32. Dylan
THIRTY-TWO
DYLAN
I wake up with a hard-on.
Not morning wood. Nope.
A hard-on.
A boner.
A rock-solid erection.
Because sometimes Adrian turns on his side at night, so our bodies align, and he presses himself against me in his sleep.
Or sometimes he presses his chest against my back and throws his arm over my waist.
Or presses his nose into the back of my head.
Or, you know, just breathes.
It doesn’t take much to get me going when it comes to Adrian.
It’s torture.
I pretty quickly figure out that unless I take care of it early in the morning before Adrian wakes up, I’ll be on edge the whole day.
So now I have this new routine. I sneak out early in the morning to jerk off to thoughts of my best friend.
In case it wasn’t obvious yet that I’m a bit fucked up.
You can get used to a lot of things. Even being stranded on a deserted island.
We get into a routine. There’s stuff we have to do every day. Gather firewood. Keep the fire going. Fish. Gather coconuts and those weird green things we eat but don’t know what they are.
There are plenty of birds here, but we rarely come upon their nests. They’re hidden well, some of them high up in the trees, so we can’t reach them. Most birds are tiny here, too, so their eggs are tiny, too.
We also find a jackfruit tree, so altogether we have three different fruits in our diet, and I hope to God we’re getting at least some of the vitamins people need to function properly. It would be incredibly anticlimactic to survive a plane crash and then die from scurvy.
How long does it take to develop scurvy?
Fuck, I miss the internet, because I have so many questions every fucking day and no way to find answers.
There are a hundred and eighty-two marks carved into the tree.
Dry season has turned into wet season. It rains every day, and the air is practically solid with humidity.
We put a stop to exploring the island because the humid air is suffocating, and we only have the one water bottle we can take with us.
We’ve mapped our side of the island out pretty extensively by now, but we’ve barely ventured into the northwest side of the island, aside from that one time we hiked around it.
Any further exploration trips have to wait for now.
It’s the boredom.
It gets to us both.
Sure, keeping ourselves even somewhat fed takes time. Firewood takes time. Securing the life raft and building a lean-to over it takes time.
We make rope out of coconut husks. It takes time.
We build a firepit.
We use the signal mirror.
We go swimming.
Adrian carves chess pieces out of wood, and I teach him to play. We play a lot of chess and checkers.
It all takes time.
We’re still bored out of our minds.
We talk a lot.
Freya used to come up a lot.
Not anymore.
I’m sure she’s on Adrian’s mind, but it’s probably too difficult to talk about her right now. I don’t poke, and I don’t talk about her.
Nope.
Instead, I’m grateful she hardly comes up at all anymore.