Forbidden Sensations: A Dark Romance Savannah Rose (readnow TXT) 📖

Empty.

It couldn't be empty. This cabinet, closest to the bed, was where I'd put my playthings. I opened the next, and the next. All of them coming up zero. No toys, no suitcase, even my fucking shaving kit was gone.

What in the fuck?

I was just discombobulated, was all. Understandable. I had a head trauma, was very thirsty, and the skin on my scalp felt like shrink wrap. Also the groaning. Louder. Going from its standard creeeak to a horrendous, terrible craaaack.

All the cabinet doors swung outward, gaping like wooden mouths, as the Insatiable tipped over. To starboard, I think it was, right before I lost consciousness.

Chapter Twelve

MADDOX

“Don't say I didn't warn you,” Josh said, watching me puke for the fiftieth time. My knuckles were white as I held tight to the Insatiable's railing, and I didn't understand how he could be here, because he was dead. “I told you it was a bad idea. No shame in taking Dramamine, bro. You got nothing to prove to me.”

I wiped my mouth. I tasted like… vinegar.

Josh leaned over the rail, standing beside me, and watched the waves that weren't waves, but sand dunes. We were sailing on sand dunes. He was wearing an obnoxious Hawaiian shirt, the one Mom bought him. He was too polite to tell her it was hideous, what with its parrots and frawns and nonsensical splashes of plasma yellow.

I didn't know why he thought he needed to wear his football helmet, either. I guess because he loved that helmet. Number eight. Varsity quarterback, Florida Gators.

We buried him with that helmet. Yeah, I remember that, which meant he was definitely dead.

“How's Mom?” he asked, looking out at what wasn't an ocean, but a desert.

I hadn't talked to her for months. I shrugged and said, “Fine, I guess.”

“You shouldn't guess, Maddy. She's your mom, too, so you shouldn't be a dick.”

He turned toward me. It was hard to see him through the facemask, but I could tell his eyes were dark. Sunken in.

His hair, which he'd always kept short, was peeking out from the sides of his helmet. Long locks of red, falling to his shoulders.

“Ginger Rapunzel,” I snorted.

“Ppphbt. Whatever,” he returned, and now I could see his eyes weren't there anymore. His face was decaying. “Here,” he said, reaching into his shirt pocket and pulling out a prescription bottle. “Better than Dramamine.”

I didn't like it when he did this. The doctors said it was okay, though, so he kept taking the pills to offset the pain. It was the Gator's fault. Quarterbacks shouldn't get sacked three times in the first quarter. This year's offense was crap. They couldn't hold back a fart, let alone a thousand pounds of defensive tackles.

Josh took my hand and turned it palm up. Held the bottle above it, shook out a few capsules, and when I looked down, all I saw were bones. Gripping my fingers and not letting go.

“First one's free, bro,” he laughed.

I pulled my hand away, slicing my skin open against his fingernails. They had grown long and taken on a gruesome hue of yellow, a lot like the splotches on his shirt.

I kept stumbling backwards, cycling my arms for balance, until I felt the boat railing against my ass. Then nothing, as I pitched overboard. I didn't hit water, I didn't hit sand, I didn't hit anything. I just kept falling, falling, falling into a bottomless abyss, Josh's skull smiling down at me.

“Hut! Hut hut!” he yelled and waved.

I watched him disappear, but I didn't want him to go. I wanted to cry out for help, and just as I was about to scream his name, a giant marshmallow swallowed my head. I could no longer breathe, let alone yell.

I flailed about like a fish in a net, struggling, groping, trying to pull the marshmallow off my face.

It was a pillow.

I sat straight up, gasping for air and quickly realizing it was just a nightmare, and here I was, in the master cabin of a shipwrecked boat. A night sky shone through the cracked windows, and other than the crashing of waves, there wasn't a sound to be heard.

The first thing I would do, I decided, was not to let myself get knocked out again. This made three times in twenty four hours. Which was exactly three times too many. It was the cabinet door above the bed that popped me. It was hanging at an absolute right angle, because the boat had fallen completely on its side.

I was about to start clamoring out of the cabin, when something inside that cabinet gave me reason to pause.

I couldn't really identify what was there. Or not there. There were wires, small thin ones, that looked as though they had been cut. They trundled out from the back panel like so many spider legs.

It occurred to me that even though I'd not bothered to read the Insatiable's safety manual, I had an inkling this is where the GPS tracking system should be.

The second thing I would do was sue Atlantic Charter for gross negligence. Whether they were replacing the system, upgrading it, reinstalling it, they'd allowed one of their crafts to leave the docks without its GPS.

I'd had it with this fucking crate.

I clamored out from under the mess, and squeezed my way through the window frame. The sand was nice enough to break my fall, but my entire head felt like a bowling ball after a league night, my throat was parched, and now I was getting hungry, too.

Why I hadn't thought about it before, I supposed I could blame on the overall shock of the fucking situation. This kind of thing didn't happen in real life. Shipwrecks and castaways only happened on television and in the movies.

Bottom line; this was bullshit. So I pulled out my phone to call for help. Or text for