I’ll never—
Ashley tips her head back, angling herself to take me deeper.
My resolve to be a heartless piece of shit crumbles. I’m never going to make her understand. She’ll never see me for what I am.
I’ve been a captain long enough to know a losing battle when I see one.
She chose me and she won’t go back on it.
She chose me. At my worst. This has to be my worst, the most wrecked I’ve ever been.
I break the surface of that despair and take my first full breath in days. Ashley has already witnessed this demon, this monster I’ve become.
It’s not denial in her eyes. It’s not willful ignorance.
It’s acceptance.
I’m too lost in her to be a good man, which was never on the table anyway. I’m too lost to pull out of her mouth. All I can do is slow the pace. Give her some leeway.
Her fingernails skim over the skin of my thighs and around to the backs of my legs. A heartbeat of a pause. A silent question. I unhook my fingers from her hair and run my palms over it instead, smoothing it back from her face. The water from the shower feels as warm as the sea used to feel, as hot as her mouth feels now.
Ashley licks me, a long, slow curl from base to tip. She swirls her tongue over my piercing, giving it attention that makes my toes curl. Every muscle works itself into a shiver.
She does it again.
Something else unlocks, some nameless wall of welded steel, and my mind clears. The clawing desperation slides its hooks out of me. Grief is still a snapping dog that won’t go the fuck away, that won’t leave me alone, but it’s distracted. That’s good enough for now.
The way Ashley’s touching me now is more than good.
It’s gentle in a way I don’t deserve, and filthy in its gentleness. Her sweetness turns it dirty. Dirtier, somehow, than when she gagged on me, than when her body struggled in my hands in spite of her willingness. Ashley’s next lick yanks a sound from my mouth that’s nothing like me, or is everything like me, and I feel her smile around my cock.
“Mmm.” It’s an approving hum that shoots down to the tips of my toes. They curl in and grip the floor of the shower and pleasure ignites at the base of me. Real pleasure. Raw pleasure. It’s like a row of explosives setting each other off, one fire starting the next, and I should apologize for the way I have to fuck her, the way I have to come—
No. Not like this.
I haul her up off the floor. Ashley doesn’t have time to gasp before I have her on the bench, before I spread her thighs, before I lean down and return the favor.
She’s wet from being on her knees in my shower with my cock down her throat. The taste of her shoves me off the precipice of release, and this thing, this pleasure, takes both of my hands. One on her thigh to keep her open for me while she comes on my tongue, and the other fisted around my cock while I spill onto the tile.
4
Ashley
Poseidon washes my hair in the shower.
Then he lets me run a washcloth over his skin until I’m too tired to hold my hand up anymore. I’m running out of energy for this day. This week. This life.
The rain beats its fists against the roof, trying to get in.
At some point, the hiking has to make me stronger instead of exhausted.
That moment would probably come sooner if I didn’t spend so much time crying.
I’ll cry less tomorrow. Today’s already lost.
He shuts off the shower. There’s so much rain coming down that the sound stays the same—loud and rushing on the roof. I let Poseidon wrap me in a towel. I let him brush my hair and dress me in one of his shirts and put me in the huge bed.
It’s too early to fall asleep, but it’s dark as night and I’m tired down to the marrow. My calves are in knots from hiking, my eyes aching from all the tears. Poseidon lies at my back and skims his hand from my shoulder to my wrist and back again. There’s nothing to say, or nothing I can summon the energy to say.
The rain follows me everywhere in a constant drumming. It’s a strange rain. Usually, if it rains for a long time, the sound fades into the background. That doesn’t happen now. It’s not like it was on the Trident, when after a while I couldn’t hear the ocean unless I stopped to listen for it.
This rain never becomes white noise.
Peals of thunder follow me into my dreams along with the endless tap-tap-tap-tap of thousands of raindrops on shingles.
I’m alone in the bed when I wake up. I could be dreaming. It’s hard to tell. The master bedroom is bathed in blue light like an aquarium, and then it’s not. Was it a flash of lightning through rainclouds or a shark blocking the aquarium light? I’m probably very safe in either scenario. Aquariums have thick glass.
Poseidon sits by the window in the dark, only the outlines of him visible, and oh, god, I’m so tired. This must be a dream. I must be underwater, because it’s hard for my limbs to move. I push myself to sitting anyway. I’m either under the surface or in a current of air thick as syrup.
He’s instantly alert, leaning forward. It reminds me of the way he sat by my bed when I was sick, only I’m not sick now. “Go back to sleep, princess.”
“I’m asleep.” Tingling in my fingertips makes me think this is not true, but everything feels untethered from reality. “You’re not.”
Poseidon rubs a hand over his face. “I can’t sleep,” he admits. I hear him so clearly through the rain, though he does not raise his voice. “It’s killing me to be here.”
Sleep deprivation is a form of torture. Everyone knows that. And looking at him in the aquarium glow, I know he’s telling the truth. He can’t sleep. I’ve been too wrapped up in my own grief to notice it, but of course he’s not resting. He’s never in bed when I wake up. When I turn over in the night, the sheets are cold. I never find evidence he’s slept somewhere else. Not since we arrived on the island.
It’s been days and days. It’s not actually possible for a person to stay awake this long. Is it?
“It would be easier to sleep if it would stop raining.” It makes my head ache. There might not be a solution to Poseidon’s sleeplessness. If I had any money, I would bet that he can’t sleep because we’re not on a ship. Because he needs the ocean.
Poseidon is land sick.
It’s keeping him awake all night.
And the rain—
The bed tips, and I lower myself back down to the pillows. Poseidon’s eyes follow the movement. Light flickers. No—dances. We are deep down. We are at a great depth. Ocean presses in above us, trying to get in. Trying to get to—
“It’s the sea, you know. It made itself into rain. It can’t stand to be away from you.”
I can’t stand to be away from him.
“The sea doesn’t want anything to do with me.”
“Lie.” He’s farther away now, dream-dark closing in. “If you would go to her, the storm would stop.” It’s crazy. It’s also the most reasonable thing I’ve ever said.
Impossible to say if the footsteps moving across the room are real or imagined. Same goes for the soft slide of the door. Dream-sounds for a dream-world. Inventions of an exhausted mind.
It’s so quiet now. So still. I pull the silence over me like a blanket. There. Rest.