Chapter Seven #2
“Well, yes,” I rubbed sleep from my eyes and tried to draw myself together, to put on a mask of normalcy. “I woke up, and you all were too cold and wouldn’t wake up, so I warmed you guys. I think after all the adrenaline, I just conked out.”
“Yes, I think all of us owe you our lives. Jin Woo and I owe you twice.”
“No,” I said resolutely, “I was only able to help because you all kept me warm; you don’t owe me anything.”
“No, we do tesoro. We do. And we will show you how much we do once we leave this island.”
I tried not to look at him. Tried to push down the feeling that screamed that he was MINE MINE MINE.
“You both do so much for me here. Let’s think about everything once we get off of the island. How about that?”
“Alright,” he said so softly, as if I was fragile, precious.
“The others?” I asked.
“Bartosz and Oskar are planning for another try with the sheep. Jin Woo is looking for firewood in the forest. We don’t want to have a repeat of last night.”
“And you guys are all alright?”
Ettore did his little elegant shrug.
“It seems that we are…ah, tough sons of bitches.”
That dragged a smile out of me, but it didn’t last long on my face.
“I’ll go and gather some mushrooms for lunch or dinner today.”
Ettore reached out his hand as I stood up, as if to stop me, but dropped his hand back at the very last minute.
“Are you sure you don’t want to rest a bit more? There’s no rush on the mushrooms.”
I flashed him my best, ‘I’m not crazy OR sick’ smile.
“Don’t worry about me. It looks like I’m a tough son of a bitch, too.”
***
It was probably around noon, the sun high in the sky. Restless energy pooled in my veins, so much so that I broke into a half-walk, half-trot through the woods. I wasn’t really looking for mushrooms, more just trying to clear my head.
I hadn’t been off my meds in so long that I only kinda remembered how it felt.
The psychiatrists and therapists that I had seen had always assumed that I would never go off my medication, and so I was never taught coping mechanisms. All I knew was that I turned into this grasping, possessive person who was so obsessively attached to people.
Maybe, I thought, not having much hope, me being older would stop me from going full crazy, maybe I would just be half-crazy.
I would warn the boys tonight, and we would make a plan to stop me from bothering them as much as possible.
I could cook outside and sleep in shifts.
Maybe they could build a lean-to for me like they were building one for the sheep.
With the start of a plan in my head, I immediately felt better.
I felt so much better that I actually started looking for mushrooms… and stopped looking where I was going.
“Ooof!” I exclaimed as I hit something hard, but instead of falling to the ground, warm hands caught me, and a friendly face smiled down on me.
“Naekkeo, there you are! Etto said you had gone this way. He was worried, so I came to check on you and help carry the mushrooms. May I walk with you?”
“Sure,” I said absentmindedly, and off we went, my arm looped in his.
“Etto says that you don’t want to talk about what happened last night. Is that right?"
I looked high up into the branches of pine trees and breathed in a large lungful of the sea air.
“Yeah, it was just a lot, and I’m feeling out of sorts, so I’d rather talk about it later.”
“That makes complete sense. We can speak of other things.”
There was not an inconsiderable layer of pine needles on the ground, most likely not even from this year, or not entirely.
They were the result of year after year after year of pine needles falling and accumulating here on this island, where everything was left untouched.
Most things in the world were connected, by phone, by plane, by someone knowing you on the street and calling out.
Here on the island, it was almost like we were on the moon.
“Did you ever tell him?” The words tripped off my tongue, as if they had been waiting for the right moment to escape.
“Tell him what?” Jin Woo replied, smiling down at me.
“That you love him? That was your big juicy secret, wasn’t it?” My words petering out. Maybe it was rude to bring up what someone who had been drowning and delirious with hypothermia had said. I didn’t quite know the etiquette.
Instead of looking offended, his smile grew larger. It seemed that our natural state as a pair was me being afraid of offending him, and him thinking the whole thing was hilarious.
“Yes, I told him. We’ve figured out quite a few things about our relationship here on the island. I told Ettore that maybe that’s why we were shipwrecked here, and he responded, ‘No, it was the fucking waves and the shitty volcano.”
If there were any birds in the trees close to us, my barking laugh would have scared all of them away.
“That does sound like him!”
I worked hard not to hold on tighter to Jin Woo, and looked around as if I was taking in the sights on a busy street in New York City, instead of mostly barren woods on a deserted island.
“So, no need to continue the experiment, right?”
Me? I didn’t care; I was a cool, chill, normal girl. Me? Obsessive? Pshaw!
Instead of his arm loosening and dropping mine, his tightened on me, and we took a hard right until we were in a little thicket of trees, my back against a pine.
“We told you that you were...additive, no? Not a replacement for something in our relationship?”
Jin Woo came off so easygoing that I had forgotten how large he was. He could rest his chin on my head; instead, he had one arm on the tree behind me and his face close to mine.
“Yes,” I breathed. I was impressed I could even do that. He was just so much, his dark eyes burning.
“Will you remember that? Will you be a good girl?”
My lip flicked out and wet my lips, and his eyes followed. I was starving and thirsty all at once.
“Yeah,” I croaked.
“Good girl,” and then he was kissing me, his hands cradling my head as he kissed me like he was drowning and I was air.
I was carried away and in the current, gladly being devoured by him.
I nipped his lower lip half-accidentally, and he moaned into my mouth, so animalistically that I automatically tried to clench my legs together, but I couldn’t when he was between them, hard and strong.
I was half in a daze when he pulled away. My chest was heaving, and I was gripping his arms hard.
“Can I taste you?” His voice all sandpaper on charcoal.
Well, he had been for the past however-long-he-had-been-kissing-me, but he could have asked me for a kidney at that moment, and I would have said yes.
His knees hit the ground with an almost silent thump, but I was so sensitive at that moment that I would have heard a pin drop a mile away.
I heard the distinctive sound of a branch breaking, but what was a branch breaking in comparison to the man before me, who had slid down my pants and was now kissing and biting my thighs.
And then his tongue was on me, in me, and all I could see were stars.
“Oh, Mina,” he groaned into me, “you taste delicious.”
He took his time savouring, coaxing out little sounds out of me that, no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t keep in. I gripped his silky hair and begged him, so far gone that I was sure that he wouldn’t be able to make out a word I was saying.
When I came, I whited out, coming back to the world slowly minutes later. Jin Woo had one arm around my waist, his free hand straightening my clothes, even though he had dressed me immaculately.
He was definitely also hard; I could see the straining length of him in his pants. But when I reached for him, he caught my hand in his and kissed the inside of my wrist.
“No, Naekkeo,” he said gently, “this was for you, to make sure that you remember that you are additive. If you want, we can do more when you are rested.”
“Yup, yes, please yes!” Well, there went any chance of coming off as cool and collected.
Jin Woo’s laughter boomed through the woods as he steered us back to the cabin.
“But what about you?” I asked, guilt pinching me.
He gave me a slanted smile that was so much like Ettore’s that it was uncanny.
“That is what fiancés are for.”
***
Jin Woo had distracted me admirably, but by the time the sun had set, I was on edge again. That voice, the one that begged me to bite and claim and own, had been silent all day but an hour in the cabin with all of them, and it was beginning to speak to me again.
They had once again failed to catch a sheep, something about them being ‘slippery dicks’, but it seemed that we were learning from our mistakes: the fire was crackling loudly and merrily, and they were all pressed close to it, practically on top of each other like a puddle of puppies.
I clung to the warm edge of the rock fireplace and fought the urge to throw myself into the pile.
I needed to lay everything out on the table.
The longer I waited, the worse it would be.
I was pretty sure that they wouldn’t exile me, not after last night, but my mind spun off with a hundred other dreadful possibilities.
Namely, that they would look at me with such disgust that I would wish that I had drowned when the ferry went down.
This was the most time I had spent with people who weren’t my coworkers in years.
The first time in years that someone had liked me for something other than my good performance at work.
It would be crushing when they suddenly hated me.
I didn’t know how I would handle it. I didn’t think I could.
“I need to tell you guys something.” I finally made myself say.
Bartosz had been avoiding eye contact with me all day, well, since we had come to an understanding, but he pushed up from where he was reclining, Roman emperor-like on the floor.