Unseen Messages(135)

Either way, she tried to let it slide.

She pulled a Pippa and didn’t tell anyone.

And I wouldn’t have known if I hadn’t commandeered her solar-charged phone and manically shot a home movie the night before.

Pippa and Conner had adorned themselves in head-dresses of ferns and palm leaves, putting on a badly acted and laughably funny theatrical performance of Fijian cannibals.

Pippa was the delicious sacrifice and Conner was the war chief seasoning his future meal.

Sprinkling sand and ash on his little sister for taste, Conner paraded around like a pompous fool, declaring how delicious his dinner would be.

Estelle and I laughed where appropriate and oohed and ahhed in suspense. Her body had already changed, rounding and filling, looking sexier every day. I hated that I found her condition beyond attractive. I cursed my cock for wanting her ten times more.

But her hormones matched mine, and the sex...goddamn, the sex reached smouldering heights.

I wanted to be careful.

She wanted me to be rough.

I wanted to take her gently.

She wanted me to take her hard.

Every time I entered her, it was like a bloody war, leading to the most intense orgasm for both of us.

And yes, I finally came inside her.

To say it didn’t change my world would be an absolute understatement.

Switching my thoughts from sex to the kids acting, I swiped on the camera app only to see a blaring reminder on the screen not to forget Estelle turned twenty-seven at midnight.

I’d pretended I hadn’t seen, and after everyone went to bed, I snuck out, careful not to disturb my sleeping birthday girl, and spent the entire night carving a wooden heart with the words, ‘You’ll always be mine,’ by moon and firelight.

It was the truth.

She would always be mine.

No matter what happened in a few months.

No matter if our baby survived or died.

Estelle would never be alone again.





Chapter Forty-Nine


...............................................

E S T E L L E

......

There comes a time when life doesn’t listen to what you want.

It ploughs ahead, confident that you can’t jump off the journey it’s decided on.

I wish there was a way to change my destination.

Was I charging toward death?

Was I running toward motherhood?

What would happen when this was all over?

Taken from the notepad of E.E.

Final inscription.

...

OCTOBER

“G, I DON’T want you to do this.”

“Estelle, we’ve been over this.” Galloway refastened the vine tying his long hair back. A few months ago, we’d used the Swiss Army knife to cut all our hair. Me, Pippa, Conner, and Galloway.

The brittle, salt-tarnished lengths had been too straggly and annoying.

But it seemed the Fijian heat made everything grow faster, including our hair.

“We’ll be okay, Stelly.” Conner carried the crudely made oars to the sea edge. “We’re just going to test it. Make sure it floats.”

My heart hadn’t left my throat since Galloway announced he wanted to test the life raft.

After my birthday, when he made me a delicious dinner of smoked fish, flax seeds and minted taro, and presented me with the most precious wooden heart, he’d delivered the news that if we were going to leave, we had to leave now.

I was five months pregnant.

Already, my stomach had grown and heartburn was a daily nightmare. The acid racing around my chest made me snappy, and poor Pippa was in charge of steeping concoctions, sampling the leaves we knew were edible in different preparations to see if any had antacid properties.

We had (totally by fluke) found that a small fuzzy plant helped with blood clotting and decreasing inflammation. Galloway had once again injured himself on a stupid forage into the forest with no flip-flops and stood in a patch of this furry plant while chopping down a palm tree. Instead of the wound being infected and swollen, it’d remained free of flowing blood and healed in half the time it normally would. Which was just as well because cuts on our feet lingered for months, seeing as we lived in the ocean and the salt turned the wound to sea ulcers.

We’d experimented over the course of a few months and found that boiling the leaves and using as a poultice increased its effectiveness.

We had no medicines. No antibiotics. No painkillers.

But we did have a small chance at dealing with superficial cuts without issue.

However, all of that was beside the point.

Galloway was leaving.

Leaving me and my waddling fat body to bob idiotically on the bay.

“You’ll never get past the breaking waves on the reef.” I hated how pessimistic I sounded, but the thought of leaving (while halfway through my pregnancy and irritable) was not on my top ten things to do.

Along with heartburn, the tiniest flutters of my evolving baby kept my thoughts turned inward. I knew I’d ignored Galloway a little the past few weeks, but that was natural...wasn’t it?

My body was cooking a human.

It was only right for my mind to mature and prepare, too.

Galloway slid the bamboo raft onto the water, leaving it to float innocuously on the surface.

How many times had we swam in the tide and made love? How many times had Galloway carried my pregnant ass into the waves and washed my hair or massaged my back or kissed my lips as if I would smash into a trillion tiny pieces.