Dreamboat Ch. 02

Usual standard declarations about age, etc. apply here.

As an author, I set the characters up, tell them precisely what I want them to do, and then send them off to do it. And of course they bugger off and do exactly what they want. Honestly, it's like trying to herd cats! So if you read chapter 1, you'll know some of the characters already, and guessed they may have a few secrets yet to reveal. (And if you haven't read chapter 1 you'll be completely in the dark – enjoy the guessing game!) But, I like them already, and I hope you do too.

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He could hear the children, the song they chanted as they played together, and the appalling, familiar dread swept through him. He tried to stand, to shout, to scream a warning, to scare them away, but could do nothing. He could feel the wounds in his arm and back burn hotter and hotter, his torn and twisted ankle shattered from the last RPG strike. He wasn't worried about the grenades or rockets though – it was the children.

He wanted to push away the swirling, smoky clouds - grey and brown and loaded with dust and propellant, acrid to his nose and palate. But his arms wouldn't move. He was stuck fast as if cemented somehow to the rubble strewn floor as the children drew nearer. Soon they would appear around the corner. He would see them. They would see him. They would skip and dance...

The wound in his knee was migrating upward, travelling ever higher and slipping around to the back of his thigh. He was bleeding out. He knew it. There was nothing he could do. But the children would stop it. They would...

He screamed and at last his arms moved. He flailed and felt his fingers strike something soft, something that cried out. The cry slowed his frantic efforts to escape. A weight, not heavy, but nevertheless firm, settled across his chest. Hands held his wrists - small hands.

Children's hands? He tensed and felt the weight across him do the same in response.

No. Not children. The children weren't here. They were gone. All gone.

Reid opened his eyes. At first he could only see a yellow haze – a haze that gradually sharpened until he realized he was looking at the top of a head - a blond head. It was a pretty colour, he concluded slowly, and finally relaxed his body.

"I'm awake," he muttered, his tongue thick and heavy in his parched mouth.

The head shifted upward and Wren's face came into view, staring into his eyes with concern and worry evident in every aspect of her expression. Fear had left her face to leave it appearing older than it really was. She looked very pale and drained, smudges of dirt and a couple of drops of blood on one cheek leaving her looking even more like a homeless waif than she normally did.

"Please don't kill me!" she whispered.

Those four words, hardly discernible over the sound of water slapping against something (a dock? a pier? a boat?) outside, shocked him back to reality and he tried to sit bolt upright. Initially her weight held him down, although he knew she was a very slight little thing, and then pain from his thigh suddenly kicked in.

"Ah! Shit!" he yelled.

"You mustn't move!" she urged him. "You mustn't! It will start bleeding again!"

Again? It had stopped? If she had managed to make a two inch cut right through his thigh stop bleeding, she had to be a miracle worker.

"Okay," he sighed. "I won't move. Can you let go of my wrists now?"

Wren looked into his eyes for a moment and then gave a small nod. He felt his right wrist released and he flexed his fingers: she had squeezed hard enough to cut off the blood supply. Which was quite impressive, he thought. She couldn't be more than what ...five-two maybe, and weigh no more than fifty kilos? She had one hell of a grip for someone that size.

She shifted, lifting herself off him and drawing back onto her knees. He drew his left arm up; unable to help noticing that it had been held under her body, against her groin. His hand felt warm. He tried not to think about that.

"You were having a nightmare," she commented quietly. "You were thrashing about and I didn't want you to reopen your cuts. I tried to hold you down. I thought you might kill me in your sleep."

"You did a pretty good job," Reid noted. "I get nightmares quite often and it apparently takes quite some effort to keep me contained. You did well."

She flushed at the praise, the colour coming back to a chalky, pale face.

"I should check the dressing," she said.

"Wait a moment!" His words checked her movement, but he was pleased to see no fear in her eyes now. "What happened? Where are we? What's going on?"

She pursed her lips, and then smiled very sweetly at him.

"You saved my life. You were fighting the Fiddlers and ... and ... it was amazing. It looked like something from one of those chop suey movie things. I could hardly see you move and then ... and then two of them were down and you told me to get on the boat. I didn't see what happened next until I managed to jump aboard and the next thing I knew you were sort of hopping towards me with that huge knife, and I could see more of Cole's men running towards us and I was so frightened. The boat started drifting away and then you sort of stepped forward and fell flat on your face. You went unconscious, so I dragged you in here."

She wound down and took a gasp of breath. Then she leaned forward and kissed him very lightly on the lips.

"You saved my life," she repeated in a whisper, after a few very long seconds during which he discovered how incredibly soft her lips felt.

"That's what friends do, I guess."

She smiled at his reply.

Wren sat back again and then drew her shawl down from where it was tucked around his shoulders. Reid realised for the first time that he was shirtless, and – when the shawl was drawn all the way down – pantless as well. He shivered in the cool air, realising consciously for the first time that wherever they were, they had made it through the night. He could see very clearly in reflected sunlight.

His thigh was wrapped in bloodstained cloth, and as she leaned forward to very carefully unwind it, he realised that she had torn the sleeves from her dress to bandage him. He also realised that the resultant holes in the sides of her midnight blue dress not only bared her arms, but also allowed him to see her small, but very pretty breasts in a somewhat grubby white bra.

She noticed his glance and smiled again. "You were bleeding very heavily, so I made a tourniquet with one sleeve and used the other to bandage you up and keep the pressure on the wound."

"So, I know we're still on the boat of course," he said. "I can feel us bobbing about. But how did we get away?"

She pursed her lips again in thought. "I don't really know. I was trying to drag you into the cabin and didn't really want to put my head up. But when I did take a peek, we seemed to be a long way away from the shore."

"But the boat was drifting in, how come it drifted straight out again?" Reid mused.

"Maybe the tide changed," she offered. She unwound the last part of the bandage, and gave a little squeal of delight. "Oh it's looking much better."

Reid took a look, astonishment sweeping through him as he saw the twin wounds neatly stitched closed. There was no sign of the tourniquet, so she must have removed it after he was stitched up.

"You did that?" he asked incredulously. She nodded. He held his hands up in silent question.

"Well I'd seen Andrew being stitched up often enough. When he was high he was always falling over and cutting himself. So I pretty much knew how to do it, and when I found a curved needle in one of those drawers..."

"Hang on! You found suture needles on this boat?"

"Is that what they're called? Yes – in that second drawer over there. It was in a little sealed packet alongside a bottle of some antiseptic. Oh, and another packet with thread in it. So I used them. That seemed to stop the blood flow, so I covered us up and ... well, I knew that to keep warm you need to snuggle up. So I snuggled up to you."

"You did?" Reid said, trying to keep the sheer incredulity he felt from his voice.

"Yes. You smell nice," she declared. "Very masculine."

"Thank you," he murmured disbelievingly. He hadn't managed to bathe for a very long time.

She went to a tiny sink to the side of the cabin just inside the door, ran the tap and filled a glass with water. She handed it to him, and then knelt to help him lift his head to drink.

He sucked it down greedily and she gave him another. When his thirst was sated at last, he touched her hand. "Thank you!"

There was so much to consider and he couldn't think of how to explain the impossible odds against this tiny boat appearing at just the right moment – and never mind in the hour, more like in their split-second of their need. Then the tide turning the moment they were safely aboard, and then being stocked with just what was needed to keep him and her alive.

That last thought triggered another.

"So where are we now?"

Wren frowned and then rose to look out of the side windows. He hadn't noticed before that the boat even had windows, but then he had had other things on his mind, what with trying to fight off three thugs trying to kill them.

"I can only see waves," she commented.

"No land at all?" Reid asked.

She took another careful look to the sides and front of the boat, and then stepped out of the cabin into the sunshine at the rear of the boat. The breeze ruffled her blouse and shorts, and made her golden hair dance to one side as she peered in all directions. She disappeared and he heard careful footsteps making their way across the roof of the cabin.

Then she was back again, pushing her hair back over her shoulders. "Nope. No land. Just sea in every direction."

He sat up and pushed the shawl off him, realising for the first time that he was lying on a real bed. He lifted his good leg and she flew at him, pushing him back down.

"No!" she yelled. "You have to rest. I have to take care of you. So, you just tell me what to do and I'll do it. You lie there and get better!"

He tried to push her off. "I need to find a way of knowing where we are. We could be drifting into sea lanes, or onto shoals."

"Then I will do that. You just tell me what to do."

He was weaker than he realised, and she managed to push him flat once more. She looked around, frowned and then opened a pair of cupboard doors set at the head of the bed.

"Aha!" she crowed triumphantly, hauling out a couple of pillows and quickly arranging them under his head, then following it up with a blanket that she spread over him carefully.

"This boat is pretty well stocked for being so small," Reid commented.

"It seems to be," Wren agreed. She popped up onto her feet once more and went on a voyage of discovery.

"There's food in this cupboard," she commented as she busily opened doors and cupboards. "And in the fridge."

"There's a fridge?" he marvelled.

"A stove, and a sink, and a microwave oven and ... oh! A coffee maker. We can have coffee!"

She opened another door. "Oh my God!"

"What is it?" he asked anxiously, hoping it wasn't dead bodies or something. There was still the mystery of who owned this boat hanging over everything.

"Nothing bad. I'll be back in a few minutes."

He heard the door close and then the sound of water running. Ah, so there was a toilet.

He settled back, lost in thought and dozed for a while. Then she was kneeling on the bed next to him once again, wrapped in a thick white towel, another one twisted up into a turban on her head.

"There's the strangest little shower in there," she said with a huge smile. "It feels so wonderful to be clean again. I haven't been this clean in months."

He knew how she felt, and felt a twinge of envy that she was so much cleaner than he was. Being sweat-dirty and smelling somewhat rank is the order of the day when you are homeless, so to smell her natural scent beneath the perfume of soap and shampoo, left him feeling even more disgusted at his own odour than usual.

Her face had lost the final echoes of fear and despair, and Reid realised for the first time just how young she was. Young, and beautiful. He had never really noticed before. Whenever they had met on the streets, even when they'd talked in long, meandering conversations, she had always kept the hood of her coat up – even in summer.

She found a bowl and sponge and proceeded to give him a bed bath, carefully washing every part of him, giggling at his reaction when she washed the soles of his feet, and then apologising profusely when he groaned after jerking his injured leg away from her tickling fingers.

Then she was washing his legs, all the way up to his thighs, making sure all the blood was washed away, before stopping and then working her way down from his head. Gently, she washed his face, kissing him again before washing his neck and ears and then proceeding down his chest.

She came to a scar on one side of his chest and frowned, and then found another above his hip on the other side.

"Jesus, Reid" she murmured. "You get into a fight with a threshing machine?"

He gave a quiet snort. "Something like that."

When he very, very carefully turned over onto his front that she could wash his back and butt, she gasped and put her hand to her mouth, tracing some of the bigger scars with a feather light touch. She put her face close to his. Her breath was sweet.

"You look like you've been in a war."

"Yeah," he replied shortly, wanting to cut short this line of enquiry. "Pretty much."

Wren wondered how much of that was irony and how much was truth. Either way, it was obvious he didn't want to talk about it.

"This is not your first bed bath then," she continued, washing a well-muscled back, and enjoying the view of his taut buttocks as she sponged every inch of those, carefully washing between them to clean the small, crinkled star.

"No, I've had a few. Not many with a nurse as pretty as you."

She looked mystified.

"I'm not pretty," she stated.

He laughed. "Well, if you're not pretty, then neither is sunlight through the trees, or the view of a lake between mountains, or..."

"No!" her voice was louder. "I'm not pretty!"

'Okay,' he thought. 'Stay away from that then.'

It didn't bug him; almost every homeless person had some or other problem that prevented them from climbing back onto the rungs of society's ladder to success. This was just hers – something to deal with when it came up, and let it lie quiet if it didn't. Drugs, booze, mental illness, crime, sorrow, even betrayal... the list went on and on. Everyone on the street had a story, and it was never good.

"Okay," he offered. "Not one as nice as you."

"Thank you," she came back, much happier at being considered nice.

He was carefully turned onto his back once more, Wren so solicitous and careful that there was not even a twinge from his leg to warn him not to overdo things,.

She soaped up the sponge again, and he realised that this was going to be the most difficult part – not the rolling over. How was he going to keep from getting an erection as a beautiful young girl washed his cock and balls?

With gritted teeth, he watched her as she leaned forward on her knees, and then closed his eyes as he felt the sponge touch his hip and sweep across his lower belly. It was safer with his eyes closed, he realised. Then he wouldn't have to think about how this little blond nymph was giving him as close as didn't matter to a hand job, and as pleasant a one as he could ever remember.

Wren carefully washed the creases where his leg met his groin, then took hold of what seemed to her to be a very substantial cock and held it up so she could soap his testicles, being very gentle and very thorough at the same time. She had a little smile on her face all the while, as if thinking of a pleasant interlude. Finally, she put the sponge aside, rubbed the soap between her hands and began to wash his penis at last, using both hands in turn and sliding them up and over the fleshy appendage, squeezing a little tighter as she reached the skin over the top to pull it out straight. Then the other hand would grasp it at the base and repeat the whole manoeuvre.

Reid was undone.

At her first touch, he had felt his cock begin to grow stiffer and harder. She didn't seem to notice, or if she did, didn't seem to care. If anything, the smile on her face grew a little broader. Frantically he tried to thing about anything else but his current situation: social problems, financial strategies, his ex-wife, anything to try and stem the flow of blood to his cock. But he could feel her hands on him; feel her breath over his straining erection, feel the silken, fairy-light touch of her hair on his thighs. Nothing worked, and within a minute he had an erection that would have won a red ribbon at any livestock show.

Wren ignored it completely, finishing soaping him up, and then rinsing him off carefully before gently patting the towel over the whole area and making sure every part of him was nice and dry.

She looked up at him for the first time and he could have sworn he saw a twinkle in her eye. She quickly unravelled the turban and gave her long golden hair a last quick rub before finger-combing it out and flicking it back from her face. She tucked her knees together, her feet crossed behind her delightful butt.

"I thank you for my life," she said in six simple, carefully enunciated words. Then she leaned forward, lowered her head and took his erection into her mouth.

Reid grunted loudly in shock, surprise and then happy bewilderment as he felt the softness of her lips once again, this time encircling the head of his cock as her tongue explored all around. He reached down to her head, and with a supreme effort of will, drew her away from him.

"You don't have to do that," he gasped, while the monkey part of his brain jabbered 'Yes she does have to do that! Now! Again! You fucking moron! More!'

She licked her lips, which made his whole body shiver in response, and shrugged. "I want to. I want to thank you for what you did to save me, and all I have to offer is five kilos of heroin which is going over the side as soon as I find a knife to open the packet. I know you don't want heroin. So all I have left is me. Please let me thank you in the only way I can."

"No, you don't have to th... erk..."

Ignoring his protests, she took him into her mouth once more, cutting off his protests and then gently but firmly slapping his hands away whenever he tried ineffectually to pull her away from her self-appointed task – all without ever stopping the tongue-swirling dance around the head of his erection.

Reid gave up. "Oh my God, Wren! That feels so good. Sooo good!"

She made a little noise of satisfaction that her efforts were achieving the results she was looking for, and the vibration from that seemed to travel down his shaft, up his spine and rattle around in the dusty corners of his brain. He put his hand on her head and stroked her hair, and in return she took him even deeper into her mouth, letting it slide back and forth – a well-lubricated pillar of velvet coated steel – to the back of her mouth and almost all the way out again. Then she drew it deeper and let it butt up against the barrier to her throat for a few millennia-long moments. He started to shake, his hand slipping down over the damp hair and sliding beneath the remaining towel, pushing it off her to feel the silky-soft smoothness of her naked back.

Finally, Wren took a deep breath through her nose and began to swallow, her throat nipping all round the most sensitive part of his penis before taking it further down.

Her lips crept further and further along his erection, and he stared in wonder into her blue eyes as they looked up along his body into his eyes and appreciate the sheer pleasure on his face. She drew back, her hands now driving up and down his shaft, all the while carefully keeping the tip of him between her lips. And then took him all the way in again.