Quest didn’t say much during these walks. He scanned the horizon with those dark eyes, one hand on my lower back, jaw tight. I knew he was doing the same thing I was. Looking. Hoping. And slowly, quietly, making peace with the possibility that today wasn’t the day either.
We’d been here for about a week. I was losing track of the exact days because time moved differently on this island. There was no schedule, no alarms, no meetings, no deadlines. Just sunrise and sunset and the hours between them filled with survival. Wake up, eat, walk the shore, check the fire, gather food, bathe, sleep, repeat. A loop that was simple and exhausting and starting to feel permanent in a way that scared me more than the crash did.
The crash was violent and sudden and my body responded to it with adrenaline. This was slow. This was the quiet terror of realizing that nobody might be coming and that this island, this tiny unnamed patch of land in the southern Caribbean, might be where I raised my baby. Where I gave birth in the sand with no doctor and no hospital and no epidural and nothing but Quest’s hands and his voice telling me to breathe.
I couldn’t think about that. Not yet. So I focused on the walk and the water and the man beside me whose hand hadn’t left my back since we started.
“Let’s go to the waterfall,” I said.
He nodded and we turned inland.
• • •
The waterfall had become our sanctuary. The one place on this island that felt like it belonged to us instead of the other way around. The pool was cool, clear, surrounded by thick green canopy that blocked the sun and muffled the sound of the ocean. When we were here, the world shrank to just water and rock and shade and I could almost forget that we were stranded.
I undressed and stepped into the pool and the cold water hit my skin and I shivered and sank down until it covered my shoulders. My belly floated slightly, round and buoyant, and I put my hands on it and let the water hold some of the weight I’dbeen carrying. The baby moved. A slow roll, not a kick, like she was stretching out and enjoying the coolness too.
Quest undressed and stepped in after me. I watched him because I always watched him and I wasn’t going to pretend otherwise. A week on this island had changed his body. He was leaner. The softness that came with rich meals and comfortable living had burned off and what was left was hard and defined and covered in scratches and bruises that told the story of what he’d been doing to keep us alive. His hands were the worst. The blisters had healed into rough calluses and there were cuts across his knuckles from carving spears and splitting coconuts. These were not the hands of a CEO anymore. These were the hands of a man who worked with them every day and I found that shift attractive in a way that surprised me.
He waded toward me and I reached for his hands and held them under the water and ran my thumbs over the calluses and the cuts. He let me. Quest didn’t usually let people tend to him. He was the one who tended. The provider, the protector, the man who handled everything for everyone and then handled himself alone in private. But out here there was nobody else and the walls he kept between himself and vulnerability had gotten thinner with every day we spent depending on each other for everything.
“Your hands look terrible,” I said holding them up and kissing them.
“Cost of keeping us alive. You shouldn’t trust a nigga with soft hands anyway,” he chuckled.
“You’re done amazing with keeping us alive and fed every day,” I thanked him.
“I’d do anything for y’all,” he said as he caressed my swollen belly.
I reached for his hands, cupping them. “These are gonna scar badly.”
“Good. I’ll have something to show for this trip besides a tan and a story nobody’s gonna believe.”
I smiled. He smiled back. And for a second, just a second, we were just two people in a pool underneath a waterfall and the circumstances that put us there didn’t exist. No crashed plane, no sabotage, no island, no survival. Just Quest and Mehar. The way we used to be in the penthouse when the world was asleep and it was just us tangled up in sheets with Banks Reserve on the nightstand and his playlist on low.
He pulled me toward him and I floated into his chest and his arms wrapped around me from behind, his hands resting on my belly under the water. I leaned my head back against his shoulder and closed my eyes and felt his heartbeat against my back and his breath in my hair and the baby moving between his palms.
He pulled me toward him and I floated into his chest and his arms wrapped around me from behind, his hands resting on my belly under the water. I leaned my head back against his shoulder and closed my eyes and felt his heartbeat against my back and his breath in my hair and the baby moving between his palms.
Neither of us spoke. We didn’t need to. Out here, with no phones, no meetings, no casino, no drama, the silence between us had become its own conversation. I knew what he was thinking by the way his hands moved on my belly. Slow circles meant he was calm. Still palms meant he was somewhere in his head he wasn’t ready to talk about. Right now his thumbs were tracing along the underside of my belly, soft and deliberate, and that meant he was present. Right here. With me.
“When we get home,” he said against my ear, “I’m never letting you out of my sight again.”
“That sounds controlling.”
“It’s romantic.”
“It’s the same thing with you.”
He laughed. A real one. Low and warm against the back of my neck and I felt it vibrate through my body and something inside me shifted.
I turned in his arms and faced him and put my hands on his face and looked at him. Water running down both of us, the waterfall loud enough to cover anything we said from everything except each other. His eyes were dark and steady and stripped of everything except fiery desire.
I kissed him. Soft at first. My lips against his, tasting the fresh water on his mouth, feeling his hands tighten on my waist. Then deeper. His tongue finding mine and his body pressing against me and my back touching the smooth rock at the edge of the pool. The water moved around us and the mist from the waterfall settled on our skin and I felt something shift between us. From comfort to hunger. From holding each other to needing each other.
“I need you,” I whispered against his mouth. Not because I was turned on, although I was. Because I needed to feel alive. I needed to feel something other than fear and monotony and the slow erosion of hope that was grinding me down day by day. I needed his body against mine and inside mine because that was the one language we spoke that the island couldn’t translate into survival. That one was just ours.
He kissed my neck. Then my collarbone. Then the space between my breasts that were fuller now than they had ever been. His hands held my hips under the water as his mouth moved down my body. I arched into him, felt the waterfall mist on my face and the sun through the trees on my closed eyelids. His fingers found me under the water first, sliding between my legs, and I was already soaking before he even touched me. He groaned against my neck when he felt how wet I was and pressedtwo fingers inside me slowly, stretching me open while his thumb circled my clit and my knees almost gave out in the water.
