Chapter14
Emilio
We spend the rest of the trip back to the island fucking.
I take her standing against the railing, lying down in the sun, in the hold against the benches. For hours, we taste each other until we’re spent, and by the time I motor back into the caves and tie off at the dry dock, Lesley and everyone else is already waiting. We don’t have time to talk about her sister or to process what we just did.
It was like a spell fell over me. Like something reached down from below and took me over, like a demon slipped into my skin. I had to have her, again and again, and she was dripping wet and begging for more, more, more. We went into a frenzy, one of the more delicious frenzies of my whole life, and it only left me aching for another taste.
Kaye says nothing as she hops off the boat and heads to the Jeeps.
“How’d that trip go?” Nathan asks, grinning and glancing back at the retreating Kaye. “Everything okay between you two?”
“We hit a storm last night but we’ll be all right. You worry about getting that fucking hold unloaded.”
Kaye hides out at the house when we return. I keep expecting her to corner me somewhere and demand an explanation about Lucy, but she hides in her room for the rest of the afternoon and disappears to class the following morning. That goes on for a few days and she’s like an itch I can’t scratch. I halfway expect her to leave the Calico House and move back into the dorms, but she’s still there, still in her room, still across the hall.
I keep thinking about what we did on that boat.
The storm. The hotel. The trip back. Her skin, her moans, her lips around my cock. It was filthy and beautiful. It hurt and felt so goddamn good. She came, again and again, with my cock in her mouth, buried between her legs, twitching against her tits.
And now her silence feels like a punch to my throat.
Like her hands are wrapped around my hair, pulling.
“You and me gotta talk,” Lesley says that Friday night. The fire pit in the back yard is crackling and several society members are standing around, drinking. Kaye’s nowhere to be seen, like always. I glance back at the house, up toward her room, and wonder if I catch a shadow near the window. But no, just the firelight flickering.
“What’s going on?”
Lesley leads me away from the group, a beer clutched nervously between her hands. “I heard some rumors on campus. I thought they were bullshit, but I looked into them.”
“Tell me straight.”
“Some of the other societies got their hands on pills. The sort of pills we haven’t been bringing onto the island.”
I frown slightly and shrug. “Other students deal. They sneak shit in.”
“That’s what I thought too, but everyone says it’s coming from one place, from one of the other societies. And it’s moving in big quantities.”
I let that sink in. “You think they’re already out on the water?”
“Emilio, I think they took that boat out the very next day after the accident. Who the hell would do something like that?”
The fear in her voice sends a shiver down my spine. I put a hand on her arm. “I’ll handle it. We’ll figure out who’s behind this shit.”
“I think it’s the Cask and Barrel Society. What’s what everyone keeps saying, anyway. Cask has the good shit. Cask has the hookup.”
I squeeze her arm and nod. Cask is the second biggest society on the island and has some of the most rich and powerful members around. If anyone’s going to start up a smuggling ring to rival my own, it makes sense that it would be them. They certainly have the resources.
But do they have the balls?
I glance over Lesley’s shoulder. Standing in the shadows of the porch is Kaye and she’s staring at us with a deep frown. I tilt my head, meeting her eye, and before I can say anything, she turns and storms back inside.
I let my hand drop away. “I’ll look into it.”
“This is fucked up. Whatever’s going on, they nearly got themselves killed and were out at it again the following day. Someone’s taking this shit seriously.”
“I can handle myself, Les. You know that.”