Chapter 9 #2
He shoves down his own shorts, balancing on his elbows, his body so much bigger than mine it should scare me, but it doesn’t.
I close my eyes and let him in, let him fill the empty ache, the loss, the fear, everything.
He slides inside me, slow, his cock thick and rigid.
The stretch burns, but I grab him harder, pulling him even closer.
We don’t make a sound, not a word, just these little gasps and shudders, our bodies rocking together.
He kisses me again and again, moves inside me until the world tunnels down to the band of his arm and the breath on my lips.
I don’t know if I’m shaking from the cold or from him. Maybe both. Who knows.
All I know is it feels incredible, the kind of sensation I have never experienced before.
“Cum for me, sweetpea,” he whispers into my ear.
I do.
Oh god, I do.
My nails rake down his back as I shudder against him, my entire body convulsing.
His growl is a low, ragged sound as he pulls his body from mine, releasing onto the sand beside us.
His body jerks and his muscles are tense as his breathing becomes ragged.
It’s a delicious sound, and when he rolls back to me, I press my face into his chest and breathe him in.
The warm scent of him. He curls an arm around me, pulling me close again, and I fall asleep in the way I have become way too familiar with.
It is quickly becoming my safe place.
That should scare me, but it doesn’t.
Morning comes suddenly, as if the night never happened.
Or maybe it’s the fact that I’m woken up to Aggie shaking my shoulders.
My eyes snap open and it takes me a moment to gather my bearings.
I see Aggie leaning over me, whispering my name.
Ace is curled around me, and she’s desperately trying not to wake him.
She fails, because his eyes slowly flicker open, too.
“What is it?” I whisper.
“We can’t find Rachel.”
I frown, sitting up. “What do you mean?”
“We woke up, and she wasn’t in her bed. We figured she just needed time, but then she didn’t come back so we went looking, and we can’t find her.”
I glance at Ace, who is sitting up now, too, his bare chest catching Aggie’s eye. She turns away, cheeks flushing.
“Did you check Iris’s grave?” I whisper.
“Zeke did. She’s not there,” Aggie says, twisting at the string around her wrist.
I push to my feet. “She’s grieving. Maybe she just needed space. I’ll help look.”
“She hates us,” Aggie mutters, her voice low. “She blames us for Iris.”
“We all blame ourselves,” I tell her, “but we can’t give up on each other now, so let’s go find her and sort this out.”
Ace pulls his shirt on and tells Kellen they will go search the jungle.
Aggie and Tati agree they will go in the opposite direction, so they’re covering more area.
Adrian tells us he will climb a tree to get a better view, nobody even tries to stop him as he rushes over to a coconut tree and actually begins climbing it like a fucking monkey.
“That man is fucking nuts,” Ace mutters.
“Yes, yes he is,” I agree.
With one more horrified stare in Adrian’s direction, he turns and disappears with Kellen. I try to think about a place I think Rachel might go, and I know for certain where I’d go. The cliff. It’s a hike, sure, but it’s so peaceful up there. Like a whole different world.
I make my way towards it.
My instincts were right, because the second I get to the top, huffing and puffing, I see her.
Rachel is sitting cross-legged at the edge, staring out to sea, her ponytail swishing in the breeze.
Her back is stiff, her hands in her lap.
She hates me, that much is apparent, but I know that she is suffering right now.
In a way none of us can understand. Iris was her best friend.
“Rachel?”
She doesn’t answer, but her shoulders drop just a touch, so I know she has heard me.
I sit beside her, leaving plenty of space.
The wind stings my cheeks, and it feels scary sitting this close to the edge, but it is also weirdly freeing.
Like we could just soar off and find freedom.
Even though we both know that isn’t how it would go.
Neither of us speak for so long, I wonder if I should start the conversation, only I don’t know what to say.
“Do you think they’ll find us?”
Her voice comes out crackly and broken.
I want to lie so badly it hurts, but the truth is, I actually don’t know the answer so maybe it isn’t a lie at all. “I don’t know,” I say, “but even if they don’t for a while, we’ll make it. We’ll survive until they do. We have to.”
Rachel’s hand tightens on her knee. “What if we all just die slowly, just like Iris did? Eventually, what if this world here consumes us all. What then?”
“We will do everything we can to make sure that doesn’t happen. We won’t give up. I don’t know what the future holds, but we are here, we are alive, and that is all we can focus on.”
“I don’t know if I will ever be okay again,” she whispers, her voice barely there.
I feel that.
Oh, do I feel that.
I sit there with her, letting the silence fill whatever needs filling. We stare at the horizon, together but apart, and I hope that somewhere, someone is looking for us.
Because I don’t know what we’ll do if they aren’t.