Slither (17 page)

"Loren!"

"Now shut up and flip over so I can put sunblock on
your back. Otherwise you'll get redder than a-"

"Don't say fire truck!" she insisted.

"I was going to say scarlet bristleworm." He grabbed
a tube of his own sunblock.

Sputtering, Nora flipped over on her belly. "I guess
you're getting to be an expert at this."

"I'm an expert in everything," Loren claimed.

"I feel like chopped liver here."

"Why?"

.You were too busy rubbing all over Barbie, you
didn't even stop to think that maybe your boss might
need a back rub."

"And what's wrong with chopped liver?" he said,
squirting lotion on her back.

She tensed a moment as his hands slid over some
sunburned fringes, but then relief began to work in.

Loren chuckled. "I overheard Annabelle talking to a
friend on her cell phone, and she referred to me as The
Geek."

"Are you sure she wasn't talking about me?"

"Naw, you were Professor Dork."

"How flattering."

"And here's the best part-she's yacking away to her
friend and eventually tells her that she's certain you
and I are both virgins. How's that for a laugher?"

Nora smoldered and kept silent.

"What? I say something wrong?"

"No, just-"

"I'm no virgin, that's for sure. I've had sex a bunch
of times, and my first one was with this foreign exchange student who stayed at my house while my
brother went to Sweden. This girl was hot! She
even-"

"Loren, I don't want to hear about your sex life!"

"Wow, you're really testy today," he said. "Guess
Annabelle was right."

"What?"

"She also told her friend on the phone that you had
permanent PMS."

Nora almost yelled, "That insufferable bitch! I'd like
to mop my floor with her bleached-blond head!"

"Calm down," he urged, his finger daintily spreading
the cool sunblock around her top straps. "Can I ask
you a personal question?"

"No!"

"Are you a virgin?"

"No. Of ... course not! And even if I were, it's none
of your business. Just put the damn stuff on my back,
mouth shut."

"Sony." His fingers paused. "Wait, take this off before I goo it up."

My cross, she realized. Her grandmother had given it
to her eons ago at her confirmation. She rarely ever
took the tiny golden cross and chain off. "You take it
off, I can't reach, and I'm too lazy right now to sit up."

He carefully worked the tiny catch and slid it off.
"I've been working for you over a year and never knew
you were a Christian."

Nora thought about it. "In truth I guess I'm a pretty
shitty Christian. My grandmother gave it to me and she
was cool. I always wear it under my top."

Loren grinned behind her. "I like the dichotomy. The
symbol of the man who died for our sins, and you keep
it between your breasts, which are the symbols of female sexuality."

She rolled her eyes under closed lids. "Loren, my
boobs aren't exactly pillows of carnality."

"Oh, that's right, I forgot. You did admit that you're
a virgin."

Nora knew he was just pecking at her for fun, which
normally she went along with. But now, here, the conversation filled her with dread. Throughout her adulthood, she hadn't even been "saving" herself for the
right man. I couldn't GIVE it away ... She didn't suppose she was downright ugly, and she was at least complex enough to realize that not all men went solely for
Annabelle-types. Jesus, I can count my heavy makeout sessions on ONE hand. Then a worse possibility
assaulted her.

Maybe Annabelle's right. Maybe I really am a great
big case of permanent PMS. For one thing, what guy
wants a woman whose career field revolves around
worms? And for another, what guy wants a woman
who's bitchy, unhappy, and cynical all the time?

But was that really her?

When she felt the cross slip out from between her
breasts, she couldn't even remember if any man in her
life had actually had his hands on them ...

Now Loren was doing the backs of her thighs, multitasking the application of the lotion into a pretty good
massage. Nora blanked her mind of all negativity ...
and felt better.

Her thoughts drifted to last night's dream: the crude
sex-fantasy. It had been a gratifying dream, of course,
until the end, when she'd wakened unfulfilled.

Just sex, she thought. She focused on the dream's
details-the faceless night suitor with no identity. The
rough, intent hands on her flesh, the urgent tongue that
incited her nipples and her sex. That's what I need, she
joked to herself, a man who's just a body.

A body for her.

She could almost fall back to sleep now. The Bimbo's
right; Loren gives a killer massage ... Now he was
working her feet, firing nerves she didn't know she had.

"The feet are an erogenous zone, you know," he said.

"Your point being?"

"Clinical reflexology. As scientists, we should be intrigued by human reproductive response systems, and
all their intricacies."

"Loren, please." Slippery fingers glided back and
forth across her arches and insteps. "Just be quiet and
keep doing it."

The sensations overwhelmed her; she felt woozy in
some carnal way. Her buttocks clenched when his
hands slid back up the calves, then thighs. She knew
this was absurd: she was letting an innocent back rub
become much more, she was stealing something from
it. She tried to imagine Loren as the lover from her
dream, but then some distant moral twinge disallowed
it. More sensations flowed from her thighs to her groin,
somehow squeezing her sex with a lewd, hot pressure,
and in another mental recess, she imagined herself
turning around in the sun and masturbating, or worse,
brazenly inviting him into her.

The mental alarm bell clanged louder, and the fantasy
dissolved with her realization of the truth. My teaching
assistant is putting sunblock on me and I'm getting
horny. Nora, congratulate yourself on a new low.

"That's enough, thanks," she blurted. She flipped
back over quickly, assailed by an inexplicable guilt. At
least if she were blushing, her sunburn would hide it.
"I can do the front," she said.

"Damn, I was just starting to have fun."

Nora frowned. I'll bet. Probably musing over the
Bimbo. She rubbed more lotion on her front shoulders
and arms. The tingling between her legs mocked her;
she struggled for a harmless subject. "So what's on the
rest of today's agenda? Are you and Miss Priss going
out for more worms?"

"You heard her," he said, lying back on his own towel. "She wants more underwater shots when the
light is optimum, she said. And she wants to try to get
some mating shots. Probably tomorrow afternoon."

Figures. 'Did you sex the samples you brought up?"

"Of course. All today's samples are back at our field
lab. I've got them in some field aquariums." He chuckled. "And don't worry, I won't let Annabelle dupe me.
Today she kept brushing against me-what a tease. I'll
let her go on thinking I'm a virgin. Then she'll really
want me, right? I mean it's true, all women want to
crack a male virgin?"

She shook her head to herself. "How about if we
stick to more professional subjects?"

"Come on, it's true, right?" he insisted. "Everybody
wants to be somebody else's first. It's completely biogenic, it's got to be. In a sense, we're all still back in
Neanderthal days. Part of our brains believe this."

"Remnant Darwinism in sexual function," she murmured, closing her eyes again and lying back. "Let's
stick to scarlet bristleworms, huh?"

"I'd rather talk about sex," he thwarted. "It's fun.
I'm going to play Annabelle's game, let her think what
she wants, and execute my right to your remnant Darwinism in sexual function." He nearly giggled. "I'll
wind up giving her the best balling of her shallow, insipid life!"

Nora looked over, shielding her eyes. "What's gotten
into you? You never talked so-"

"Libidinously?"

"That's not quite the word I was looking for. 'Trashy's'
more like it."

"Same thing. Why mince words? I don't know, it
must be the environment, the air, the sun, just the four
of us here in the cusp of nature's beauty. It all reaffirms
my vitality as a sexual entity."

You sound like a horny redneck, Loren."

"I am a horny redneck, baby," he said, his giant
Adam's apple bobbing. "And when I get back to the
mainland, I'm gonna tear it up! Watch out, girls!"

Jesus, I've created a monster-nerd ...

"And speaking of abandonment of modern morality," he said, "here's your cross back."

She'd forgotten about it-a symbol, perhaps, of her
forgotten religion. She reconnected the chain and
slipped the cross beneath the top of her one-piece. The
tiny tidbit of metal felt cold between her breasts.
"What about you?" she asked. "Are you spiritual at all?
Do you have any religious beliefs?

"Sure," he answered at once. "I believe in scientific
conclusionary phenomenalism."

Nora almost hacked. "What the hell is that?"

"Reverence to the acknowledgment of the contradiction that space and time are forms of intuition. Man's
spiritual absolution can never be made manifest in our
finite minds but in the genetics beyond the whole. Follow me?"

"No."

"What I mean is, salvation is a consistence of a judgment pursuant to other judgments, fitting in ultimately
to a single absolute system."

Nora rubbed her eyes wearily. Never ask a genius
what his religion is, she told herself.

"It's just a neo-Judeo-Christian attitude, that's all,"
he dismissed. "Quasi-existential dynamics-and if there
really is a hell, you can bet that Sartre and Nietzsche
are there. We'll only find out who's right when we die;
until then, there's only faith."

Interesting gobbledygook, but Nora thought about
that. If God exists, where will I stand in the end? she
wondered with a chill. I'm not a bad person, but am I
really a good person?

And if there isn't a God ... does that really mean nothing matters? The ideas frustrated her, even as she
unconsciously felt her cross beneath the swimsuit's
fabric. She looked for any escape. "You're covering a
lot of bases today," she pointed out. "Now you're talking heavy theology and five minutes ago, you were
telling me about how you're going to connive Annabelle into thinking you're a virgin just to get laid."

"But lust is innate," he responded. "God forgives all."

Nora smirked. "I've had enough sex-talk and Godtalk." She got up and brushed sand off her skin. "Now
I'm going to do something that really matters."

"What's that?"

"Catch lobsters."

Ruth hadn't felt this awful ... ever. She awoke in the
woods, and after a minute of thinking through a catastrophic headache, she remembered: I fell asleep in the
shed last night, didn't I?

Yes. She and Jonas had gotten high on some of his
potent weed, and had made love in that little shed.
He'd gone back to the boat but .. .

I stayed, she knew. I slept on the floor-I'm positive.

And if she'd slept on the floor .. .

How did she wind up in the woods?

When she leaned up, more shock hit her: she was
still naked. She almost shrieked when she brushed
some bugs off her thighs and stomach, then thought
Fuck! and flicked a slimy tree frog out of her belly button. Dismay shot her head around; then she saw that
she lay less than fifty feet from the shed. Sunlight struggled down through high branches. The door to
the shed remained open.

My clothes must still be in there, she realized. She
wiped sweat off her brow and smacked her lips. Yuck!
Her mouth tasted dry and stale, and her stomach
squirmed to remind her how hungry she was. Jonas's asskicking pot always leaves some ass-kicking munchies.
She was probably dehydrated, too. In this heat? Even last
night it didn't feel as though the temperature had dropped
below eighty. And I slept in it. In the fuckin' woods?

She must've been so stoned, she'd tried to walk back
to the boat, but then passed out. It was the only explanation. When she looked down more closely at herself,
it almost seemed as if she'd been laid out deliberately:
legs spread wide, arms out, flat on her back and nude.
But when she tried to get up-

"Oww! Fuck!"

Her hands flew to her bare heels, which suddenly
barked in pain when she'd dragged them across the
ground.

Her heels were scuffed bloody, and her buttocks and
bottoms of her thighs sparkled in pain, too.

What the fuck happened to me?

She helped herself up, blinking her confusion
through the headache. Now her eyes scanned back toward the shed and she saw two lines coming from the
doorway and ending-

Exactly where her heels had been.

"This is fucked up! I didn't pass out in the fuckin'
woods! Somebody dragged me here! They dragged me
out of the shed and left me!"

But who? And why?

Jonas? Slydes? Why would they do that? Or maybe
one of those nature photographers, she thought, but
that didn't make sense either.

Then she thought again of her position. Like she'd
been deliberately laid out spread legged-in wait of
something.

Like bait, came the next, odder thought. Somebody
left me here on purpose ...

The rustling chopped off her remaining thoughts.
Just a few feet away, she noticed leaves moving on the
ground. I don't need this fuckin' shit!

She ran back to the shed and slammed the rickety
door.

"Fuck!" she exclaimed yet again.

Ruth's less than complex mind crapped out on further contemplations. Dread and terror left her winded.
We just need to get the fuck off this fuck-hole shit-bird
island, was about the most sophisticated assessment
she could make of her situation.

And whatever had been outside rustling beneath the
leaves ...