Preparation: what a bitch.

They had plenty to prepare for that day; Jonathan would embark on his journey the following night, when it was coolest and when the tides were out. Renee collected as many mussels as humanly possible, coming back with wet, heaving pounds of shell-bound meat slung in tight sacks over her back. She cracked the shells and ripped the flesh out with a piece of ivory bone found along the beach (she was guessing a fish bone, but it was large enough to be a small whalebone), and laid the food out to dry. David was busy venturing up and down the beach, a large branch slung over his shoulder, which he used to shake stubborn coconuts from their hiding place far above the beach shore.

WHAP! the tree cried as David’s brawny muscles flexed and the coconuts rained down, breathtakingly close to his head. Jonathan spent the entire day inside the musty plane while the other two scavenged for food. He salvaged as many potential water containers as he could find inside of the plane. He might need every single one of them, and they weren’t going to make any expense in making sure that Jon had all the utilities they could give him.

Renee wanted to use the hook and line to catch fish in the Water hole, but she couldn’t spend time tinkering; right now, she had to think about getting as much food as she could, and fast.

But it would be nice, she admitted, to have a nice smoked fish. The thought made rivulets of saliva pool along the insides of her cocoa lips.

By the time that they were done, and settled to a dinner of coconut juice, some berries, seaweed, and mussles (they felt like kings with all this variety of food around them), they were exhausted. David sat at the other side of the fire, as always, distancing himself from the others as he ate, distracted. The stony silence only accentuated the soft lulling sound of the shore. To them, it sounded like the dry chuckle of dead, bleeding children that night.

This was Jon’s last night with them…maybe permanently.

This could very well be Jon’s last night with Renee, and Jon threw that thought around in the back of his head with some remorse. He knew he would pull the shortest stick when David suggested the idea; that’s just how Jon’s life was. He quite literally had always gotten the short hand of the stick, in things big and small, and this was no different at all. He stubbornly refused to accept David’s offer to go in his place. It got harder to turn him down each time David insisted, the thought more enticing than what showed on Jon’s face as he flatly refused over and over. Part of Jon wished that he didn’t have as much pride as he did; he wished he could accept David’s offer.

But Jonathan would rather go out there and die miserable in the middle of the ocean than live with the fact that he sent someone else out to die.

There would be consequences, however. Jonathan was no fool. He saw how David looked at Renee.

A grimace curled his thin upper lip.

David thought he was so stupid. So pathetic. So weak. David would be surprised, Jon knew, if he truly knew just how smart he was. Then he wouldn’t look at his wife that way. Nope. No siree.

They were going to be on that island alone. Together.

Jon was, indeed, no fool.

Think of me while you’re fucking her, Davie, he chuckled, his inner dialogue calm and composed despite its bitter content. You better not touch her, you bastard, or I’ll burn off your balls myself, see if I don’t—

Jon looked up from his plate to see David looking at him sternly. Did I say that aloud?

Jon did that sometimes. Spoke his thoughts without realizing it.

Suddenly Jon wanted his pills. One of those ‘lil pink ones.

And he was horny.

If there was one thing that could make him happy if he didn’t have his pills, it was sex.

David got up and left. But he didn’t go very far. He knew what Jon wanted, and didn’t want to be a distraction. Jon’s thoughts were so troublesome sometimes. Sick. David could have made Jon let him go by using his powers, but he hadn’t thought of that; besides, it wasn’t the right thing to do, anyway. Last night during their argument, if Jon had shrugged, given up, and let David go, David would have taken it like a man. He would go without a second glance back. For one main reason: David didn’t have anyone anymore.

David’s whole life had been planned out before he got into this mess. He was going to be a rock star until his bitch tits started drooping, pop out a couple of kids, and invest in stocks so that he could live long, fat, and wealthy on some beachside villa in Venice. A perfect, almost ridiculous dream, okay, but it was his dream. Maybe even write books someday…about what, he didn’t know, but David always found something to write about. It was his gift.

Besides the whole psychic/telepath thing he had going for him.

The sand between his toes was cold, and he looked behind him…back to the plane. The signals from their minds were extremely faint now. Finally, his psyche was at peace. He took a nice long piss near a bush. He could tell that there was nothing around him, so he didn’t have to worry about being ambushed. All day he had watched out for the serpents. Such a primitive mind was hard to detect, yes, but David was sensitive. He could feel the life forces within all things when he wanted, and the instinct of such animals now sent off half a dozen code reds through the radio station channels that were his brain waves.

David turned around when he had gone about a mile (he could detect Renee and Jon’s thoughts enough to tell that they were having sex or were close to it), and started back. The night was so dark that the only light cast upon him was through the shadowed moon and the crystal clear stars, who lighted their own solar systems millennia away but could only showed up as bright and sharp pinpricks of light on Earth’s night sky. He loved the stars. He always wanted to be an astronaut. He was smart enough to.

When he got closer to the plane, the signals in his head gained strength and clarity. Though they were making very little actual sounds, the thoughts

(hold me)

ran through his mind in disjointed fragments. He bit his pouty, pink lower lip. Should he go to the waterhole before he got any closer? If he went closer, he knew he could easily channel their feelings as well. He could feel what Jon felt. What Renee felt. Or what they both felt. Their sensations. At the same time.

He knew he could do it, but refused to indulge.

He balled his hands into fists. All he could see were the white pupils of Renee’s dark eyes. Her black hair whipping behind her head as the stones rose above the itchy yellow grass, no longer grass now in his mind’s eye but whispering sheaths of gold. Inside Jon’s head not far away, he saw what Jon was thinking about…a time when he had photographed her, naked, at their house. A week after their honeymoon.

"I feel like the chick in Titanic," she had joked wanly, laying on her side near the edge of the bed, as he flashed the picture. Then she laughed, and rolled onto her back. David had never been in their bedroom, but he didn’t need to; Jon’s memory was so crisp he felt the black silk of the sheets of their California King on his knees as Jon straddled her and snapped another picture of her. She was an angel, the black halo that were her locks spread across the pillow…

…The first night Jon made her come…

Shannon, forgive me, David whimpered to himself. He stumbled closer to the plane and let their feelings filter through him. He hadn’t expected it to be like this. It was overwhelming; he shook violently as he collapsed near the plane. His legs gave up on him as both partners’ sensations, experiences, and thoughts filled the receptive conscious of his mind, becoming a reality. Suddenly, all he felt was flesh in flesh, venturing in and being ventured into, the movement, the friction, and nothing else besides but touch. He was touching and being touched at the same time; feeling a man’s pleasure and the woman’s as well, seemingly different but so much the same. Both of their experiences were amplified into one, until it doubled and tripled, and his mouth stretched into an O. His eyebrows knit together. He didn’t even have to touch himself to know that he had a gigantic erection, and that he was quickly approaching an orgasm. He had been tempted to tap into Shannon one time…

…don’t think about Shannon…

If he touched himself it would all be too much to handle. But he did. He zipped down his fly. Reaching into his boxers, he took himself into his hands, and when he began stroking all three sources mixed together into a drugged tonic.

Pain.

He ignored it. Kept on going, furiously working towards release.

David knew that a woman felt pain—there had been a dull pain since he first tapped into Renee—but this quite suddenly became nearly unbearable. A ripping apart.

Grayness.

Blackout.

Little boys.

Blackout.

Renee dead and clammy on a steel slab in a white room, one eye rolled in the back of her head and the other staring straight ahead. A gash through her neck. Drops of blood frothing between her lips with gushing sounds. Jon’s hands wrapped tight around her throat as the rest of her body slid beneath him. And the sick, wet hammering of warm flesh into cold…

The sensations heightened in Jon, but in Renee the pain was so severe that David stopped, gagged, and threw up dinner in the space of white sand next to him.

(David where are you I need you where)

David sprinted around the plane and ran, despite his stiff erection, despite the shrieking muscles in his upper thighs. His lungs were spent from gasping and moaning, but all air flew from him at the shock of what he saw. Jon’s dark silhouette was violently moving on top of Renee, his two skinny arms coming together at her throat. He was choking her as he came, growling and violent. The influx of frantic thoughts made David want to hold his head, run away, or both—but he didn’t. He shut out Jon’s thoughts and Renee’s pain as best as he could and knocked him off of Renee. Jon rolled away, whimpered, and lay still, trying to catch his breath.

Renee was bleeding. Bad.

Jon’s saliva had dripped onto her neck, where it glowed white and thick. Her sweat made her body slick on top of the rumpled blanket.

This wasn’t the first time he had done this to her.

Beneath the tan smoothness of her skin was a resurgence of red, and she looked pale as blood rushed through her neck and towards her heart. Jon’s tight handprints were there, along with rising bruises on her collarbone, from being bitten hard. David saw scars on her collarbones, underneath her jawbone, and on the soft, fleshy underskin of her breasts. In an instant David knew everything.

As soon as she could breathe again, she lifted both arms feebly and tilted her head to one side. She shut her eyes tight, but she didn’t weep. She hadn’t even noticed that David had saved her. Her mind shut off. She fainted.

All David could think to do was get some clothes on her. He had to cover her up; it was such an injustice to keep her unclothed. Her glistening body was as beautiful as the pictures had foretold, the pictures he had seen taken in Jon’s head. Gingerly, he took his pants off and placed them over her, covering her crotch and her breasts feebly. It was pathetic, but David could no longer stand to see such perfection marred in the moonlight than see the eyes of her lunatic husband as he rolled around to face him.

David expected Jonathan to salivate furiously, to wrinkle his eyes like a madman and dive for him, clawing and screaming. Straight for the jugular. Cursing. Grumbling. Finally giving in to the dark thoughts that slid through his mind as subtly as a slimy serpent does just beneath murky water. But that didn’t happen. Instead, something worse: Jonathan acted as if nothing was wrong.

"Dude, why’d you stop us?"

David didn’t know what to say. He searched Jon’s face, then Jon’s head. No memory of choking, of little boys, of a dead Renee on a mortuary slab at all.

"I didn’t stop you. I just came here and Renee was naked so I put my pants on her. So she doesn’t get cold."

"I guess I tuckered her out, didn’t I?" Jon stood up, and walked naked to the shore to clean off his body before he went back to bed. David took his opportunity to clean up the bloodstain, stop Renee’s bleeding, but when he looked down there, there was no blood. There was a rapidly vanishing puddle of blood on the blanket, now no more than a 1-inch in diameter circle.

Of course.

There was no dried blood on the insides of her slender thighs, or in her crotch.

No sweat.

As if nothing had happened.

If she didn’t have that power, Jon would have killed her.

David looked for the scars, and the bruises. They were gone, too.

David wrapped her in the blanket, her soft skin beneath his fingertips, tears welling in his eyes, twinkled by starlight. Renee dreamed of the Cheshire Cat, and Jon was wiping what was now only a small spot of blood off of his penis. David knew that Jonathan didn’t even see the blood; Jon only saw what he wanted to see, when he wanted to see it.

David stayed awake all night. He knew then, and only then, that he was the only chance Renee had of getting off the island alive. He had to go in Jon’s place. He could just take off, but he also refused to leave Renee alone with Jonathan; Lord knows that he could very well kill her while David was gone. Why didn’t she use her power against him? David didn’t have to ask. Even if it meant her life, she would never hurt Jonathan. She would never contradict him outright. He was a man, and she was a woman. She would obey him. No matter what.

David was very scared.