Part I
One
March 2016
Vance
“You good?”
She looks up from re-tying her bikini bottoms, smiling with her teeth pressed to her lip. “Yeah.” The word is a purr. Her eyes are still glazed as they look me up and down. “So…” She flashes me a dimpled grin. “Can I get your number?”
I’m lost in thought—so much so that I don’t realize she asked a question until her freckled cheeks blush. “Only while we’re on the cruise, if you want, but…” She does that little laugh—the awkward one that women do when they’re self-conscious.
“But you want my number.” I arch my brows.
Another giggle. “Sort of.”
“How old are you, sweetheart?”
She straightens her shoulders, making her little tits jut out. “How old do you think?” Her voice has gone all sexy-hoarse again, but she can’t keep the smooth seductress act up. She smiles, and her pink cheeks and blonde pigtails make her look all of eighteen years old.
“Twenty-two,” she says. “Just an office manager from Indiana, cruisin’ with my squad.” She steps closer, making the island hut feel smaller. Her finger traces my pec. “What do you do, cowboy?”
Huh? Oh, right. I was wearing a straw hat back on the catamaran, before our little group went snorkeling.
I run a hand over the soft mound of her breast, tweak her nipple gently with my fingertips. “You.”
I give her a numb, drunk grin. She laughs—a high-pitched, you’re-so-crazy kind of laugh—as her brown eyes rove over me again. She gathers her pigtails in one hand, lifts them off her sun-kissed shoulders. Then she kneels before me on the hard-packed sand floor.
She tilts her chin up at me, and I think: she’s pretty. It’s true. Still, though, the thought is like a pep talk. Fuck her, Van. Just fucking fuck her already, and get it over with.
I reach for the tequila bottle on the scarred wooden table, tip it back, and take a long pull.
* * *
Just fuck her…
The echoed thought bobs to the surface of my consciousness. I try to reach for it, to make sense of it, but my damn head’s pounding.
Shit.
I crack my eyelids open, squint at the shifting blob of black and gray above me. It’s swaying. Or…I am.
A swarm of sound fills my ears. An ocean sound. I turn my head a little. Ow. My bleary eyes sting as I look down myself. Swim trunks. I shift slightly in the hammock, and the canvas stings my sunburned back.
Fuck. I’m—I’m still on that little island. The one we went to for the snorkeling excursion. Why’s it dark?
I try to swallow as I look around, but my mouth’s dry. Like…really dry. I sit up in the hammock and my head spins. Nighttime. What happened? There’s a sheen of moonlight on the flat, black ocean. It glints off the waves as they roll to the shore.
I step off the hammock on unsteady legs, feeling like I might be sick. My heel comes down on something cold and hard. There’s a bottle of tequila, empty and half buried in the sand. My eyes throb. I rub them with a sweaty hand.
“Fuck me, cowboy. Fuck me!”
We fucked in the hammock. I remember now. Pigtails. I’m on the backside of the island—just a little crumb of sand we came to with the cruise’s Sunday afternoon catamaran excursion. She and I—what was her name?—we grabbed a bottle of tequila from the open bar and cut through the sand mounds at the center of the island. Sneaked back to the east shore, where these huts are. My gaze moves over the one she blew me in; they’re just these little, round, wood things with straw roofs, kinda scattered through the palm trees.
Shit. I’ve gotta get back to the island’s other side, fast. I’m surprised the snorkeling has run this long. Maybe they did some kind of kitschy bonfire thing after.
I must have passed out hard if Perky Tits left me here. What was she…some sort of business manager? Something responsible. Girl like that wouldn’t let them leave without me.
I ignore the moon’s position in the sky as I dig my flip-flops out of the sand and slide my sunburned feet into them, then start toward the island’s middle. One deep scratch on my ankle from the underbrush, and I’m angling back toward the beach. Too dark for that shit. But I’ve gotta move fast.
I swallow against my dry throat as I squint out at the water. What time is it? Wait—my phone! Where’s my fucking phone? I whirl back toward the huts, patting my pockets.
I left it on that boat. The catamaran. They had these little dry bags and—
“Oh, fuck.”
The moon—near full and beaming stark white light down from the center of the sky—is saying, “Hey asswipe, it’s midnight.”
Maybe shit is different in the Caymans. Sky shit changes with your latitude, right? Still, I start to jog over the hard plane of damp sand beside the water, my heels tossing surf behind me as I make like the Road Runner.