Dreamboat Ch. 03

Usual standard declarations about age, ownership etc. apply here.

Still here? Then I'm very pleased to see you again. You sitting comfortably? Then I'll begin...

If you read the first two chapters you're up to speed. If not then you're dragging behind. Give them a go! At least then you'll know something about what's going on, even if it's still a guessing game for most of us at this point. More back-story, more sex, more secrets and a few discoveries in this one. Ain't that always the way?

Listen...

CHAPTER THREE

Lachlan Reid awoke slowly after almost twenty four hours of sleep, the gentle rocking of the boat threatening to return him to slumber at every movement. He knew boats well, but from river and lake fishing, not the deep sea. He wondered idly whether he would get sea-sick before this craziness was over.

He felt a movement beside him, and turned his head to see Wren snuggling in next to him, her naked body alongside him a wonderful thing to wake up to. With a sigh, he settled back on the bed, and then sat up abruptly as he realised they still hadn't sorted anything out about the boat. They could be heading for rocks, into a storm or directly into the path of a supertanker -- and they still hadn't even found out where they were, whether the boat's motor worked, and if it did, if there was sufficient fuel for them to work with.

He automatically began to check his wound as he thought over their priorities. First of all -- the engine. If they could get that working, they could at least steer to some extent; hopefully enough to keep themselves out of danger.

Second -- navigation. He had to try and discover where they were, and decide where they wanted to go -- which raised a myriad of further questions. The boat had become their refuge from King Cole, but he had tentacles all along the east coast, so putting into any port or one of the myriad little harbours along the coastline might be placing them squarely back into the jaws of the monster.

The third thing to consider was supplies. They had to find out what food and water the little boat carried. If they had drifted completely away from land, it could take a long time to get back again -- long enough that thirst and hunger could become an overriding priority very quickly.

While he thought, his hands quickly unwound the makeshift bandage on his thigh, praying that he wouldn't smell the sickly-sweet scent of infection. He had had enough experience of that on the front lines that he knew that the slightest whiff of corruption could very well mean a long and painful death as gangrene made its inevitable journey through his body.

He breathed in deeply through his nose, as the end of the home-made bandage slipped off his skin. With a sigh of relief at the lack of any scent of rot, he peeled off the final dressing.

He slowly and carefully drew up his knee in order to see the back of his thigh, and stared at his leg. The skin around the two-inch wound on each side looked pink and healthy. The stitches Wren had put in were neat and tidy, with no gapping that would require further attention. His respect for the girl's abilities rose considerably.

Tentatively, he stretched the leg out, waiting for the moment that the internal damage to his thigh muscles would halt the movement, requiring weeks of stretching before he could use it properly again.

A moment later, he stared in astonishment at his leg, stretched out perfectly straight in front of him. There was a little painful protest from the muscles in his thigh as he drew his foot backward against his Achilles tendon, but nowhere near as much as he expected. He made a mental note to check out the bottle of antiseptic she had mentioned. Whatever was in it had worked wonders.

Even more tentatively, he drew his knees under him and climbed off the side of the bed, slowly putting weight on his legs and finally standing upright. The roof of the cabin wasn't far from the top of his head, but there was enough headroom for him to move around without needing to crouch.

"Reid?" Wren called, her voice thin with concern.

He turned as she sat up, the blanket falling from her shoulders to reveal the smooth, white skin of her throat and shoulders leading down to her beautifully perky breasts, so pale they seemed almost transparent, with her small nipples pointing slightly upward. He felt his body respond involuntarily, his shaft and even his own nipples stiffening and rising.

"You're standing. You shouldn't be up yet!" she exclaimed, trying to ignore the prominent demonstration of his desire for her. Quickly, she wrapped the towel around herself, tucked it in between her breasts and moved to his side, enfolding her arms around him as if to provide support.

"It's okay," he assured her. "I don't know what you did, but whatever it was, you worked a miracle."

She knelt behind him to examine the wound, touching the skin around it gently, almost tenderly. Reid had the sudden random thought that she would probably make a wonderful mother.

He shook his head and put that out of his mind. He wiggled his leg in front of her.

"It works fine, almost no pain at all."

"It does look to be healing well," she commented, gently brushing over the stitches with her thumb. He was all too conscious of her near-naked body, the heat of her hands high on his thigh, and even more aware that his burgeoning erection was just inches from her lips. With the memory of her previous oral attentions to it all too clear in his mind, he decided that trousers were called for. He was very much aware of her vulnerability at that moment -- homeless, having her lover murdered in front of her, being chased onto a dead-end pier by murderous thugs, all capped with her feeling that she owed him for saving her.

He was determined not to take advantage of her.

He looked around the cabin for his clothes, which were nowhere to be seen.

Wren picked up on his search. "There's a tiny washing machine and dryer in the bathroom. I put our clothes in it while you were sleeping."

She hopped across the bed with far more energy than Reid had expected, disappeared through the almost invisible door and emerged with an armful of clothes. Reid examined his shirt and trousers with delight at the fresh, clean smell of them -- an aroma he hadn't experienced for far too long.

He slipped on the tee-shirt, and then started drawing on the camouflaged trousers that he had worn almost daily since he had left his house, after...

His mind shied away from the thought, and he was glad when Wren spoke up as, disregarding her bra and shorts, she pulled on her plain white panties and the long, thin, almost threadbare blouse with its missing sleeves. When the garment finally covered those wonderful breasts, he felt a surprisingly strong sense of loss and gazed at the delightful hillocks they made in the material instead.

"Give me your pants," she ordered. "Let me sew up those cuts before you put them on."

He handed them over, once again very conscious of being naked from the waist down. To try to hide his recurring tumescence, he sat down alongside her and crossed his legs. Outside, he could hear nothing more than the soft slapping of waves against the hull of the boar -- no waves crashing against rocks or engines of any sort. In fact they existed in a remarkably quiet bubble. So if they were in trouble, he guessed a couple more minutes weren't going to make that much difference.

Reid watched her as she worked, the tip of her tongue protruding slightly in concentration, her hair falling forward from her shoulders to make a golden curtain alongside her face. It looked ragged, obviously trimmed badly with little regard for fashion, but somehow that just made her look even more beautiful; young and vulnerable, but with a core of strength to her.

He felt a little tug at his heart that surprised him, and silently ticked himself off for feeling that way. He hadn't felt anything for any other human being for a very long time, and to start mooning over this girl, who had just lost her lover in a violent murder, was not only inappropriate, it was stupid.

Using the needle she had used to sew up his wounds, she quickly stitched the two cleanly cut rents in the pants leg where the machete had sliced through, and gave them back to him. The repairs, with no traces of blood remaining on the cloth at all, were almost invisible, tiny stitches binding the cuts closed.

"You're very good at that," he commented, his face showing his appreciation.

She smiled at the praise, a faint hint of a blush rising in her cheeks. "That's all down to Rosa, our... a lady I grew up with."

He took a guess that she had been going to say maid, and from the way she said the name with great fondness, he guessed further that Rosa had had a large part in Wren's upbringing -- so, a full-time maid? That meant money. Now what was a girl from a moneyed family doing living on the streets with a junkie? Had she simply rebelled? Or were the issues a little deeper?

He decided to let it lie for the moment.

"Does that coffee machine work?" he asked, pulling on the pants and luxuriating in the feel of clean clothes against his clean body.

"Ooh, I'd forgotten about that," she said, excitedly going to the machine and carefully filling the water tank from the tap. Two minutes later, she had boiling water filtering down into the pot, and had discovered half a dozen mugs from which to choose.

When she handed his mug over, he took a deep breath, dragging the aroma deep into his lungs, and then took a sip and closed his eyes to enjoy the taste and the pleasant burn from the hot liquid.

"Shall we drink these in the sunshine?" he asked. She nodded and followed him up the steps onto the rear deck.

His first thought was that the boat really was bigger than he had first imagined; the rear deck an open wooden semicircle over the rounded stern that would allow the two of them to sit there in comfort if they could cobble together a couple of seats. This thought was confirmed when he looked towards the bow and realised that the bridge, where the helm and all the controls would be situated, was either an enclosed flybridge or a convertible bridge that would allow the sides to fold back and down in pleasant weather. This was perched over the cabin they had slept in, constructed so as to allow sunlight into the forward windows of the cabin.

From the patchy light and dark colouring of what seemed to be matched strips of finely polished teak decking, he began to get an inkling that this boat might also be a whole lot more valuable than he had considered. He was pleased at that, purely because it would probably mean good instrumentation in the bridge. The thought that it also meant there was probably an intense ongoing search for it, also crossed his mind.

He was about to go and investigate further when Wren turned to him, cradling her mug in both hands, her hair flickering in the wind. "When you fought the Fiddlers... I mean, in that fight... Well, what I mean is ... did you do martial arts or something?"

He smiled at her. "No, not as such. I was in the army."

"Oh, I should thank you for your service," she said, almost automatically. For some reason it annoyed him, her parroting what had started as a genuine, heartfelt outpouring of support, now simply what one said to be polite to servicemen and women.

"No. No you shouldn't! You really shouldn't!" he stated. He took a drink, put the mug down on the deck and leaned forward towards her. "I don't know why you were on the streets, apart from the problem with Andrew and his habit. But whatever it was, the country let you down badly. You don't need to thank anyone."

She looked down. "Actually, Andrew was on the street because of me."

Reid was surprised. "You were a junkie before he took it up?"

"No! He was... I mean, I got him thrown out of his flat. That's why we ended up on the street. I never did drugs until he-"

She broke off abruptly, biting her lip.

"Loyalty doesn't mean a thing to a dead man," he said, deliberately brutal. He sensed she was sitting on some deep emotions when it came to this topic. Talking things out sometimes helped, and it rarely hurt. "He got you hooked."

She nodded sadly. "I ... left home, and he lived far enough away. I asked him for help and he took me in. I didn't know he was doing drugs -- coke and sometimes heroin. After a few weeks, before we were forced to give up the apartment, he persuaded me to try it, it would make me feel better and forget... just forget."

He let the gaps in her story pass this time. He had experience in interrogation and knew that sometimes when you needed to know something it was better to bypass it and then come back to it unexpectedly. He did feel a twinge of guilt in using those methods with her. But then again, like it or not, she had got them both into a war with King Cole, and if she was hiding things, it might be all the difference between survival and a wretched, painful end.

"A couple of times, and then you realised you needed it," he stated.

Wren nodded miserably.

"How did you get clean?" he asked, keeping his tone neutral. Any condemnation or disgust shown now might very well cause her to lock it down tight -- just when he needed every detail he could get.

"It was the smell," she confessed. "Andrew had stopped showering months before, and I guess in the end I stopped trying to find a way to keep clean as well. One day I woke up and I could smell the two of us. And it was so bad-- just so rank, I thought it would drive me round the bend! It was so thick I imagined I could chew on it."

Reid found himself nodding. He knew how evil the smell of unwashed bodies could get when you had no access to proper bathrooms. Hell, he had probably smelled the same way until she had given him the bed bath.

"I began to lower my intake, every day fighting that urge to just give in and take more and more. Gradually I found myself able to cope with less. And six months ago I stopped using altogether."

Reid stared at her, feeling a wave of respect for sweet, house-proud Wren, who somehow contained a steel-hard core of determination. He had never met another addict who had managed that while...

"And you did that while Andrew was still shooting up," he said, his voice incredulous. "You helped him shoot up and didn't help yourself to it?"

She suddenly looked exhausted, tiny lines appearing around her eyes and mouth. "I owed him. But I didn't want to do it anymore, so I didn't."

He crossed to her and took her in his arms. She began to sob, clutching at his shirt to try and draw him closer.

"I didn't love him anymore -- not for a very long time," she stammered between sobs. "But I didn't want him to die. Really! I wanted to get away, but I didn't wish that on him. I just didn't want him to hurt anymore. And then..."

He held her firmly, almost cocooning her in his arms. "It wasn't your fault. You were trying to help him. His death is not on you!"

She wept for a long time, before his hands stroking her back and her hair soothed her grief enough for her to step back.

"Sorry," she sniffled, wiping at his shirt which was now wet and covered with mucous. He stripped it off and she took it from him with a grimace. "Washing machine."

"Nothing to be sorry for," he smiled. "We're friends, right?"

She managed a weak smile. "And you saved me."

"Okay, friends with benefits then." It slipped out before he realised the real meaning of his words. He didn't want to pressure her into anything...

"Yes! Friends with benefits!" she agreed enthusiastically. "That's perfect!"

She skipped back into the cabin and he heard her open and close the washing machine on his shirt. Well, that had ended surprisingly, he thought. It seemed that Wren was more than happy with his unintended proposition.

Wren rejoined him after a moment, offering him a sandwich with peanut butter spread thinly in it. "I found bread in one of the cupboards."

He took it and gazed at it for a long time, before taking a bite. The bread was fresh, and the thick texture of the peanut butter on his tongue bought back memories of his childhood in almost excruciating waves of nostalgia. Then it struck him. If the bread was fresh, the boat must have been recently stocked, which meant it couldn't have drifted that far. It must have broken free from a mooring somewhere back up the coast.

He pointed this out to Wren, who gazed at him with her big brown eyes, not sure that them residing on the object of an intense search was such a great thing. What if they were discovered and taken straight back into the lion's den?

"Why don't we go and see what's up on the bridge," he said, looking to divert her

She collected their mugs, quickly washed them and put them away, and then rejoined him as he grinned at her house-proud instincts. Then, her hand in his, she followed him up the steps to the cabin roof and from there, through the door and onto the bridge.

They both stopped and stared.

Wren had been expecting to see a big wheel, with spokes sticking out at intervals around it. Reid had in mind a small wheel, like that in a motor car, with a couple of instruments and one or two throttles, depending on how many inboard or outboard motors it carried.

Neither had expected something that looked like it had been lifted directly from a movie set -- a science fiction movie.

The bridge was dominated by a high-backed, plush leather seat that perched proudly within a u-shaped arc of instrumentation, a joystick at the end of each arm of the chair.

"Wow," whispered Wren, rubbing her fingers over the leather.

Reid was more interested in the instruments. As he stepped behind the chair, a small panel on the floor lit up as his foot touched it, and the seat swivelled 180 degrees to face him. He shot backwards into a crouch, adrenalin squirting into his system and forcing his heart to beat wildly, and then tried to laugh it off as Wren stared at him.

"Not used to that," he muttered. Taking the plunge, he sat down and the seat rotated back into position. "Well, at least we now know that the batteries are fully charged."

"Where's the wheel?" Wren asked curiously, leaning over the console from the far side and trying to read the labels upside down. "And which bit tells us where we are?"

"I think this is the wheel," he guessed, touching the right hand joystick and then tentatively pushing it forwards. Within the silence of expectation, nothing happened. "I guess I need to turn the engines on first, before anything will happen."

He looked for a starter button, and then checked for any slot that might take an ignition key. Finally he simply pressed a few buttons, but the console remained dead. Between the two of them, they pressed all the buttons they could find, and then started trying combinations. Nothing worked.

Finally Reid slammed his hand down on it.

"Fuck!" he shouted, losing his temper. "Fuck, fuck, fuck this fucking bitch boat!"

Wren looked frightened, then bit her lip and moved behind the captain's chair. Carefully, she stood on the little panel, and the chair rotated, leaving the man facing her, looking surprised.

"Lachlan," she whispered. "I know we are in a dangerous situation -- I put us in a dangerous situation -- and you are the only one who is going to be able to get us out of it. Please be calm and we can think this through. I know I'm not very bright, but I can help if you'll let me."

He felt a wash of shame flood through him. He was the person trained to cope in all sorts of emergencies, yet she was the one having to keep him calm and on track.

""I'm sorry," he said, and forced a smile. "You're right. We need to work together. And you are bright. So all we have to do is..."