Chapter 7: The Return Favor
The tide was a slow, lazy retreat, leaving behind a shimmering wet plain littered with shells and tiny, scuttling ghosts. Jonah’s trap, a clumsy-looking cage of woven vines and lashed branches, sat in a shallow tidal pool. As they approached, the water inside seemed to boil.
“No way,” Amy breathed.
The trap was alive. Not with fish, but with a seething mass of armored bodies, blue-black shells clicking and scraping against the vines. Crabs. Dozens of them, some as big as Jonah’s hand, their stalked eyes waving in furious indignation.
Jonah let out a whoop that startled a nearby tern into flight. “It worked! I mean, not for fish, but… this is better! This is protein!”
“They look pissed,” Amy said, but a grin was spreading across her face. The sheer abundance was dizzying. They hauled the heavy, writhing trap onto drier sand, the crabs within clattering in protest.
Building the fire was quick work, their movements efficient and synchronized now. They’d perfected the small, hot cooking pit. As the flames caught, Jonah used two sticks to gingerly transfer the crabs into their salvaged metal pot, now forever dedicated to boiling seawater. The crabs fought until the end, a frantic scraping against the metal that slowly stilled.
The smell that rose as they cooked was of the pure ocean, salty and rich. They waited, the sun baking their shoulders, the anticipation a tangible thing. Finally, using broad leaves as gloves, they tipped the steaming, bright-orange pile onto a flat rock.
Cracking them open was a savage, joyful mess. They used rocks and their fingers, prying apart carapaces, snapping off claws. The meat was sweet and startlingly white, flakes of it clinging to their lips and chins. They ate until their fingers were raw and shiny with brine and grease, until a small mountain of broken shell grew between them.
Jonah sucked the richness from a leg, his eyes scanning the horizon without seeing it. They kept drifting back, pulled like magnets, to the space between Amy’s thighs as she sat cross-legged on the sand. The dark, dense curls were powdered with a fine dusting of sand. The jungle. He’d thought of little else since that morning.
He set down a half-cracked claw. The sound was final.
“Amy.”
She looked up, wiping her mouth with the back of her wrist, her eyebrows raised in question.
His mouth was dry. He couldn’t find a corporate metaphor, a quippy deflection. The words came out rough, stripped bare. “I want to return the favor.”
She froze, a piece of meat halfway to her lips. “What?”
“Let me go down on you.”
The blush that swept up her neck and face was immediate and violent. She looked down at the scattered shells, shaking her head. “Jonah, come on. It’s… I told you. It’s a jungle down there. You don’t have to do that.”
“I’m not doing it because I have to.” He leaned forward, his voice dropping. The crackle of the fire was loud between them. “I want to. I’ve wanted to for days. Weeks, maybe.”
The admission hung in the salty air. Amy didn’t move. She studied his face, looking for the joke, the hesitation, the pity. She found only a focused intensity that was becoming familiar, and a raw hunger that was entirely new. Her practical mind fought it. It was messy. It was impractical. It was vulnerable in a way that letting him come in her mouth wasn’t. That was a transaction, a service. This was… an offering.
“It’s not exactly hygienic,” she tried, her last line of defense.
“Nothing here is,” he said, and the simple truth of it disarmed her.
Her heart was a frantic drum against her ribs. Slowly, her movements stiff, she placed the piece of crab meat back on the rock. She didn’t speak. Instead, she leaned back, bracing herself on her elbows, and let her knees fall apart on the warm sand.
The invitation was terrifying. Jonah moved around the fire, the sand shifting under his knees as he settled between her legs. He saw her stomach flutter with a quick, nervous breath. Up close, the reality of her was overwhelming. The coarse hair, yes, dusted with sand and glinting in the firelight. The scent of her, mixed with salt and sweat and the sea. It was profoundly, unapologetically human.
He hesitated for only a second. Then he lowered his head.
The first touch of his tongue was a shock for both of them. He was tentative, parting the curls, learning the unfamiliar terrain he’d only imagined. She jerked, a small gasp escaping her. He felt her hands come down, not pushing him away, but gripping his shoulders, her fingers biting into his skin.
He persisted. His explorations grew less polite, more deliberate. He found the sensitive, swollen knot of her clit and circled it, slowly at first, then with a firm, steady rhythm he discovered by listening to her breathing.
Amy’s head fell back. The sky above was a deep, endless violet. The sensations tore a hole through her careful control. This wasn’t a release of pressure. This was an onslaught. A gathering storm deep in her belly, coiling tighter and tighter with every stroke of his tongue. Her hips lifted off the sand, seeking more.
“Jonah,” she choked out. It was a warning, a plea, his name dissolving into a moan.
Her hands scrabbled from his shoulders to his hair, fisting in the floppy brown strands, not guiding, just holding on. The world narrowed to the points of contact: his mouth on her, her hands in his hair, the rough sand beneath her back. The clever, talking part of her mind went silent. There was only the building heat, the relentless, perfect friction.
When it broke, it was not a gentle wave. It was a fracture. Her body arched, rigid for a long, silent moment before a ragged cry was torn from her throat. She shook, the tremors traveling through her thighs where they pressed against his ears. He didn’t stop, riding the pulses until her grip on his hair went slack and she collapsed back onto the sand, spent.
The only sounds were the fire, the ocean, and their ragged breathing.
Jonah rested his forehead against her inner thigh, his own body humming with a strange, triumphant awe. He finally sat back on his heels, wiping his mouth. He tasted of her and the sea.
Amy lay still, one arm flung over her eyes. Her chest rose and fell rapidly. After a long minute, she lowered her arm. She looked at him, her eyes dark and huge in the firelight. There was no sarcasm left, no deflection. Just a naked, stunned openness.
“Okay,” she whispered, the word barely audible over the waves. “So that’s… that’s a thing now, too.”
Jonah nodded, a slow smile touching his lips. He reached out, his sandy finger hooking gently with hers where her hand lay on the sand between them. She didn’t pull away. They sat like that in the dying light, surrounded by the ruins of their feast, the balance between them irrevocably changed.
They sat like that in the dying light, surrounded by the ruins of their feast, the balance between them irrevocably changed. The fire burned down to embers, painting their skin in fleeting copper flashes.They didn’t move until the stars were sharp and cold overhead.
Sleep that night was different. The space between them under the palm fronds wasn’t just a neutral zone of shared body heat.It felt charged, like the air before a storm. Amy lay on her side, facing the shelter wall, acutely aware of every point where his skin nearly touched hers. Her body still hummed with a low, alien echo. Jonah stared into the dark, replaying the taste of her and the shattered sound of her cry.He’d never done anything that felt so profoundly right.
He woke just before dawn, the pale light etching the shelter’s rough outline. The familiar pressure was there, a hard, urgent throb against her lower back. He breathed in the smell of her hair, salt and coconut and sleep. His arm was already around her, his hand splayed on her stomach.He felt her wake, the slight stiffening, the soft inhale.
Instead of her sliding away, he tightened his hold just a fraction.His voice was gravelly with sleep. “Wait.”
Amy stilled.There was a question in her stillness.
He shifted, rolling onto his back and pulling her with him so she lay half-across his chest. The movement lined their bodies up differently.He was achingly hard against her hip. His hand trailed down her spine, over the dip of her waist, coming to rest on the curve of her ass. The gray light showed the focus on his face.
“What if,” he began, his thumb drawing a slow circle on her skin, “we tried something else this morning?”
She lifted her head to look at him. Her expression was guarded, pragmatic. “Like what?”
“We could…,” he swallowed, the old awkwardness trying to resurface.He pushed past it.“We could do it together. At the same time.”
Amy blinked.Her brain, still soft with sleep, processed the meaning. A laugh, short and surprised, huffed out of her.“You mean 69? Like, middle school?”
“Yeah.Like that.” His gaze was steady, earnest. “I just thought… it seems more… mutual.”
She studied him. The earnestness was real, but so was the blunt evidence of his arousal pressing into her.It wasn’t a noble suggestion.It was a hungry one. Yet the word ‘mutual’ lingered. After last night, after he’d given her something that felt like a gift with no expectation of immediate return, the logic held a certain appeal. It was practical.Efficient.A transaction, but a shared one.
“You realize my morning breath could kill a smaller animal,” she said, deflecting.“So could mine. We’ll call it even.”
She was silent for another long moment, listening to the waves. The shelter felt both vast and impossibly small.Finally, she let out a slow breath, a capitulation.“Fine. But we’re not calling it that. And if you get hair in your mouth, you don’t get to complain.You were warned about the jungle.”
A slow, real smile spread across his face. He nodded.
Moving in the cramped space was a clumsy, funny shuffle of limbs and elbows, a silent negotiation without words.The rough blanket was pushed aside. They rearranged themselves, her moving over him until she was straddling his head, her knees by his shoulders. He tasted the salt of her thigh before anything else as she lowered herself, guiding him into her mouth with one hand.
The perspective was dizzying. The intimate scent of her own body, closer and more potent than last night by the fire.The weight of him on her tongue, familiar now. And then the first hot, wet touch of his mouth on her again, a shock even though she’d expected it.
It was awkward at first.The angle was strange.His nose pressed into her. Her movements stuttered as a shiver ran through her, distracting her rhythm.He hesitated, adjusting. Then they found a cadence, a fragile, unspoken synchrony.The awkwardness melted into something else entirely.
There was no grace to it, only a desperate, shared focus. The giving and receiving blurred into one continuous, breathless circuit. Amy’s mind, usually a scrolling list of tasks and dangers, went blank and white. There was only sensation: the salty-smooth texture of him, the relentless, clever pressure of his tongue, the coarse hair scratching her chin, the deep, building coil of her own pleasure.She heard him groan beneath her, the vibration traveling through his body into hers. His hips bucked upward slightly, a helpless reflex. She took him deeper, her hands braced on his thighs, anchoring them both.Her own movements against his mouth became less precise, more urgent.
She came first, a sharp, silent climax that clenched her entire body. She muffled her cry against him. The waves of it were still pulsing through her when she felt him tense, his own control shattering. He spilled into her mouth with a choked-off gasp, his fingers gripping her hips hard enough to leave marks.The aftermath was a slow unwinding, a careful separation. They settled back onto their sides, facing each other, breathing heavily in the cool dawn air. Sand clung to their damp skin.Jonah reached out and brushed a stray curl from her sticky forehead.
“So?” he whispered.Amy considered it. Her body felt liquefied, satiated in a way that was entirely new.“Statistically efficient,” she finally said, her voice husky. “But logistically challenging.”
Jonah’s smile was tired and full.“Noted. We can workshop it.”
The gray light was brightening to gold.Outside, the island awaited its daily toll. But for that moment, lying in the sand and salt, they just breathed together in the quiet. The horizon could wait.