30. Adrian
THIRTY
ADRIAN
When I wake up in the morning, Dylan’s already up. He’s sitting in front of the life raft, and he’s left the canopy open, so the moment I open my eyes, I can see him.
My eyes are gritty, and I don’t feel like I’ve gotten that much sleep still, but I feel strangely calm, maybe even a bit apathetic, which, I’m not gonna lie, is not great, but for right now I prefer it to the debilitating anxiety of the last few weeks.
I roll myself into a sitting position and rub my face to wake up a bit before I crawl out of the life raft. Dylan doesn’t react at all when I sit down next to him.
He’s too thin already. So am I. Weeks of scraping by on only coconuts, and the occasional egg we manage to find have left their mark.
Dylan was lean before. Now he’s thin, bordering on gaunt.
The sharp lines of his ribs and collarbones are worryingly visible beneath his sun-bronzed skin.
His face has gotten narrower, cheekbones more prominent, and eyes with dark shadows underneath them. His lips are cracked from salt and sun.
What little we eat keeps us alive, but that’s it. It’s just enough fuel to be able to stumble through the day, but none of it is lasting, and we use up way more calories than we take in.
Hunger is a constant, dull ache that’s always there, even after a meal. We’re both slower, mentally and physically. Whenever I stand up too quickly I get dizzy, and all I can think about is food. It’s the one thing that’s always in my mind.
For a while we sit in silence. I’m in no hurry to speak. I don’t feel the need. Instead, I look at the ocean glinting in the sunlight in front of us. The anger from last night is gone, along with the rest of the over-the-top emotions.
Now I’m just exhausted.
Calm, but exhausted.
Eventually, Dylan turns his head to look at me. He raises his brows in question, and I shrug in reply.
He gives me minuscule smile.
I rake my fingers through my hair.
“I think I’m fine,” I say. My voice is hoarse. “Sort of. I’m not losing my fucking shit right now.”
He considers that for a moment. That’s my Dylan. Always analyzing stuff.
“Did you sleep?” he asks.
I shrug again. “Sort of?”
“Sort of?” he echoes, still with that minuscule smile.
“You know that kind of half sleep early in the morning, where you’re not quite up but not quite asleep either? It was that.”
He mulls that over too, then nods. “Better than nothing, right?”
“Yeah, better than nothing. How long have you been up?”
“Just for a little while.” He picks up some sand and pours it from one palm to the other. He nods toward the fire he’s rebuilt while I was sleeping. “There’s coconut for breakfast.”
“I’d rather starve,” I say emphatically, even though I don’t mean it, and we both know it.
“So picky.” The words are teasing, but he sounds distant, like his mind is miles away.
What a surprise after last night.
He wipes the sand off his hands. “What’s the plan for today?”
I shrug. “Do our best not to die?”
He nods. “Not the worst idea I’ve ever heard.” He picks up something from the sand by his side and holds it out to me. It’s the signal mirror.
I take it and turn it over between my fingers. “I thought I wasn’t allowed to have this for a while?”
“I trust you. Just don’t go overboard with it.” He weighs his words for a little while. “Hope is a good thing. We won’t be here forever.”
It’s a more cautious approach than our previous one. The a-plane-will-be-here-tomorrow approach.
It’s probably a more realistic one, and it makes me reevaluate some things.
Instead of concentrating everything I have on a probable rescue mission, I have to adjust and reassess.
Our end goal is still the same—survival.
But it’s also clear that at least for right now, it’s on Dylan and me to figure out how to do that.
“This looks… kind of bad.” I hold up the fishing line we’ve been working on for the last two days.
“Hey!” Dylan protests.
“I still think it’s too thick.”
“Yeah, well, the thinner one kept breaking and could only hold the tiniest fish imaginable.”
“The fish will see the line.”
He rolls his eyes. We’ve been bickering about the thickness of the line for a day and a half, and he’s been getting more and more sarcastic.
“That’s the intention,” he says.
I stare at him. “Is it?”
“Yeah. We’ll eat the dumb ones. This line is an elimination device, basically.”
“I’m sure the fish appreciate you calling them dumb before we cook them.”
He looks up from tying the line to the fishing pole. He’s shirtless and his teeth look gleaming white in his tanned face.
“At least they won’t have to live long with that knowledge,” he says.
“What a relief.” I finish carving a line into the makeshift fishhook, which is more like a really short toothpick than a hook, but I figure it’ll do the job.
“Did you find any worms?” Dylan asks.
I hold up the coconut half with the few earthworms I dug up earlier. “I found some centipedes too. We’ll see which the dumb fish prefer as their last meal.”
We wade into the water, me with the fishing pole and Dylan with the coconut half of bait. There are small fish swimming all around us, but we’re after bigger and better things this time around.
“Want to do the honors?” I ask Dylan.
He takes the fishing pole from me and plonks the line into the water with no finesse.
“Efficient,” I say. “No skill whatsoever was used to cast that line.”
“The worm’s in the water. It’s always style over substance with you, isn’t it?”
I grin at him, and then we both shut up, stay very still, and wait.
Because everything else on this island so far has been a life-and-death situation at worst and a terrible struggle at best I don’t have high hopes, but Dylan catches a fish in less than ten minutes. He lifts the thing out of the water, and it flops around on the line.
“Holy shit.” He turns to me, his mouth hanging open. “I caught a fish!”
I laugh out loud from sheer relief. “You did catch a fish.”
He looks so surprised that I almost expect him to drop it back into the ocean. He doesn’t, though. Instead, we take the fish back to the beach, kill it with a rock, and put it down next to the fire.
We eye it for a bit.
Dylan glances toward me.
“What do we figure? Poisonous or not?”
I’m getting really tired of this shit.
“I don’t know.” I drop my head back and rub the back of my neck while I try and care if this fish will kill us or not.
“We either take the risk and eat it or die of hunger. One is quick, the other is slow.”
“Oh, well. You’ve convinced me,” I say drily.
I clean the fish anyway. We spear it on a stick and cook it over the fire.
“I’ll be the guinea pig,” I say. Not that I especially relish the thought of dying from poison, but there’s no way I’m risking it with Dylan either.
“Together,” Dylan says. “I wouldn’t stay here without you anyway, so let’s just do it together.”
I give a resigned nod.
The smell is so good that we burn our fingers and tongues because neither of us can wait for the fish to cool down.
We eat all of it. There’s not a scrap left once we’re done, and then we catch a few more and eat them, too, because at this point, who gives a fuck anymore, might as well go all in.
“I think I’m full,” Dylan finally says, his voice full of amazement. I get where he’s coming from, because for the first time in weeks the gnawing hunger in my stomach has eased up.
“Those fish might’ve been the dumb ones, but they tasted good,” I say.
“So good.” Dylan’s voice has a sleepy, lazy edge to it as he leans back on the sand and lets his head drop back. “This might be a scientific discovery. The dumber you are, the better you taste.”
“You think it applies to people, too?” I ask with a laugh.
He opens one eye and peers at me. “Should I be worried? Is this turning into a kind of Lord of the Flies type of situation? Just how far are we from you stalking me through the jungle with a spear?”
“For food? Or for light entertainment? Do they eat people in that book?” I never read it, so whatever that reference was, it went right over my head.
“No, they just drop rocks on them or beat them to death. So, light entertainment, I guess.” He lies on his back on the sand and closes his eyes again. “If you’re going to hunt me with a spear, it better be to kill me and eat me, because the other option is definitely not what turns me on.”
I lean back on my elbows and glance at him. “Oh yeah? Well, lay it on me, then. What turns you on?”
He goes very still. It’s almost like he’s not even breathing.
He doesn’t answer either.
I poke him in the cheek.
He bats my hand away.
I poke him again.
He raises his middle finger up and opens his eyes to frown at me. “Why are you annoying me?”
“I’m trying to have a conversation.”
“In sign language?”
“You didn’t answer me.”
“Answer you about what?” He closes his eyes again.
I tilt my head and study him. I guess that’s one of those questions you could classify as personal, but we’ve never exactly set those kinds of limits.
We talk about everything. He knows about the first girl I kissed.
He’s met every single one of my girlfriends.
He knows when I lost my virginity. He knows?—
I don’t know those things about him.
It’s the first time I’m truly realizing that.
He’s never told me.
There’s a chunk of his life I know nothing about.
I turn on my side, still leaning on my elbow.
“Tell me,” I say.
He ignores me.
I know how to play that game, though. I knew how to play that game when we were ten, and I’ve perfected it over the years.
“Tell me,” I repeat. “Tell me. Tell me. Tell me. Tell me. Tell me. Tell?—”
He growls and turns his head toward me sharply. “Really?”
“I can go on.”
“I know. What do you want from me?”
“I want you to talk to me.”
“About?” He’s still feigning ignorance.
“About you. Come on. You’ve never told me any of this stuff.”
His jaw tightens for a second for some reason before his expression smooths out. “Why would you care?”
“Curiosity.” I shrug.