Chapter Five
Dusk fell fast and hard. It always did during the fall, but it surprised me regardless. One minute, I was standing outside enjoying the weak rays of the sun, and the next, it was past dusk, and everything was painted in shades of grey and indigo.
I leaned against the outside of the cabin. It was rough wood on all four sides, with mossy rock on the ground, preventing the growth of grasses in a wide circle around the building. From where I stood, I could see the ocean, part of the ring of trees, and some of the pasture.
I didn’t smoke (I had tried once, and it had caused me to puke so hard that I had never wanted to try it again), but it seemed like a cigarette would perfectly fit the vibe.
I could almost smell the smoke, but that could have just as easily been the whole exploded-volcano thing.
It was chilly, maybe fifty degrees Fahrenheit, and dipping, but I didn’t want to go back inside.
The cabin was the size of a big shed, or like half the size of the average elementary school classroom, and it felt claustrophobic, especially with Oskar brooding in the corner.
Even Jin Woo and Ettore had been entirely consumed with each other.
They had been whispering aggressively ever since we had gotten back to the cabin.
I knew that the key to survival in this instance was waiting for rescue, but I sure as hell wasn’t going to wait in the cabin the entire time. Instead, I would freeze my ass off pretending to smoke out in the cold.
My eyes half closed, I had drifted into a daydream of a huge buffet that I just had to eat, or everything would go to waste, when a noise close to me sparked me into alertness.
Leaning against the cabin’s wall was a tall man. He was wearing only a t-shirt and some tech-ish-looking pants, and only one shoe. I said the first words that came to my mind.
“Thank fuck! Is this your island? Do you have a boat? We were shipwrecked here yesterday, there are four, no five of us!”
The man stared at me blankly for a long moment.
He had dark, slightly curly hair, with long eyelashes and a twist of his mouth that oozed arrogance. Dipping one last time to the Greek gods, he could be no one else but Hades. He seemed…familiar.
Finally, he spoke, “Bro. I was shipwrecked, too. We’ve been in the cabin all fucking day. Jeezus fuck you’re blind, blind and painfully unaware.”
I was a patient woman. I couldn’t have done my job without having my temper well in check. However, I was hangry, tired, dirty, and emotionally drained by Oskar’s bullshit. I had no patience to waste on this asshole.
“What the fuck did you just say to me?” I ground out. He may have flinched, may have bunched up his naturally tanned skin, but I was too enraged to take note.
“I said,” as he doubled down, “that you were blind and a fucking idiot.”
I was in front of him in a flash, my forearm pressed against his neck, my nose practically brushing against his, our breath mingling.
“If you ever, ever talk to me like that again, I will cut your balls off.” I could feel the unhinged smile that always came out on my face whenever I had completely lost control.
He was about three inches taller than me, but the slight rise of the land that led to the cabin’s door made us the exact same height.
He parted his mouth to speak, but before he could, I pressed harder against his neck, leading him to half-whine, half-moan in a wheeze.
“I’m not joking. I’d get away with it. This is a fucking deserted island, and so there is no one to save you. Will you ever speak to me in that way again?” I asked with the tone of an old-timey schoolmistress with a couple of screws loose.
He tried to speak again, and I pressed even harder, causing his eyes to roll back slightly.
“Nuh-unh! No need to speak. Nod if you agree.”
After a long moment of me staring into his grey eyes, he nodded. I stepped back, a sated snake of satisfaction curling in my stomach.
“Good boy.”
I walked back into the cabin. Maybe I had hit my head when I had been thrown overboard. Maybe that was an explanation for why my blood was hot and rushing in my ears and how much I wanted to march right back outside and push him against the wall again.
A moment later, the door opened behind me, but I didn’t turn around. He had to learn that I wasn’t even a little scared of him. Honestly, I was more scared of myself.
In school, it had always been funny to me how quickly everyone assigned themselves unofficial assigned seats.
I remembered how disgruntled I was whenever someone sat in ‘my’ seat; it had ruined at least three of my days in middle school.
In our little cabin of survival, we had assigned ourselves places, which was quite funny as we had been there for less than a day, and the entire floor was like 10 feet long.
The rude lump sat hunched over on the left of the fire, and Oskar leaned against the wall on the right side of the fire.
Ettore, Jin Woo, and I sat with our backs against the left wall of the cabin, and our feet brushed the right wall of the cabin when we were fully stretched out.
The order of our little trio was currently flexible, but ever since the couple had been in their intense discussion in a surprising combination of Korean, Italian, and German, I had been sitting closer to the fire while they sat together closer to the door.
However, as I went to sit down in ‘my’ seat, they split, and Ettore patted the place between them and pulled back what I had realized was a cheap blanket.
It had maybe been used for holding lambs after they were just born.
It was barely larger than a baby blanket, and to make sure that everyone had even a little bit of coverage, we had to squeeze tightly together, not that I was complaining.
Cuddled between them, Jin Woo busily tucking the blanket around us, I finally chanced a look at Oskar.
He was once again messing with the fire, but it kinda looked like he was watching me out of the corner of his eye.
It was a bit concerning that I liked that he was looking at me.
I didn’t want him to stop looking at me.
The thought flashed hot and white in my brain.
If I were anywhere else, that thought would have been a sign that I needed to take my meds.
I would have taken my meds, and I would have sunk back into normality.
Unfortunately, my meds were somewhere at the bottom of the ocean, and so I would have to control my more unhinged urges the old-fashioned way.
“So,” I began to the men on either side of me, trying to distract myself,” have your deliberations resulted in a plan for us getting rescued? Or were you talking about something else?”
“Well,” started Jin Woo, “I do think that we should try to catch a sheep to butcher tomorrow, while Ettore thinks that we should wait until it’s a bit colder, but I think we’ll be weak and—”
“Uhm!” Ettore cleared his throat pointedly while elbowing Jin Woo.
“Um, yeah, but we were mostly talking about you.”
I could feel one of my eyebrows creeping up higher and higher.
“About me?” I said incredulously.
Ettore swiped a stray curl away from my face, his fingers lingering on the shell of my ear.
“Is that so hard to believe, salvatrice? That you would be the object of our discussion and in our thoughts?”
My brain very much short-circuited.
“Uhhhhhh…yeah?”
“Well,” Ettore leaned back as he spoke again, giving me enough space that my brain began to cool down enough to work, “more specifically about you and our relationship.”
I was not functioning high enough for this.
“Meaning?” I said directly.
Jin Woo, with a very steady voice, spoke.
“We have been thinking of adding someone to our relationship. We both feel that we have much more love to give and that we would both be good with a, well, bigger relationship. However, we are both all too conscious of the risk and the potential impact to our public images. I am the heir to a massive conglomerate, and Etto manages one of the most successful alcohol companies in the world.”
I turned towards Ettore.
“You are Da Lodi, as in the wine empire, Da Lodi Wines?” I asked incredulously.
Ettore shrugged that slow, deliciously indolent shrug.
“And liquors.”
Ah,” I said, because what the fuck else could I say, “well, ok.”
“So you see why we wouldn’t want to take such a big risk when we don’t even know if a bigger relationship would work for us. However,”
Jin Woo easily continued his fiancé’s sentence.
“There are no paparazzi here, no nosy mothers-in-law, no board members just too willing to make any tiny molehill into a mountain.”
“Wait, wait, wait, wait, are you saying that you want me to be your, what, practice third?” I asked.
“Yes, basically,” Ettore nodded sagely, “we wouldn’t do anything you were uncomfortable with, but just let us include you in our relationship a bit and let us pamper you as much as we can in this god forsaken place.”
I looked between the men, wondering if they were completely insane or only a little insane.
“Don’t you guys want to, I don’t know, focus on surviving?”
“My little savior, it looks like we will be mostly gathering firewood and sitting around trying not to expend too much energy.” He was close again, his lips basically brushing my ear, “I don’t think our little trial will expend too much energy, piccola salvatrice, do you?”
Maybe I was the insane one, because I was truly considering it.
I mean, two beautiful men were asking me to be their practice lover, and well, they weren’t wrong.
It looked like the next week or two would be full of being hungry and doing my best not to think of the horrible possibility of no one ever rescuing us and us slowly dying on this piece of rock.
What Ettore and Jin Woo were offering me sounded much more pleasant.
“So, how far would we go?” I asked.