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Jax smiles shyly. She’s not shy as a rule, but I’m sure my awkwardness makes her uncomfortable. My pulse races. My throat feels dry. This whole conversation was meant to be lighthearted, but now there seems to be a lot more going on under the surface.
“Right. We’re together,” she rasps.
“So I’ve got you, my favorite movie. And after that, I suppose I’d have my copy of Origin of Species.”
Jax pretends to snore. “I’m sorry, what book?”
“It’s got all my notes in the margins. I’ve had it since I was 11 years old,” I say, chuckling. I know; I’ve gotten shit over my preferred reading material my entire life.
“All right, I guess I’ll have to write my own erotica. What else?”
I’m quiet for another moment, then I say, “A machete for clearing brush and cutting bamboo to make a shelter. And my Bowie knife for hunting and making spears for fishing. And that’s it.”
“You’ve got two more items, plus a person, Doctor.”
“That’s all I need as long as I have you.”
I enjoy watching her face react in surprise. Her eyebrows go up, and she’s speechless. For a few seconds, anyway. And then, she licks her lips; my cock twitches.
“Because I’m the one with the charger and the phone,” Jax says. “I feel overpacked in comparison.”
Finally, our protein arrives in the form of an unsuspecting grouper. Minutes later, the two of us are stuffing our faces with a feast of fruit, fish, and crab over a campfire.
“As restaurants go, this one gets a five-star review from me on Yelp,” she comments.
I’m glad she’s happy, but my lizard brain is still thinking about that vibrator.
Her phone rings again, disquieting our little zen moment.
Again, she’s not answering it.
My mood is starting to shift into overprotective. I’m curious about who’s bothering her and how I can make them go away. “Are you going to tell me who that is so I can put a stop to it?”
She looks at me, a bit surprised at my tone.
“It’s my father. Well, no. Damian is my father’s personal hired gun who likes to think he’s my bodyguard. I’m…well…I suppose now is a good time to tell you. This vacation was supposed to be my honeymoon.”
My stomach falls into my feet. “You’re married?”
Jax shakes her head. “No! God, no. I ran away.”
Relieved but still on a roller coaster, I can’t help but find this a bit amusing. “You left some poor sap at the altar?”
Jax squares her lovely shoulders and fixes me with a determined stare. “Listen. He’s no poor sap. Louie will be fine; he doesn’t love me. And I can’t stand him.”
Geez. I thought I knew everything about this girl from obsessively, secretly following every move she makes online. But it turns out I know nothing. “Then why would you get engaged?”
Jax scoffs haughtily. “I didn’t get engaged. Not voluntarily. It was all arranged by my father.”
I look around the island. “Excuse me, but it’s the 2020s, and you are an adult American. That’s not a thing.”
Once again, her look bores through me. “It’s a thing if your father fancies himself a successful music producer and borrows money from bad people to finance his lavish lifestyle.”
I don’t follow, and I tell her as much.
“Be right back,” she says, getting up to wash her hands and face in the water after finishing our meal. When she returns to sit next to me on our driftwood seat, I’m thankful for the little fire that I’ve built. I find that a campfire makes it easier for people to talk about uncomfortable stuff, giving two people something to look at instead of right in the eyes, which can be disconcerting. That’s especially true for me.
“So. My father owes money to loan sharks. Loan sharks who work for some nasty guys, who in turn answer to one of the bigger drug kingpins in the state of California. I figured it out pretty quickly one night at my thirteenth birthday party. My father was never that attentive to my day-to-day needs; I was mostly raised by nannies. But whenever my birthday rolled around, he made a huge show of it. Professional entertainment, party planners, A-list guest list. The works. I didn’t care; I just wanted to hang out with my friends. When I turned thirteen, some strange men showed up to the house and, right in front of everyone, took all the pretty boxes from the gift table and casually loaded them in their car. When I asked my dad what was going on, he pretended it was a joke. He was terrible at covering his ass. So I walked right up to one of the big, burly men and asked them. They all ignored me except one. He just turned to me, kneeled, and gently said, ‘You tell your daddy, this is what happens the first time he doesn’t pay his bills.’
