First Daughter - Eric van Lustbader [74]
"But the planets have no breathable atmosphere," Alli said. "What would we do when we got there?"
"We'd find a way to survive," Barkley said in a very grown-up tone of voice. "Humans always do." He turned his head, looked at her. "Don't we?"
Alli, mute, felt paralyzed beneath his serious gaze. Trying to put herself in his head, she wondered what he thought of the body stretched out before him. She herself had not looked at his.
He rose up on his side to face her, head propped on the heel of one hand. His hair was golden, his skin glowing. All of him seemed golden. "Don't you want to fly far, far away, Alli?"
A moment ago, she would have said yes, but now, forced to make a decision, she didn't know what she wanted. She thought she'd miss her family, no matter how annoying and stifling they sometimes could be. She didn't want to be without them, and then the revelation hit her: She was a conventional girl, after all. The thought depressed her momentarily.
"I want to go back."
She sat up, but Barkley put a hand on her forearm. "Hey, it's early yet. Don't get spooked, no one can see us, we're safe."
Reluctantly, she lay back down, but a subtle shift had occurred inside her, and she was unable to keep her thoughts at rest.
As if sensing her unease, Barkley wriggled up behind her, put one arm gently around her. "I'll just hold you close, I'll protect you, then we'll swim back, okay?"
She said nothing, but her body nestled back against his and she gave an involuntary sigh. Folding one arm beneath her cheek, she closed her eyes. Her thoughts, like fireflies, darted this way and that against the blackness of her lids. Eventually, though, she felt a warmth spread from Barkley to her, the fireflies dimmed, then vanished altogether as she fell into peaceful slumber.
She was awakened slowly, almost druggily, by a repeating rhythmic sound and a persistent sensation. Drawn fully out of sleep, she realized that it was pain she felt, pain and pressure in a localized area, the place between her buttocks. It was then that she realized that the rhythmic sound and the pressure were connected. Barkley, grunting, held her tight against him. Sweat slicked the surface of her back, spooned against his front, and a peculiar musky scent dilated her nostrils, roiled her insides.
"What are you doing?" Her voice was thick, still slurry with sleep.
His grunting became more intense.
All at once, she snapped fully awake. She felt something rubbing against her bare buttock.
"Have you lost your mind?"
For what seemed like an eternity, she struggled silently in the prison of his arms.
It was only later, in the relative safety of her bunk, that she began to realize that she had been the victim of violence. At the moment, she was defeated by shock and terror. Her little body shook and quivered with each masculine thrust. She wanted to curl up into a ball, a crushed and discarded paper bag. She wanted to cry, she wanted to beam herself to another planet like they did in Star Trek. Beam me up, Scotty, she thought despairingly. But she remained locked in the sweaty embrace of this monstrous octopus that had risen up from the muck of the lake to entwine her in its tentacles.
Suspended time ticked away like taffy being pulled in slo-mo. She was no longer there, on the bucking raft, pinned to sun-beaten wooden slats. Pine trees on the shore ruffled; a sinister cloud, spreading like mist, masked the bone-white moon. An owl hooted, and a squadron of bats winged low over the water like Darth Vader's TIE fighters. But she was deaf and blind to the world around her. Her mind fled down pitch-black hallways that smelled of him, of them, of sweat and fear, of wood-rot and despair. But this place wouldn't do, so she went deeper, to a fortress her mind made impenetrable, and there she pulled up the drawbridge, locked herself away like a princess in a fairy tale, retired to the keep in the still center.
Without knowing how, she wormed her way to the edge of the raft.