CHAPTER TWO UNDER ONE TARP
Grant woke before dawn with Cody's back against his chest and his own arm locked around Cody's waist.
For one disorienting second, the island was a hotel room three years ago. Then rainwater dripped onto his temple, a camera clicked into low-light mode, and Cody stretched against him like a man who knew exactly what he was doing.
Grant released him.
“Morning,” Cody said.
“Get up.”
“That was almost tender.”
“Storm damaged the shelter.”
“And your reputation.”
They worked through first light. Grant cut support poles and rebuilt the roof at a steeper pitch. Cody stripped fibers from palm bark, rolled them against his thigh, and produced cordage strong enough to bear Grant's weight.
“Television trick?” Grant asked.
“My grandfather taught me. He ran expeditions in the Philippines before people carried satellite phones.”
Cody found dry heartwood inside a fallen limb, carved a fireboard, and knelt over it. The motion of the spindle sent sweat down his sternum. Twenty minutes later, smoke curled from the notch.
Grant crouched beside him. “I had you wrong.”
“Write it in your confessional.”
“Don't push it.”
The ember took. Cody bent low and breathed a flame into life. Pride brightened his face, unguarded and boyish. Grant felt something dangerous loosen behind his ribs.
They spent the next hours making camp survivable.
Cody wove a raised platform from green branches. Grant built a stone hearth and carved two crude spoons. They boiled vine water in the pot, cooled it under the tarp, and shared it without comment from the same cup.
At the shoreline, Cody showed Grant how to read the reef by watching the angle of foam. Grant taught Cody how to choose a storm-felled tree that would not roll while cut. Each lesson required hands on hips, shoulders, or wrists. Each correction lasted longer than necessary.
“Television edited out this part,” Grant said when Cody identified three edible greens beside one poisonous look-alike.
“Television edited out most things.”
“You let people think you were improvising.”
“The network liked instinct better than preparation. Preparation is not sexy.”
Grant looked at Cody crouched naked except for clinging black trunks, forearms muddy and hair damp with sweat. “They were wrong.”
Cody's head lifted.
Grant turned back to the greens before the admission became another kiss.
By noon, the island's insects had discovered them. Bites rose along Grant's shoulders. Cody slapped at his calves until he found a bank of pale mineral clay beside the stream.
“Kaolin and ash,” he said, rubbing a little between his fingers. “Dry enough to discourage mosquitoes. Maybe the sand flies too.”
He glanced toward the nearest camera, then pushed his trunks down and stepped out of them.
“Cover my back.”
Grant stared at the bowl Cody held out.
“You have arms.”
“Not the kind that bend backward. Unless rescue school taught you a trick.”
Grant took the bowl. “Turn around.”
Cody faced a palm and braced both hands against it.
Grant spread clay over his shoulders. It went on cool and slick, drying to a pale veil. He covered the backs of Cody's arms, the length of his spine, the hollows beside his hips. Cody's muscles shifted under every pass.
“Lower,” Cody said.
“You're enjoying this.”
“I enjoy thorough field medicine.”
Grant dragged both hands over Cody's hips and down the backs of his thighs. Cody's head tipped forward. The pose had stopped being innocent long before either man acknowledged it.
“Lift your foot.” Grant coated one calf, then the other. “Turn.”
Cody turned.
The air changed.
There was no fabric between them now, no towel, no rushed rescue to justify Grant's hands. Cody stood openly aroused, gaze steady, giving Grant every chance to step away.
Grant dipped his fingers into the bowl and drew a stripe across Cody's collarbone. Another over his chest. He slowed at Cody's abdomen.
“Still professional?” Cody asked.
“No.”
The honesty silenced them both.
Grant finished the task with care that felt more intimate than haste. When he handed over the bowl, Cody's fingers closed around his wrist.
“Your turn.”
Grant removed his trunks.
Cody began on his knees. Clay traveled over Grant's boots-bruised ankles, calves, and thighs. He looked up as he worked, watching the effect of each touch. Grant's hands opened and closed at his sides.
“You can tell me to stop,” Cody said.
“Would you?”
“Immediately.”
Grant considered the man kneeling before him, the cameras, the old wound waiting between them. “Don't stop.”
Cody rose slowly. He coated Grant's hips, stomach, chest, and back, taking his time where Grant was most sensitive. The practical treatment became a language of pressure and permission. By the time Cody's palms slid up Grant's ribs, both men were breathing too hard for the work they had done.
The camera pivoted closer.
Grant looked at it. “Enjoy the weather.”
As if summoned, thunder broke over the island.
Rain came in a solid wall. Their new fire hissed out. Water raced through camp, lifted their bedding, and turned the black soil to warm mud. They saved the pot and knives, then crawled beneath the tarp with nothing else.
Mud streaked their skin where the clay washed away. The space was tighter than the night before. Cody lay chest to chest with Grant, one hand trapped between them.
“You left,” Grant said.
Cody went still. “We're doing this now?”
“You brought up what the cameras know.”
“They know you kiss like you want revenge.”
“You disappeared before sunrise.”
“I had a reason.”
“Everyone has a reason after three years.”
Cody shoved at his shoulder. Grant caught his wrist and pinned it above his head. The tarp snapped in the wind.
“There,” Cody said, eyes dark. “That's the man I remember.”
“You remember what suited you.”
Cody twisted, planted a foot, and rolled them. Suddenly Grant was beneath him, Cody's forearm across his chest.
“I remember everything.”
“Prove it.”
The challenge hung between them. So did the question beneath it.
Cody loosened his hold. “Do you want this, Grant?”
Rain hammered the tarp. Grant could hear the camera outside searching for an angle, the little motor whining against the wind.
“Yes,” he said.
“Even angry?”
“Especially angry.”
Cody kissed him.
What followed was neither reenactment nor forgiveness.
It was a collision postponed for three years.
They wrestled for leverage, laughing once in disbelief when the tarp nearly sailed away, then catching it together without letting go of each other.
Grant rolled Cody beneath him. Cody reversed them again.
Every shift of control was offered and answered; every rough touch softened the instant either man's breath changed.
They used the last of the coconut-fiber cord to anchor the tarp and the whole of the storm to exhaust their anger. Mouths, hands, heat, rain—the boundaries between challenge and care blurred until there was only Cody's name against Grant's throat and Grant's hand locked with Cody's in the mud.
Several times, the argument tried to return.
“You do not get to vanish again,” Grant said against Cody's mouth.
“You do not get to decide what happened without hearing me.”
“Then tell me.”
Cody's eyes opened, bright in the dark. “Not while you are using anger to keep from listening.”
The accuracy of it made Grant freeze.
Cody softened immediately. He touched Grant's cheek with muddy fingers. “This can stop.”
“Do you want it to?”
“No.”
“Neither do I.”
They kissed again, slower. The change mattered. It turned combat into choice without making desire gentle. Grant understood that Cody was not refusing the truth to manipulate him. He was waiting until Grant could receive it without converting pain into a verdict.
That restraint demanded more trust than Grant possessed. He offered what he had through his body instead.
When they finally joined, it was with a pause long enough for one last yes.
Then the island vanished.
Grant knew Cody's rhythms and discovered new ones.
Cody remembered exactly where Grant's control fractured and took him there without mercy, then yielded when Grant rolled them and asked for the same trust in return.
They changed pace, changed position, changed who led.
Nothing about it belonged to the cameras, no matter what shadows the lifted tarp offered them.
At the end, Grant buried his face against Cody's neck and held on while thunder moved out to sea.
Neither man spoke for a long time.
The aftermath was more dangerous than the sex.
Cody rinsed mud from Grant's scraped knuckles with rainwater collected in the pot. Grant checked the bruises at Cody's hips and found none that worried him. They worked in the cramped dark with quiet tenderness, both pretending aftercare was field medicine.
“Any pain?” Grant asked.
“The good kind.”
“That answer is useless.”
“No injury,” Cody amended. “You?”
“No.”
Cody lay down again but left an inch between them.
Grant stared at that inch. He had wanted distance for three years. Now it felt like accusation.
He closed it, fitting one arm beneath Cody's neck and the other around his waist.
“This does not solve anything,” he said.
“I know.”
“Tomorrow, we talk.”
Cody settled against him. “Tomorrow, we survive. Talking can happen while we work.”
Grant almost smiled. “You always negotiate terms after the contract.”
“And you always sign before reading.”
The joke should have stung. Instead, Grant felt Cody's laughter against his chest and held him tighter.
The storm passed near dawn. Silver light entered beneath the tarp. Cody lay stretched across Grant's chest, his fingers resting over Grant's heartbeat.
Grant woke to those fingers moving lazily through the hair there.
Cody opened one eye. His smile was exhausted and unguarded.
“Twenty-nine more nights.”
Grant should have been horrified.
Instead, he pulled Cody closer.