Mehar
Every morning we walked the shoreline. And every morning the ocean gave us the same answer.
Nothing.
No boats. No planes. No helicopters. No contrails in the sky, no engine sounding in the distance, no flicker of light on the horizon that could be anything other than the sun doing what the sun does.
Just water, stretching out flat and blue and endless in every direction, indifferent to the two people standing on the beach begging it to deliver them something other than waves.
I was starting to hate the ocean. Which was wild because two weeks ago I was excited about spending time near it on a babymoon with my fiancé. Now it was a prison wall made of water and every morning I walked its perimeter looking for a crack in it and every morning it told me there wasn’t one.
Quest didn’t say much during these walks. He scanned the horizon with those dark eyes, one hand on my lower back, jaw tight. I knew he was doing the same thing I was. Looking. Hoping. And slowly, quietly, making peace with the possibility that today wasn’t the day either.
We’d been here for about a week. I was losing track of the exact days because time moved differently on this island.
There was no schedule, no alarms, no meetings, no deadlines.
Just sunrise and sunset and the hours between them filled with survival.
Wake up, eat, walk the shore, check the fire, gather food, bathe, sleep, repeat.
A loop that was simple and exhausting and starting to feel permanent in a way that scared me more than the crash did.
The crash was violent and sudden and my body responded to it with adrenaline.
This was slow. This was the quiet terror of realizing that nobody might be coming and that this island, this tiny unnamed patch of land in the southern Caribbean, might be where I raised my baby.
Where I gave birth in the sand with no doctor and no hospital and no epidural and nothing but Quest’s hands and his voice telling me to breathe.
I couldn’t think about that. Not yet. So I focused on the walk and the water and the man beside me whose hand hadn’t left my back since we started.
“Let’s go to the waterfall,” I said.
He nodded and we turned inland.
· · ·
The waterfall had become our sanctuary. The one place on this island that felt like it belonged to us instead of the other way around.
The pool was cool, clear, surrounded by thick green canopy that blocked the sun and muffled the sound of the ocean.
When we were here, the world shrank to just water and rock and shade and I could almost forget that we were stranded.
I undressed and stepped into the pool and the cold water hit my skin and I shivered and sank down until it covered my shoulders.
My belly floated slightly, round and buoyant, and I put my hands on it and let the water hold some of the weight I’d been carrying.
The baby moved. A slow roll, not a kick, like she was stretching out and enjoying the coolness too.
Quest undressed and stepped in after me.
I watched him because I always watched him and I wasn’t going to pretend otherwise.
A week on this island had changed his body.
He was leaner. The softness that came with rich meals and comfortable living had burned off and what was left was hard and defined and covered in scratches and bruises that told the story of what he’d been doing to keep us alive.
His hands were the worst. The blisters had healed into rough calluses and there were cuts across his knuckles from carving spears and splitting coconuts.
These were not the hands of a CEO anymore.
These were the hands of a man who worked with them every day and I found that shift attractive in a way that surprised me.
He waded toward me and I reached for his hands and held them under the water and ran my thumbs over the calluses and the cuts.
He let me. Quest didn’t usually let people tend to him.
He was the one who tended. The provider, the protector, the man who handled everything for everyone and then handled himself alone in private.
But out here there was nobody else and the walls he kept between himself and vulnerability had gotten thinner with every day we spent depending on each other for everything.
“Your hands look terrible,” I said holding them up and kissing them.
“Cost of keeping us alive. You shouldn’t trust a nigga with soft hands anyway,” he chuckled.
“You’re done amazing with keeping us alive and fed every day,” I thanked him.
“I’d do anything for y’all,” he said as he caressed my swollen belly.
I reached for his hands, cupping them. “These are gonna scar badly.”
“Good. I’ll have something to show for this trip besides a tan and a story nobody’s gonna believe.”
I smiled. He smiled back. And for a second, just a second, we were just two people in a pool underneath a waterfall and the circumstances that put us there didn’t exist. No crashed plane, no sabotage, no island, no survival.
Just Quest and Mehar. The way we used to be in the penthouse when the world was asleep and it was just us tangled up in sheets with Banks Reserve on the nightstand and his playlist on low.
He pulled me toward him and I floated into his chest and his arms wrapped around me from behind, his hands resting on my belly under the water.
I leaned my head back against his shoulder and closed my eyes and felt his heartbeat against my back and his breath in my hair and the baby moving between his palms.
He pulled me toward him and I floated into his chest and his arms wrapped around me from behind, his hands resting on my belly under the water.
I leaned my head back against his shoulder and closed my eyes and felt his heartbeat against my back and his breath in my hair and the baby moving between his palms.
Neither of us spoke. We didn’t need to. Out here, with no phones, no meetings, no casino, no drama, the silence between us had become its own conversation.
I knew what he was thinking by the way his hands moved on my belly.
Slow circles meant he was calm. Still palms meant he was somewhere in his head he wasn’t ready to talk about.
Right now his thumbs were tracing along the underside of my belly, soft and deliberate, and that meant he was present. Right here. With me.
“When we get home,” he said against my ear, “I’m never letting you out of my sight again.”
“That sounds controlling.”
“It’s romantic.”
“It’s the same thing with you.”
He laughed. A real one. Low and warm against the back of my neck and I felt it vibrate through my body and something inside me shifted.
I turned in his arms and faced him and put my hands on his face and looked at him. Water running down both of us, the waterfall loud enough to cover anything we said from everything except each other. His eyes were dark and steady and stripped of everything except fiery desire.
I kissed him. Soft at first. My lips against his, tasting the fresh water on his mouth, feeling his hands tighten on my waist. Then deeper.
His tongue finding mine and his body pressing against me and my back touching the smooth rock at the edge of the pool.
The water moved around us and the mist from the waterfall settled on our skin and I felt something shift between us.
From comfort to hunger. From holding each other to needing each other.
“I need you,” I whispered against his mouth.
Not because I was turned on, although I was.
Because I needed to feel alive. I needed to feel something other than fear and monotony and the slow erosion of hope that was grinding me down day by day.
I needed his body against mine and inside mine because that was the one language we spoke that the island couldn’t translate into survival. That one was just ours.
He kissed my neck. Then my collarbone. Then the space between my breasts that were fuller now than they had ever been.
His hands held my hips under the water as his mouth moved down my body.
I arched into him, felt the waterfall mist on my face and the sun through the trees on my closed eyelids.
His fingers found me under the water first, sliding between my legs, and I was already soaking before he even touched me.
He groaned against my neck when he felt how wet I was and pressed two fingers inside me slowly, stretching me open while his thumb circled my clit and my knees almost gave out in the water.
“Turn around,” he said against my ear. Low and thick and barely controlled.
I turned and braced my hands on the smooth rock edge of the pool.
The stone was warm under my palms and the water sat at my waist, taking the weight off my belly so I felt weightless and free.
He pressed against me from behind and I could feel how hard he was against my ass and I pushed back into him because I was done waiting.
He slid inside me from behind, slow and deep, and I felt every single inch of him stretching my pussy wide and filling me up until my mouth fell open and nothing came out but breath.
My fingers gripped the rock edge and the water moved around our bodies and his hands gripped both my hips and he started stroking with a rhythm that matched the waterfall behind us.
Steady and relentless and deep enough to make my arms shake.
“Right there,” I whispered. “Don’t stop.”
He didn’t stop. He pulled my hips back into him with every stroke and the water splashed between us and his breathing got heavier and his grip got tighter and I could feel the pressure building, deep and slow, coiling in my lower belly like a fist closing.
“This pussy,” he growled against the back of my neck. “Even out here, stranded on a fucking island, this is still the best thing I’ve ever had.”
“Then act like it.”
He went harder. Deeper. His hand slid from my hip to my belly, holding it gently even while the rest of his body was anything but gentle.
That contrast undid me completely. I came with a sound that echoed off the rocks around us and he followed right behind me, pushing in one last time and holding himself there while his body shook against mine, his forehead dropping to my shoulder.
We stood there in the water breathing hard, holding on to each other and the rock edge because neither of us trusted our legs anymore.
We stayed in the water for a long time after.
He turned me around, pulled me into his chest. We floated together, my belly between us, his hands never leaving it.
He kissed my forehead and I closed my eyes and for the first time since the crash I felt something other than fear or survival or the dull ache of waiting for rescue.
I felt peace. Fragile and temporary and probably stupid given our circumstances, but real.
· · ·
We dressed and walked back to camp holding hands.
My body was loose and warm, my mind quiet for the first time in days.
I was leaning into Quest’s side and thinking about baby names, actual baby names, because we hadn’t talked about it yet and maybe tonight by the fire we could and maybe that would feel like something normal people do instead of something survivors do.
We came through the tree line and I saw the camp and the fire still smoldering and the raft pulled up on the sand and everything looked the same as when we’d left except for one thing.
The boar was standing in the middle of our camp.
It was bigger than I expected. So much bigger.
Built low to the ground and wide through the shoulders with dark bristled fur and tusks that curved up from its lower jaw like two dirty white hooks.
Its head was down and its small black eyes were locked on us and it was completely still in a way that made my stomach drop because animals that are about to run look different from animals that are about to charge and this one was not about to run.
Quest’s hand tightened around mine. I felt his body change beside me, the looseness from the waterfall gone in an instant, replaced by something coiled and alert.
His other hand moved toward his pocket where he kept the folding knife.
A knife that was not built for self-defence, was not built for hunting.
No one could take on a wild boar with just a knife like that. No one.
We’d let our guard down. For one hour, we’d let ourselves be something other than survivors and the island had been watching and waiting and now it was reminding us exactly where we were and who was really in charge.
The boar lowered its head another inch and huffed and the sound that came out of it was deep and guttural and vibrated through the ground under my bare feet and I squeezed Quest’s hand so hard my knuckles ached.
“Don’t move,” Quest said. His voice was low and steady but I could feel his pulse hammering through his palm. “Do not move.”