AllFreeNovel
Share Us
‘Oh, I think you will. He had no food, so he starved for a long time until it occurred to him he did—have food. He cut off a toe, just to see. Because he had the scalpel and, more to the point, he had his drugs so it didn’t hurt. How fortunate for him. Anyway, of course, once he started he couldn’t stop. He had a lot of drugs and more sharp blades. He didn’t go hungry, is my point.’
Ben turned his head to look at him, his eyes shaded by his forearm. ‘And? What happened to him? How far could he go?’
‘Ah, grasshopper, you will have to read it for yourself and find out.’
‘I might skip that one with Molly then.’
That silenced them both for a while, Aleksey’s thoughts dwelling on things he had just claimed not to understand, and Ben’s, he suspected, on his daughter.
‘I could eat you. That wouldn’t hurtme.’
Aleksey snorted. ‘You used to say there was nothing to get your teeth into.’
‘Yeah, well, two pounds—keep me going for a while.’
‘You could rub it into your skin; do something about all that weak-English-skin burn.’
Ben suddenly sat up. ‘If you chewed off a toe, I could use it as bait maybe.’
Aleksey copied him, regarding the shallow water around them thoughtfully. ‘Okay.’
Ben glanced over. ‘Fucking hell! I was joking!’
Aleksey continued to stare into the water. ‘So was I.’
After a while, Ben commented, ‘Sun’s going down.’
‘We stay here until it rises again?’
Ben nodded.
They both knew what was in store for them this night.
* * *
They’d both spent worse nights, but not many. Once the sun went fully down behind the expanded horizon, it got cold. Then bitterly cold and then the tide rose. They were forced to retreat further up the rock, anxiously watching their life-saving pool of water. They needed it. They forced themselves to drink almost continually, filling up, saturating their bodies, flushing through the salt they’d swallowed.
They huddled close, naked, sharing what little body heat they had.
They talked a little to pass the time, favourite movies, favourite positions, the usual stuff any two men might wile away a cold night with, they assumed.
At one point, after a few hours, when he assumed Ben had dozed off, Aleksey heard a quiet, ‘Do you think Phillipa knew? Do you think she’s the one who set him on us?’
Aleksey roused and tightened his hold on the cold, hard, muscled body. ‘No. I have been thinking about that as well. About all that he said. He appeared to know me, butnotme.’
‘Nikolas. He kept calling you that.’
‘Phillipa does as well, so that does not prove my point. If I had not seen her recently, then, yes, I would think she had told him. But she was surprised when she saw me—that I was not as I had led her to expect.’
‘Immensely fat and hobbling on a walking frame, grey-haired and dribbling?’
‘Well, yes, I may have given that impression.’
‘And that’s what he thought he’d find. Hah. Bit of a shock for him then.’
‘I’m sure it was his last thought. Other thanI didn’t mean this kind of elevated…’
‘The crew were speaking Russian, yes?’
