Surviving Raine 01 (36 page)

“Not in my nature, I guess.”  I shrugged.  It wasn’t a matter of getting through it.  I tried to find ways of forgetting it.  “There’s a lot more to you than there is to me.”

“Oh, really?” Raine questioned.  “Like what?”

“Well, there’s your tits…oh, and your ass…I love your ass…”

She smacked me on the chest.

The rain was literally pouring out of the sky in huge sheets now.  The collection area in the back of the shelter was full and overflowing.  I kept talking to keep her distracted from the weather.

“I like the way you look at me,” I said seriously.  “Sometimes when you do, your eyes light up, and I think maybe I could be lucky enough for you to care about a fucked up asshole like me.

“That’s love, you know,” Raine said with a smile.  “I see it in your eyes when you look at me, too.”

“It’s easy to love you,” I said, running my hand down her side and over her hip and then back up to her shoulder.  “At least, it was once I stopped fighting it.”

“You did fight it,” she acknowledged.  “What made you stop?”

“Your…acceptance of me,” I said.  “That’s really my favorite thing about you.  I don’t know why you put up with my shit, but I’m glad you do.”

“You aren’t that hard to accept, Bastian.”  Her hand reached up into my hair.  “You were very…
trying
in the beginning.  A lot of that was the alcohol in your system, I think.  Considering how much stress you were under, I can understand why you behaved that way.  I know my dad would become quite a bear sometimes when his job would stress him out.”

“I don’t think I can just blame it on stress,” I huffed.  “I mean, it’s not like I wouldn’t have been like that if you had met me at a bar or something.”

“I bet you could be very charming when you want to be.”

“Yeah, but I would just be hoping to get my dick in you.  If you didn’t seem like the type to put out, I would have found someone who would do it for money instead.”

“Bastian!”

“It’s true.”

“You’re just trying to make it difficult for me to argue with you about it.”

“There’s no argument,” I insisted.  “Are you fucking blind to all the crappy shit I’ve done to you?  I scared you half to death when you were taking a bath, I bitched at you constantly when my leg was healing, I fucking hit you…”

“Please don’t bring that up again.”  Raine closed her eyes and shook her head a bit.  Every time she tried to tell me I wasn’t such a bad guy, I’d bring that little tidbit up.  At some point, though, she needed to see what I was.  She seemed to want to believe I was some kind of fucking hero.  I wasn’t.

“All the shit I’ve done, Raine.”  I stopped a moment and took a deep breath.  “I’m a…a…
murderer
, for fuck’s sake.  Sometimes I can’t comprehend why you would let me even touch you.”

“You did what you had to do at the time,” Raine reasoned.  “I’m not going to pretend I like it, but I understand, given the circumstances.”

“You’ve got to be completely insane,” I told her.  “Not that I’m arguing with it, because I’m not, but you can’t be right in the head to take all of it in stride the way you do.”

“Maybe,” she admitted, “but I don’t think so.  I think if someone had loved you the way you deserved a long time ago, none of that would have happened.”

“Maybe I’m just unlovable.”

Raine turned her eyes on me, and her glare would have made me take a step back had I been standing.

“That is not true!” she yelled over the sound of the pounding rain.  “Just because no one ever took the time to get to know you doesn’t mean you are unlovable.  Don’t ever say that again!”

“Shit, Raine,” I growled and pounded the back of my head against the make-shift mattress.  I was starting to get fucking pissed.  “Even as a kid no one fucking wanted me.  You know the one thing in common with every single foster parent who kicked me out?  The same thing they had in common with my real parents -
me
.  That’s it.  At some point I had to accept that I was the fucking problem.  I’m not a nice guy, Raine.  Haven’t you fucking noticed that?  Why do you think I was so good at fighting?  Because when people piss me off, I want to kill them.  That was my value to Landon.  That was the only time anyone ever had any use for me.”

“Bastian, you are about the most useful person I have ever known, and that was long before I saw you fight.”

“But I only know that shit because of fighting.”  I had no idea where I was going with this shit.  It had started out as a means to distract her from the storm, which was really raging outside now, so mission accomplished.  I hadn’t actually intended to get into it this deep, and now I was officially in over my head.  When Bastian Stark gets in over his head, the asshole comes out.  Long before my brain listened to the words it was forming, they were already out of my mouth.  “The only reason you even fell in love with me was because I saved your life.  There’s probably a fucking syndrome with your name on it.  Fuck, if any other guy from the ship had been on the raft with us, you’d probably be fucking him now instead of me!”

Raine gasped, and I think my heart actually stopped beating for a few seconds.  Holy shit, I didn’t even know where that came from.  I guess on some level, I believed it, but I sure as hell never meant to say it.

“Fuck, Raine…”  But I didn’t have any kind of follow up sentence to offer her.

“Bastian, do you really think so little of me?”

“What the fuck is that supposed to mean?”  I didn’t even like how the words sounded in my ears.  I thought the fucking world of her – how could she not know that?  Oh yeah, because I’m a complete dick.

“Do you really think I would give myself to you because you are the only other person here?”  She pushed against my arms and sat up, staring down at me.  “Do you think I have sex with you because I’m just bored, and you’re the only guy around?  Is that really what you think?  You think that I would or could replace you with just any guy’s penis?”

I didn’t even know how to answer her, so I kept my stupid mouth shut.  I had the distinct feeling that if it had not been for the rain, she wouldn’t still be in my presence at all.  When I realized she was going to wait for me to come up with an answer, I still didn’t know what to say.

“I don’t think you’re like that,” I finally said.  “I never did, and I don’t know why I said that.  I never know what to think about you.  I don’t know why you…why you do anything for me.”

“Because I love you.”  There were tears in her eyes now, and it fucking tore me apart.

“I don’t understand that, either.”

“Because you are worth it,” she said with determination.  I started to argue, but she placed her little hand right over my mouth and told me to shut up.  “I love you because of
you
.  Not because you’re strong enough to kill people.  Not because you know everything there is to know about how to survive out here.  Not because you’ve saved my life over and over again.  Certainly not because you’re the only guy in the general area.”

“I love you because you are worthy of my love,” she continued.  “I love you because you show me every day how much you care about me and how much I mean to you.  You show me when you worry about me getting sunburned, when you make sure I eat a bunch of different things to stay healthy, and when you make love to me.  I love you because under all that brawn, you are gentle and caring.  I love your internal strength and willingness to persevere, no matter what life has thrown at you.  I love you because when you recite poetry to me, I can hear in your voice how much you mean it.  I love you more than anyone and anything in the world, and I can’t imagine my life without you now – not here, not anywhere else.”

She moved her hand away from my mouth and sat back, her arms crossed.

“And don’t you dare say to me that my love is misplaced, because it’s not.  I love you, Bastian Stark.  You are worthy of it, and nothing you say is going to make that change.”

I didn’t know what to say.  Any words I could have invented on my own would have been inadequate, so I used someone else’s.

“Forgiveness is the fragrance of the violet which still clings fast to the heel that crushed it.”

Raine’s eyes met mine again, her tears still staining her cheeks.

“I’m a heel, Raine,” I told her.  “You’re my beautiful violet, and I’m always crushing you.  You take away my nightmares, and I probably add to yours.  I don’t think I will ever believe I deserve you, but I love you more than I can even describe.  I don’t know if I can ever…be better for you, but if you’re willing to keep forgiving me for being a complete idiot, I’m willing to keep trying.”

“You are forgiven, my strong, beautiful, gentle idiot.”  Raine’s smile covered me in her love.

While the wind and rain battered at our shelter, I reached up and pulled her down to me, my lips gently caressing hers.  I rolled her onto her back on the mattress and showed her how much her words meant to me the only way I knew how.

* * * * *

If I really wanted to, I could have figured out exactly how long it had been since we arrived on the island, but I didn’t really care anymore.  On the raft I paid attention based on how many days of water we had left, but here it was not an issue.  If I was going to estimate, I’d say it had been about two months since the ship sank, but I didn’t know for sure and most importantly, I didn’t give a shit.

“I’m going to go wash off,” Raine informed me.  She smiled shyly and looked away, which just about made me laugh out loud.  I’d fucked her three times since lunch, barely letting her up long enough to get something to eat before I was in her again, and still she played bashful when she looked at me.

Fucking incredible.

“It’s your own fault for wandering around naked all the time,” I said with a grin.  “I can’t help but take advantage.”

“Shall I stop?”

“Fuck no!”

Raine quickly kissed my cheek and walked off into the edge of the waves.  I smiled as I watched the curve of her ass come into better view like I was some pervert checking out the high school cheerleaders.  I admired the late evening sun shining off her smooth skin as she sauntered away, swaying her hips in such a way that she had to have been doing it on purpose.  My cock twitched even though the little fucker ought to be tired out at this point.  What can I say?  I was always going to want her right here on this beach as often as possible.

I lit one of my homemade Lobelia smokes and leaned my back against a coconut palm tree.  Raine had given me some shit for making them, but she eventually gave up and seemed to be content with rolling her eyes at me when I pulled one out.  They weren’t chock-full of nicotine, like I would have preferred, but they did a pretty decent job of making me feel like I was smoking a Marlboro 100.  If I only had a bottle of vodka to go with it, I’d be set.

Yeah, you’d think after all this time the cravings would go away, but they fucking didn’t.  Sometimes I wanted a drink just as bad as I had the first night on the raft.  I’d go through DTs again just to get my hands on a fucking fifth of most anything.

Raine reached the tide line and walked tentatively into the water, testing the temperature with her toes before walking straight in.  I didn’t know why the fuck she did that – it was a pretty constant temperature so there weren’t any surprises or anything.  She always did it, though.  She walked in slowly, then shoved her toes underneath the sand and wiggled them around before she finally got around to actually getting in the water.

I continued to watch her ass as she wandered slowly into the calm waves.  She was so fucking beautiful, it drove me nuts.  She walked around naked most of the day unless she was going to go forage in the jungle or something.  It meant my cock was hard a good portion of the day, but I made good use of that, so I fucking loved it.  The new diet had brought back her curves, and though she had always been beautiful, she was simply stunning to look at now that she wasn’t so thin.  I had lost several pounds while on the raft as well, but as far as I could tell, it was mostly back.  If someone asked me to bench four hundred pounds, I might still have been able to do it.  Maybe.  Once the shelter was complete, I took to moving rocks around just to keep my muscles built up even though I didn’t really need them for anything.  Sometimes I moved them from one side of the beach to the other.  I got plenty of exercise existing around here, though, so it probably wasn’t completely necessary, but I did it anyway.  I wasn’t as buff as I had been when there was a gym readily available, but I guess I was still built enough.

Our Survival 101 grade was pretty much an
A+
.  We had water, shelter, and plenty of different food sources.  Between the shorts I wore, Raine’s shorts, my boxers, and one T-Shirt, we didn’t have much in the way of clothing, but we really didn’t need it, either.  Raine washed everything out every couple of days and hung it in a bush to dry, so it kept clean, but they were all getting pretty worn.  That was part of the reason for going in the buff most of the time – it saved wear and tear on the clothes for when we needed it.

I smoked the last of the cigarette and tossed the end of it into the fire.  When I leaned forward a bit and rested my arms on my knees, my leg cramped up.  My leg was still sore sometimes, especially when I sat in one position for a long time and when I first got up in the morning, but overall it wasn’t bad.  The scar was pretty nasty, but it just added to my collection.  I stretched my leg out in front of me and then pulled it back in close to my chest.  After doing that a couple of times, the cramp went away.  I glanced around the beach, then up to the shelter, wondering if there was anything I ought to do before nightfall.

The lack of any real need to get something done was nice, but it gave me a lot more time to think.  Sometimes that was good, and sometimes it wasn’t.  The nightmares never went away completely, but they weren’t as bad as they had been right after Raine was attacked.  They had me considering what kind of fruits there were around here that I could ferment into alcohol, but I really didn’t have more than a rudimentary understanding of how to do that, and Raine would fucking kill me if I tried.  The smokes were bad enough.  I got the shakes still when I thought about drinking, so I tried not to think about it at all.  Unfortunately, sometimes it just popped into my head whether I wanted it there or not.  I’d get pissy then, and Raine would take the brunt of it.  I didn’t know why she put up with my moody ass, but she always seemed to forgive me once I calmed down.  I guess she really didn’t have much of a choice.  It’s not like she could talk to anyone else around here, so she was pretty much stuck with me.