used to, but I eventually figured out how to grasp things instead of stabbing them with the tip of the stick.
The baskets Raine figured out how to weave were pretty fucking clever. She gave up on the flat, square bottoms, which never worked out right, and now made them more like hanging baskets, with two sides woven together at the bottom and open on the top. She gave the baskets handles and we used them for collecting food and also to hang on the walls of the shelter. I carved wooden hooks out of coconut shells and put them all over the place so the food wasn’t on the ground, waiting for mice or something to tear into it. It gave us a place to hang clothing to dry, too.
It’s a good thing I didn’t listen to Raine very much when it came to building the place with my leg in its condition. Only three days after it was done, we had our first really big storm. I had been watching the dark clouds come in from the west and knew it wasn’t going to be a little rain shower long before it got to us. I only hoped the shelter would hold. I thought it would. I hoped it would.
“We’re going to want to bring the fish inside,” I told Raine as I pointed up at the sky. She looked over from the constructed drying rack near the fire to the sky and then back again. “We won’t be cooking anything for a while, either.”
“Is the storm going to be bad?”
“Do you see a weather radio stuck to my head?” I raised an eyebrow at her. “I have no fucking clue, but the wind is already picking up.”
We brought in everything that could get damaged if it got wet and hung the blanket-towels from the raft up over the open entryway to the shelter as the first of the rain started. It picked up pretty quickly, and before long the rain was coming down in sheets. We both moved towards the back, and I dropped down on the mattress while Raine sat a couple of feet away, staring at the rain coming down outside. The shelter entrance faced east, so rain wasn’t getting in very much – just a little bit of mist near the front – but I could tell after the first hour Raine was getting nervous.
“Why don’t you lie down?” I asked.
“I’m not tired.”
“What does that have to do with it?” I wiggled my eyebrows at her and opened up my arms. She sighed heavily but scooted over and let me pull her down next to me. “It’s all right, baby. The shelter can take this.”
As if to mock me, the wind gusted right then, shaking the long poles at the corners. It held through it, but it didn’t help with Raine’s stress.
“You got me?” she asked softly and granted me a twitch of a smile.
“Yeah, I got you.” I wrapped my arms around her a little more securely, crossing my arm over her chest and wrapping the other one behind her shoulders. She immediately started tracing the outline of my bicep.
“I love your arms,” she said, almost too quietly for me to hear. Her finger trailed all the way down to my wrist, then back up to my shoulder where she outlined the muscles there.
“I thought you loved my dick,” I teased.
Raine chuckled and sighed at me.
“I like that, too, but your arms are my favorite part of you. They make me feel safe.”
“I’ll always keep you safe,” I told her. I tilted my head to the side, looked into her eyes, and smiled down at her.
