Chapter 2 Current and Contact #3
The churuata emptied out an hour ago, the group drifting to their caba?as in ones and twos, full of good food, all having spent a day outdoors using muscles they forgot they had.
I went to mine. I lay down. I listened to the falls, and I stared at the ceiling fan moving slow circles in the dark.
And I remembered the way she looked up at me.
My body is on fire with the memory. It feels like my blood is boiling in my veins, and my cock is so hard, the pressure so tight.
I let my hand stray beneath the waistband of my pants and close my eyes, picturing her.
Nora. I give myself two strokes and one hard pump.
I'm already so close, so ready to spill in my hand while I whimper her name, but it's not enough. Not anymore.
We're not in Manhattan any longer, where work and the rules and my nerves always stop me. We're in the jungle now. And she touched me today. She looked at me with barely disguised heat.
I roll out of bed and tell myself I'm just getting air. I almost believe it until I realize what direction I'm walking in once outside.
Her light is on. Caba?a four. The furthest one along the dock, the one with the unobstructed view of the falls.
I know this. I saw Carmen assign the rooms. The warm light spills through the gap in the curtain across the water, and I can see the shadow of movement inside—just once, someone crossing the room—and then stillness.
I stop at the end of the dock.
I stand there in the dark with the falls going and the lagoon black below me and her light on sixty feet away, and I think: this is a new low, Reyes. This is genuinely a new low.
I don't move.
The jungle is very loud tonight. It sounds full.
The falls dominate everything, of course, but I can also hear the frogs croaking somewhere close by and the rustle of the undergrowth as creatures go about their business.
The air is as warm and heavy out here as it had been in my room, rich with the damp smell of the earth.
Her light goes out.
I stand there like a complete idiot in the dark, picturing her undressing and slipping between the bedsheets. I wonder if she'll let her hand wander as I had, and I suddenly can't breathe.
Then I hear footsteps behind me.
I turn to see Mateo, of all people, stepping out of the shadows near the end of the dock, coming from the direction of the northern path, the one that runs along the bank past the guest area, past the marked boundary, toward the restricted zone.
He has a small flashlight in one hand, switched off now.
His guide kit is on. He is very clearly returning from somewhere he has been deliberately quiet about.
We look at each other.
He takes in where I'm standing. The direction I was facing. The fact that there is nothing at this end of the dock except the mooring posts and the dark water, and, sixty feet out, a caba?a with a light that has just gone off.
I have nothing to say. No excuses. No explanations.
But I'm hoping he doesn't either.
He stares at me for a long moment, his expression that of a man who has noticed everything and is deciding what to do with it. Then, slowly, his face settles into a relaxed, almost-smile.
"Air?" he says.
"Air," I confirm.
He looks at the caba?a. Looks back at me. "Mm."
"You were on the northern path," I say. If he has anything on me, then I would like it noted that I also have something on him.
He pauses. Looks at the flashlight in his hand and then at me.
A beat passes in which we both understand exactly where we stand.
"Walk with me," he says.
We continue on to the end of the dock. The canopy overhang looks very different in the dark, like a cluster of hungry hands, reaching, clawing. The roar of the falls is almost deafening out here, and I realize that's why he led me here: so we won't be overheard.
"You remember that group we saw this morning?"
I nod. How could I forget?
He pulls his phone from his kit and shows me the photographs without preamble—three groups, six dates, the long lens catching people moving through the interior on unmaintained trails with the flat stone edge of the restricted tepuy base visible behind them.
"They're selling access," he says. "Private approaches inside the restricted zone.
The park authority needs one photograph with the markers in frame.
I have everything else." He locks the screen and pockets his phone.
"I am handling it. But I need forty-eight hours before anyone else knows what I've found.
" He looks at me steadily. "Can you do that? "
I look at the flashlight in his hand, then at the direction he came from.
"You have my word," I say.
He nods once. The way he does everything—certain, no wasted movement.
"And Se?or Reyes." He glances, very briefly, back down the dock toward the dark caba?as. "I did not see you out here tonight."
"And I," I say carefully, "did not see you."
He almost smiles. Then he turns and walks back toward the lodge, and I listen to his footsteps go quiet beneath the sound of the falls. I'm alone again at the end of the dock in the dark.
Her caba?a is still dark.
I stand there a little longer than I should, and then I go back to mine.