Being seen was the worst part. My God, she fretted. That bitch will never let me live it down. Nora knew she shouldn't care but she did anyway. The scientist in her was losing out very quickly to the human.
Just go back to the camp and go to sleep. Forget about it.
She stopped a moment to rest, that jolt to her heart finally wearing off. She placed her hand against a tree-
– then flinched.
What was that?
Her hand touched something.
A stud of some sort.
She turned the lantern up to look…
In the bright halo of gaslight, she couldn't have appeared more puzzled. A screw of some kind had been embedded in the tree trunk, but there wasn't a screw head at the end of it, as she expected.
Instead it was a clear glassine bulge. Like a lens.
(II)
Slydes lounged back in the fishing chair at his boat's aft. He raised his leg and farted, and found an inexplicable satisfaction in the act. He felt content now that they'd gotten in and out of the head shack without being seen, and more content in knowing that Jonas would turn that bag of pot into at least a thousand dollars in cash very quickly. It did secretly bother him, though-that Jonas made more money with his gig than Slydes did with his. Jonas believed that was proof of some intellectual superiority, but-
I'm smart too, damn it, Slydes reassured himself. He knew how to catch gator and effectively butcher it, didn't he? And he even knew how to prep and tan the hides, and that wasn't easy. Once he and his poaching buddies had thrown a gator-skinning contest (Jonas had had the audacity to not bet on his brother), but Slydes had won lickety-split. I put 'em all to shame, he remembered.
He didn't have anything to prove to anyone.
He lobbed the next beer bottle over the side. Goin' through 'em tonight… And why shouldn't he? It was hot and he'd worked hard all day. But now all those beers were leading to the inevitable result. The deck creaked when he lumbered to the stanchion cable and opened his pants. More inexplicable satisfaction arrived when he leaned back and pulled a hard piss over the side. Ahhhhhhhhh… -
After a couple of minutes, Slydes was still urinating. Damn! Come on, peter. I ain't got all night. He half expected to see the lagoon rise an inch or two. Bet it pisses the fish off, he allowed himself the scholarly hypothesis. But when he was shaking off, he…
He squinted at the sensation. Not an itch, but-
Something tingled very slightly.
On his scrotum.
Not a modest man, Slydes pulled his "bag" up and looked at it in the bright moonlight.
Fuck!
A beetle or something was clinging to one of his testicles. Bean-sized… and very disconcerting. At first he thought it might be some sort of sore-he'd had those in the past-but then the "sore" was moving. And the color?
That was the grossest part. The thing's shell was the color of pus.
He plucked it off with haste, then turned on one of the deck lights. Damn! he thought, outraged. The fuckin' thing was on my 'nads! He squinted at it.
Some piss-yellow bug, but it wasn't hard as he'd expect a beetle to be. It felt hot, wet.
"Fucker," he grunted. "You're fish food," and he flicked it over the side.
Thank God it hadn't bitten him-whatever it was. He surely would've felt a sting of pain on so sensitive an area. If anything, the area he'd plucked it off felt…
Kind'a cool and tingly, he noted. It wasn't unpleasant in any way.
How'd the fucker get in my pants? he wondered next. No biggie, it was gone now, but he figured it must've crawled up his leg when they were cutting through the woods to get Jonas's dope.
Suddenly Slydes twitched in place, stood up straight and wide-eyed. Now he felt another sensation.
"You gotta be shittin' me!" he muttered and stuck his hand down his pants in the back. He fished around and, sure enough, pulled another one of the things out.
It had crawled right down into the cleft of his buttocks. Another one in my ass crack!
In truth, though, Slydes had to feel sorry for the bug.
Dumbfounded, he checked his entire body and found no more of the things.
Some squirmy kind of leech or slug, he reasoned. He'd picked it up in the woods, so that meant Jonas and Ruth probably had too.
He thunked down the steps to the cabin.
"Jonas! Ruth! The two of you's better check yourselfs for bugs. I just picked two off me."
But when he looked around, no one was there.
Belowdecks reeked of pot smoke. He'd seen them down here earlier, toking up some of the stash they'd brought off the island.
Slides climbed back up and popped the cap off another beer. He looked out toward the island's massive tropical forest. I wonder where the hell they went…
(III)
The warm bare wood beneath Ruth's nakedness felt weirdly luscious; in fact, her entire body felt that way-cocooned in the wonderful, lulling buzz. Jonas took them to this old shed when they'd left the boat; he'd seen it on previous trips, just an old storage shed of some kind. A lot better than doing it in the woods, she thought, with God knows what kind of bugs crawling around. Not to mention that snake that had jumped on her earlier…
Jonas was already up and had his clothes back on. "Want another toke, baby?" He hoisted his favorite carved-wood pipe.
She grinned and shook her head, hair disarranged and skin teeming with sweat.
Jonas took a few more hits, then popped a brow. "I swear my stuff gets better and better. No wonder my bagmen are screamin' at me to grow more."
Ruth slowly sorted her thoughts. "A year from now, you'll be rich, Jonas. When we start more plants in the other head shacks."
"Damn straight." Something seemed to catch his eye in the corner. "What's this?"
Ruth felt too lazy now to even lean up and look.
They hadn't noticed it before, but Jonas picked up a drawstring bag. He curiously inventoried the contents: "Swimmin' trunks, towels, suntan lotion…" Then he looked at her. "Shit, Ruth, someone left their shit here."
"The photographers?"
"Naw, they're keeping their stuff at the campsite."
"Slydes said that college kids come out here sometimes," Ruth recalled. She had her flashlight set on end, shining at the ceiling. It brought down a murky umbrella of ringed light that Ruth found fascinating. "They must've left it."
"Hmm. Yeah. Guess so." He seemed satisfied with the conclusion. Another conclusion might've occurred to him had he been observant enough to notice the portable grill outside, and the beer cooler full of melting ice.
"Let's get going, I'm tired."
Disappointment overwhelmed Ruth, something she was used to with this pair. "I thought we were going to sleep here. Let's cuddle!"
Jonas frowned. "Come on, put your clothes on and let's go back to the boat."
She leaned up on her hands. Why couldn't he or Slydes ever do anything she wanted? It would be romantic to sleep here.
"I'm sleeping here!" she insisted.
"Cool." Jonas stuffed his bag of pot in his shorts pocket. "Thanks for the piece of ass. I'll see ya back at the boat in the morning."
Jonas left the shed.
A piece of ass. Prick! So much for romance. It didn't matter, though. She felt so good right now, she wasn't going to let his selfishness spoil the mood.
She lay back down, sated and high. That pot was strong as hash; the warm buzz pulsed from her heart to her toes.
She snapped the light off and let the grainy darkness come down like the softest blanket. At least the sex had been decent this time-it wasn't always that way with Jonas. The beer he'd been drinking all day gave him some much-needed endurance. Five minutes is better than two, she reminded herself. With two lovers, the situation could've been worse. What Jonas failed to provide in the way of her womanly needs, Slydes usually took care of, and vice versa.