Lost

Derrek grinned. "You re-writing my dissertation for me, Kit-Cat?"

"No. I will be editing it, though, before you take it to your committee. But we'll have to wait until we're back to civilization and a plentiful supply of red pens. Even scientists shouldn't be allowed to get away with that kind of abuse of language."

"So what's this?"

"My round-up for the layfolk. Figured I'll send the high-tech version off to Scientific American, and carpet bomb the online journals like Salon and Wired with 'Small Earth' lite."

She would, too. All through his MA and the first two years of his PhD, he hadn't managed to get one article published, until he'd co-authored with his father. It would be just like Cat to land in London in her castaway rags, and at the age of eighteen have an article in fucking Scientific American without having even finished high school. He was glad she didn't have any real love of science, and would go back to her writing whenever they finally managed to get home.

***

"Hey, do you ever think how screwed we'd be if we'd been stuck on an island with no source of fresh water?" Cat asked, rinsing her bucket clean of sand and dust, then dipping it into the pool.

"We get enough rain. We'd live. Indigenous peoples have come up with fabulously intricate systems for collecting rainwater with leaves. We would have had to do something like that."

"Yeah, enough to drink and cook with, maybe. But not enough for this!"

Derrek figured she was running to save someone from drowning she'd stop and stand under the waterfall, first. Never once had he known her to go to the lagoon without taking the time to feel the cascade wash the sea's salt, the day's accumulation of grit from her hair and skin and clothes. Sometimes he envied her spontaneity. Her lust for all things experiential. Her sensuality.

"Come on, stinky! Rinse off before dinner. It's uncivilized to sit down to a meal smelling like ten hour-old sweat."

"My apologies, madame, if some of us shower fewer than three times per day!" he called to her over the roar of the falls.

Hoisting his bucket up onto the ledge of rock, he waded through the waist-deep pool and joined Cat under the cascade. He'd planned to have a proper bath after dinner, but a quick rinse now felt good. A few minutes' respite from the day's sticky heat. He bent and let the torrent of water pound his shoulders and back. No shower head, no amount of water pressure back home had ever felt like this.

Sometimes he felt guilty that the three of them got to enjoy the pleasures of the island, day after day—even if it wasn't their choice—and no one else did. But then he'd think that if there were other people there, the island would be ruined. From pristine paradise to an ugly, cheesy Club Med. And long before the first credit card had been swiped, checking in the first tourist, half the species of plant, half the birds and insects and bats would have died off.

The waning sun throwing half her face into shadow, Cat reached up and back, wringing water from her thick, dark hair. For the first time since the day in the cave, a hot blush flared up Derrek's throat and cheeks. Her thin tank had gone nearly transparent, and her nipples showed through with startling clarity, dark and peaked.

He'd gotten used to seeing her nearly naked almost daily. Why not? They'd bathed together as kids. Skinny dipped in friends' pools and during family vacations at lakes. And here, it had seemed silly, or, more truthfully, a hassle to change into swimsuits, to find privacy every time one wanted to change out of a wet shirt or shorts. A month ago, seeing Cat's high beams through a wet shirt had been no biggie.

"That the sunset? Or are you blushing? Again?" Cat teased, locking her moss-green eyes on him.

"Come on. Let's get back."

Cat laughed. He loved her laugh, full and deep, but not loud. Honest, real. Like her.

"You get them too, you know?"

"Them? What?"

"These."

She brushed the tip of her finger across his bunched nipple, and the spark shot from nerve to nerve, down his chest, through his belly, into his already swelling cock. He heard himself suck his breath through his teeth, and the blush in his cheeks flared hotter. He resented that. How she'd turned him into the blushing wallflower.

"Yours are sensitive, too," she said, soft, earnest. With the genuine curiosity, eagerness she'd always had. "And you're hard again."

He didn't even argue, this time. When she said, "Take your shorts off," he just did it. And when she asked him to, he curved his fingers around the girth of his cock, and stroked it for her. But when she tried to touch, he pushed her hand away. Watching was one thing, but he wasn't going to start taking hand jobs from his sister. When she pulled up her wet tank, though, and bared her breasts, he didn't stop her. The sweetest ache sank through him, sifting through his gut, and settled in his balls. The urge of need, sex, mingled with something else. A more tender want.

Her breasts seemed to want him, to seek him, her dark nipples puffed and jutting. He resisted the urge, the need to touch. To kiss.

She raised her skirt. No panties underneath. Her long, delicate fingers slipped between her thighs.

"Cat..."

"Hey. It's only fair."

Over the thunder of the falls he imagined he heard her fingers sliding between her wet folds. Her green eyes got that drowsy pleasure look, heavy-lidded and sensuous. Her lips parted. Her brow furrowed, fretful.

She lifted her hand. Two pink fingertips glistened with her wetness. Startled, he stepped back, away from her, but she stepped forward, closed the gap, put a hand at the back of his waist to keep him there. Brought her glistening fingertips to him. The smell of her, her musk drove a spike of need through him. Then she touched those fingertips, slick with her warm, fragrant juice, to his lips. Held her fingers there where he could feel her, smell her, almost taste her.

Breathing her in, taking her in, those heavy-lidded, expectant eyes, her soft, just-parted lips, the little throb in the vein by her throat, how her fig-colored nipples jutted from the faintly paler, crinkled flesh at the tips of her smooth breasts, the hem of her skirt still raised, still showing him her sleek thighs, her dark bush, he was losing it. God, fuck, yes, losing himself in her, pumping his rigid cock into his fist, and he touched the tip of his tongue to her fingers, tasted her piquant musk, licked her fingertips, drew them between his lips and sucked.

His mouth watered at the taste of her. His cheeks went hot as she groaned at the feel of his tongue rubbing between her fingers to lick up every last bit of her musk, but she just smiled and sank down. Kneeling on a flat stone in the water she coaxed him closer, closer with her hand at the small of his back.

When he froze she looked up at him from under her lashes and said, "Please."

It was the kind of thing he'd never done. Only seen in porn flicks. She squeezed her breast taut and brushed the umber tip against the head of his cock. The sensation was subtle. Soft and light. But the sight of it, fuck. Gripping his shaft in his fist, he rubbed the tip of her breast with the crown of his cock, watched her nipple stiffen even more. Felt his body go tight around that fierce pleasure, felt the pleasure explode and overflow. Watched his cock lace her delicate breasts with his translucent, glistening icing.

Panting, hectic, she stood and pushed him back, onto the flat stone where she'd been kneeling. Climbed onto his lap. He held the crown of his cock tight in his fist, scared she was trying to impale herself on it, but she went up on her knees, presenting him with her come-laced tits.

"Have you tasted it before? Your semen?"

"Yes."

"Like this? Off the breasts of a lover?"

"No."

Her hand ducked under the lifted hem of her wet skirt, and a single finger parted her lips and slid between. Now her hand was still, but her hips moved, flexing forward and back, humping that lone finger.

"I liked how it looked, that day in the cave, your stuff on your chest in these delicate patterns. I wanted you to see it on mine."

Holding his gaze, she kept fucking her finger, the motion of her hips sliding her cunt back and forth along its length. Her other hand came up, and with a fingertip she smeared a pearl of his ejaculate over her stiff nipple, glazing it, glazing the dark, puckered flesh at its base.

"Please," she sighed, her hand curving at the back of his neck, now, pulling him to her. "Please."

He touched his tongue to the swollen peak of her breast, and licked. Tasting his own peppery musk, he licked again, rubbing the flat of his tongue across her firm, crinkled flesh and the jutting nub of nipple, then sucked it between his lips. Cat whimpered and pulled him harder against her. Looking down the length of her torso he saw her still flexing, writhing against her hand. Still nursing at her nipple, he cupped her other breast in his hand, aroused, moved to feel her silken skin, the eager response of her nipple under his thumb. Again she whimpered, clutching him to her breast, frantically humping her hand, then finally cried out, once, again, and again, each groan escalating with the abandon of someone who'd never muffled her ecstasy for fear the neighbors would hear.

She collapsed into his arms then, her heart pattering hard and fast against his chest, resting her head in the crook of his neck, her arms wrapped tight around him. When she let go he felt his stickiness between them like glue that hadn't had time to set. Her face just an inch or two from his she smiled. Her green eyes looked misty. Vulnerable.

"That was..." She laughed her soft, rich laugh. "Thanks."

They rinsed off a second time under the falls, then hoisted the water pails and headed for home.

***

Cat loved the buoy and roll of the sea, the caress of the tide tugging and lapping at her as she floated on the surface, the undulating embrace of the depths when she dove. Sometimes she imagined herself an eel, slither-winding below the ceiling of swells and waves, or a porpoise arcing, breaking the surface, gasping a lungful of air and plunging under again, her feet two flippers propelling her. The big fish, even the small sharks she saw sometimes didn't scare her. The rip tides did, but only enough to quicken her adrenaline, make her heart pound. Excite her.

After, she liked to lie naked in the sand, liked the way it shifted under her and formed a perfect mold of her body, liked feeling the sun warm her skin, making it tight and a little itchy while the salt crystals formed. The only thing she didn't like was how crunchy and sticky the sea water made her hair. But it was a short walk to the lagoon.

Walking up the beach, Derrek spotted his sister, languorous and golden under the low sun. Naked. The realization almost made him turn back. He could lie to his father, pretend he hadn't been able to find her.

The soles of her feet were still pale, pink heels and balls, her insteps nearly white, her high arches making an oval to frame the dark sands, the bottoms of her toes like ten little pink clam shells. Her ass, though, had almost the same tawny luster as the rest of her body. Round, firm cheeks and that deep cleft. And below.

Derrek stopped.

Below, between her parted thighs, not even hidden under a modest veil of shadow, the glistening pink of her cunt taunting him from between the dark hair. His cock swelled and started to rise, fighting the constraint of his shorts, wanting inside that soft wet pink. But even before that, a pang, a twinge shot through his gut, through his chest. A deeper, more poignant longing.

Fuck it. She'd get home when she got home. She wouldn't care if her food was cold. Them all eating together was just Dad's way of clinging to normal.

Derrek turned up the beach, delved into the dappled light and shade of the jungle, wending through the dense growth of ferns catching at his feet, the tangle of vines and grasping branches, his mind got tangled up in thoughts of her. Cat. That relaxed parting of her warm thighs, that soft warm parting of her cunt's full lips, the wet pink folds between glistening her body's want.

Birds screamed and lemurs sang. Animal sounds of danger and hunger. Grunts and cries and howls caught and blurred into his panting, hunger and danger.

Naked. He pictured her, and couldn't conjure the image of her with clothes on. She'd always worn them. She'd gone to museums and symponies and knew which artists had started Die Brücke and could name all of Stravinsky's ballets. But now in his mind she was naked, always naked and sheened and open.

He stopped. He had to. Had to crouch and get his cock in his hand, had to fall to his knees and stroke, thinking of her. Always her, now. Her small smooth breasts with their dark tips. Her white teeth, her pink tongue and full lips, wet and parted. Parted to kiss. Parted to lick him, suck him. And her cunt. Her slick pink cunt. His fingers in there, his cock in there. His cock in her cunt, fucking, thrusting, her panting, howling, crying.

Panting, trembling, he watched his semen drool down the pale bark of the young palm. Guilt filled everything left empty by that spilled ejaculate, filled all the veins not surging anymore with hot want and blood, filled his gut with something cold and heavy.

Every time, now. Always her he thought of when he jerked off, her face, her body, her voice. Her, whole, and the others, bits and pieces of women he'd known, bodies he'd seen in pictures on monitors, in magazines, on billboards, nipples and asses and glossed lips and waxed cunts, his whole repertoire of masturbatory fodder, gone. Now when he closed his eyes and gripped his erection, Cat always came and he couldn't chase her off.

As he emerged from the jungle and caught sight of the work table at the center of the clearing, a vague unease, a regret mingled with his guilt. On his way back he'd meant to collect samples at the base of the bluffs. He'd completely forgotten.

***

The afternoon sun fought to get inside, rays cutting through the gaps between the shafts of bamboo, slashing across the floor and over Derrek's prone body on his sleeping mat. Cat grinned. Derrek had always slept like a corpse, not stirring for explosions of thunder, for giggling girls at slumber parties when they were kids, even when the monsoon winds tried to pull the house apart, he'd snore through it all. And at this moment he looked like a corpse, as well. Flat on his back, limbs akimbo in a futile effort to defy the heat, his sheet scrunched down to a thin band draped across his pelvis adding to the effect of a modest cadaver.

Still, he looked lovely. Cat sat down on the floor beside him. Bands of sunlight striping his face, his naked chest and abdomen, his muscular arms, his hairy thighs. With his breath his belly rose and fell, dipping to accentuate the curve of his ribs, making a little shadow appear in the gap between his body and the sheet.

She wanted to look at it again. The part of him under the sheet. She wanted to touch. To smell.

Sitting perfectly still, she listened. Silence promised her their dad was still off collecting samples. Gingerly she plucked up the edge of the sheet and folded it back. Everything was so, so lovely. The thin line of dark hair that ran from his belly button and merged with the thick thatch of black curls below. His pelvic bones, rising to pale, gentle peaks with the grace of the slope of a desert dune. His cock.

Science had an answer for it. Human beings, like all animals, are programmed to reproduce. Glands pour chemicals into the blood so when you smell that potent musk, when you see that delicate sculpture of warm flesh, you want to touch, to kiss, to take it into you. People are flesh-and-chemical magnets, powerless to resist coming together.

His cock made her happy and broke her heart, at once. So soft, so delicate, all pink, full and heavy, lying against his pelvis. As if it were asleep, like him, and even in the stultifying afternoon heat, was clinging to him for warmth. For safety. Could you love a part of another person?

When she crouched down on her hands and knees and breathed him in, his scent, his heat flooded her body with want, with need, an ache as cruel as desperate hunger. Fuck, she wanted to mount him, to spread her thighs and rub the sensitive nub of flesh against his cock, feel it harden, nestled between her slick lips, then take him inside. Feel that hardness open her, rise up, up inside her, fill her. But all that had to wait.

Scared he'd wake before she could discover everything, she forgot to touch, to trace the ridge of the crown with her fingertip, to lift the soft warm penis and feel its weight in her hand. She just bent her elbows, dipped down, inhaled his musk, then tasted. Licked his salt musk, drawing her tongue up the length of him, just half what it was when she'd seen him hard.

Derrek whimpered and her spine and gut contracted. He hadn't woken, though. His lips had parted, but his eyes were still closed.

Rushing to the feast before she was chased off, she put her lips to him, and drew him into her mouth. Sucked at the plump crown, like a bulb of tender fruit against her tongue. Already the warm soft flesh in her mouth was swelling, firmer and firmer each second. Driven, needful, she drew him deeper into her mouth as he swelled, wanting all of him, greedy, not wanting to leave anything to the indifferent air.

Twitching, flailing he woke, but she didn't release him. More hungrily, urgently she sucked, explored his length, the veined texture of him, the ridges and contours with the tip and the flat of her tongue, lapping and swallowing to savor his taste.

Her name never came. No reprimand. Just a broken, needful groan. Little whimpers. His fingers raked into her hair, clenched and pulled, demanding more. More, she wanted it too. Loved how hard, not like any flesh she'd ever felt. How it flexed and twitched in the tight grip of her lips, against the firm press of her tongue.

He grunted, flexed his hips, fought to get deeper inside her mouth. Gasped and groaned and thrust between her lips, pumping his hard length back and forth over her seeking tongue. His whimpering sounded like crying and his need made her tender and fierce, both, moved by his want, driven to sate her own.

A rustle. A scuff. Father approaching. But Derrek hadn't heard.

Like an animal with its jaws locked on its prey, she wouldn't let go. Nursing the succulent head, licking along his rigid shaft, she drew her lips over the length of him, forced another whimpering groan from him, and a warm, zesty spurt of his fluid. Burst after burst, the thick stuff filled her mouth and she started swallowing, forcing her throat to accept its unusual consistency. Greedy, she lapped up the coating of spit and semen slicking his quivering cock, wiped her mouth with her arm, and threw the sheet back over him, covering his stubborn erection.

The crunch of steps in the sand was just outside, now. Derrek's face went red, his aqua eyes flared in anger and panic. But by the time their dad had kneed the door open and come in with his tray of samples, Cat was in the adjacent room rubbing the fuzz from a naranjilla fruit.

"Your siesta over already?" he teased Derrek as he passed by on his way to the lab.

From the doorway Cat laughed silently, watching Derrek rush and struggle to get his shorts on while keeping the sheet over his reluctantly waning half-erection.

"Tomorrow, Derrek, there's something I'd like you to see at the pool at the north end."

"Sure."

Could her dad see that Derrek's cock was still swollen and sticking out from his groin under those shorts? All he'd think was that Derrek had had a nice dream. Cat had noticed he had those himself, now and then.