22. Chapter 19 - Marley
After we compiled our resources from the afternoon scavenges, we got to work.
Danny and Brooks wove fronds into a laddered pattern.
Danny’s hands shook with the effort, but his skin color warmed as he worked.
Brooks taught Madman how to loop the leaves, and Nikki shoved the branches he and the detective had collected into the earth.
He’d taken off his cut-off sweatshirt and his defined back muscles drew my gaze repeatedly, bunching and glistening with sweat. I couldn’t stop the tingling heat deep in my abdomen. Nikki wasn’t just attractive. He was hot.
It was the most inappropriate time to lust after my friend, and yet …
He turned when I approached and shot me a suggestive wink behind the one intact lens of his glasses.
“Hey, Cap,” he called, licking his lips with a grin. Did he just flex his muscles? Brat.
I stifled the giggle and swallowed it whole, not giving him the satisfaction. With all we had to do, Nikki’s body and what he could do with it should be the very last thing on my mind.
Survival first, Marley. Then, salivation.
Ambrose fell to his mat and let out a distorted groan through his hands. I bit my tongue. Was I concerned I’d have to redo his bandages? Yes. Did I want him to suffer a bit more before I offered?
Also, yes.
“Umm, Marley?” Tessa waved me over to the rations pile.
“So, we did what you asked,” she bit her lip nervously, tucking two strands of messy brunette hair behind her ears.
“And it looks like everyone gets two small bottles of water each, four bags of pretzels, two protein bars, a bag of almonds, and a stick of gum.”
“We’re doomed.” Vanessa’s tone was lifeless and her pale green eyes, the color of sea glass, were rimmed in red. She hadn’t stopped crying since her impalement, and I didn’t know how to help her.
“We’re not doomed, Nessie,” Tessa said, resting a soft hand on her shoulder. “This is just like going on a mini cleanse, right? Like we did last year for the lemon juice challenge.”
She met my gaze, then, her bright blue eyes still filled with optimism. “We’re going to be rescued soon, anyway. We’ll just be rescued a little lighter!”
As much as I didn’t agree with the positives of starving, I was at once grateful to have her here still brimming with encouraging energy. Nikki couldn’t be the only one keeping light in the darkness.
I injected as much warmth as I could into my returning smile.
“That’s great, Tessa. Thank you.” I emptied the small bag of avocados into the ration pile. “There are tons of trees in there, and I think I saw mangos growing a little distance away. I promise, we won’t starve.”
We would dehydrate, though, if we weren’t rescued by morning. The emergency crash kit had one 1000-calorie food bar and two 125-ml emergency water packets—enough for one person, for one day. Aileron had purchased the smallest, cheapest kit available, and we would pay the price for it.
Another reason in a list as long as an ancient scroll why I’d never fly for them again after this.
Brooks was already weaving one shelter cover around the wooden posts, and Madman moved around the other side to help them.
The pair spoke back and forth in rapid Portuguese while Diaz and Nikki drove more posts into the ground.
Diaz appeared calmer after they’d returned from their woods trek, and with the size of the egg on his forehead, I wondered if Nikki had decked him. I’d have to ask him later.
Danny wove another row on the second mat, and Ambrose held a few fronds in front of him, eyeing Danny’s movements archly.
Nine strangers moving in sync, committed to our temporary survival. There was a beauty in its simplicity.
I smelled the first drop of rain before I felt it. The cloying air changed from hot and vegetal, to cool and earthy before the skies opened up and poured.
“Hurry,” I shouted and scrambled to pick up the rations and put them under the first shelter. Tessa and Vanessa followed my lead and scooped up what they could of our minimal haul, dropping it under the roof cover before hiding under it themselves.
The bags were next, most of them emptied, but they would take forever to dry in the damp jungle heat.
I grabbed three of them with Nikki and Maddox at my back, following my lead, and deposited them under the newly woven covering.
I hadn’t expected our shelters to protect us from rain today, but they were already proving to be useful.
For our stuff, at least.
Streams of hot jungle rain saturated my hair and ran into my eyes. Maddox’s T-shirt clung to my skin like a wetsuit, and the cotton shorts I wore bagged down to my knees.
Rain meant drinking water, and drinking water meant we’d live another day.
Collecting the empty water bottles from a small pile where we’d thrown them, I set them out in a row on a flat part of the soil.
There were ten in total—we’d each get another full day’s worth of rations to survive on.
We’d have to boil it in the single metal canister Brooks had packed, but it was better than nothing.
The rain immediately absorbed back into the earth at my feet, the ground greedy for the saturation.
The rush of sound in a space so eerily quiet this morning was a sensory relief.
I stood like a statue in the middle of the riverbed and closed my eyes up to the sky, embracing the feeling of being washed by nature.
I felt Ambrose and Nikki moving closer before I heard them over the rush of the rain. When I cracked open one eye, they stood a few feet in front of me and Nikki squeezed a hotel-sized shampoo bottle into both of their palms.
The diatribe on my lips that shampoo was terrible for the environment died when I considered the fuel from our plane leaking into the earth just a few hundred feet away. That ship had sailed. We were the environmental bad guys, and saving a few ounces of shampoo wouldn’t be our redemption.
Stripping off my T-shirt like an awkward giraffe caught in a slip and slide, I let the warm rain wash over my skin.
I slid down the shorts barely hanging onto my waist and laid them on a larger flat rock just a few feet away, determined not to get my only pieces of clothing muddy.
Stepping out of my now sopping shoes, I placed them on the rock, heels up.
There. Bra and panties, like I’d paid for a beach vacation and wasn’t traumatically stranded in a rainforest. The sweat, grit, and general grossness melted away with each fresh drop, but I lusted after the floral scents making their way through the earthy ozone.
“Can I have some of that?” I turned to face them and shouted over the din. Nikki looked up from scrubbing his own shirtless chest and paused, like I was a deer in his headlights.
Modesty had never been one of my virtues. We all had bodies, all shapes and sizes, and fretting over the voluptuous one I’d been given had never entered the equation, except when I had to pull on those godforsaken tights for my uniform.
But the ravenous look in my friend’s eyes made me flush all the same and heat pooled in my belly in a way it really shouldn’t. My body certainly enjoyed Nikki’s attention, regardless of how my mind felt about it.
Colleagues and friends, Marley. He’s just a flirt. Colleagues and friends.
But did a friend have to look at me like that?
“Yeah.” He shook his head as if to clear it. “Here.” He took the few steps forward to hand me the tiny tube, and I took it gratefully, pretending not to notice the outline of a hairspray canister in his pants.
It was good to know the attraction wasn’t one-sided at least.
Squeezing a dollop of the gel into my hand, I lathered it up over my belly and breasts and underarms, and turned to discreetly clean beneath my underwear.
No need for a full exhibitionist display today.
The pounding rain immediately rinsed the soap suds down into the earth, and I squeezed a final pearl of shampoo for my hair, scrubbing it ferociously into my roots.
A lumbering presence made itself known on my left side, standing the hairs on the back of my neck on end.
Madman was just a few steps away when I looked up.
He’d taken off everything but a pair of tight black boxer briefs, and stood tall with his arms folded across his chest toward our camp, like my personal guard.
Colorful artwork covered most of his exposed skin, the black and grey shading of a laughing skull wearing a fedora prominently displayed across one half of his torso, scrawling script of “Clube de Morte” emblazoned across the bottom. His gang tattoo?
Wringing a tiny drop of the remaining shampoo onto my clothing to give them their own bath, I walked forward and tapped his arm, holding out the small tube. He turned, those watchful eyes roaming over me.
He never lingered on one part for long, but his gaze held enough intensity to harden my nipples into sharp points.
I tried very hard not to do the same, but the man’s body was beautiful, rough and rugged, corded and toned.
I didn’t know what a prison diet looked like, but he couldn’t have eaten an ounce of fat in his life.
Droplets of water trailed over colorful ink and puckered, patchy scars, down the ripples of muscle and smooth edges of an Adonis belt into the fabric of his shorts.
I could climb him like a tree.
I firmly shook my head. Was this a trauma response? This compulsion to procreate when human life was in jeopardy? It was the only explanation for the sudden desperate need to jump a passenger.
“What are you doing?” I asked when he finally took the bottle from my hand.
“Protecting you,” he declared with finality. “Some eyes do not deserve to see you.”
My eyebrows hit my hairline. This man was so … well, maddening.