Page 21 of Hate Wrecked

ROWAN

The day unfolds with quiet anticipation as Riley and I investigate the remnants left by the island’s former inhabitants. We walk cautiously, our shared curiosity driving us to uncover hidden secrets. I want nothing more than a way to call back home.

Amidst the overgrown vegetation, we stumble upon a building with more recent traces of human habitation—signs of Gerald Extroix’s solitary existence. Rusty tools, weathered books, and makeshift furniture.

“Looks like we’ve hit the jackpot,” Riley remarks, eyes scanning the treasures scattered around the building.

I nod, drawn to the door at the building’s far end. “We should see what’s in there,” I suggest, eyeing the door.

Riley looks at me. “Axe again?”

“If I have to.”

After trying the door, finding it locked, I curse, reaching for my axe.

Riley places a hand on my shoulder. “Hang on, Rambo. Let’s try that.” She points to a window.

We find an old wooden crate and a piece of metal that could double as an improvised crowbar.

Riley gestures toward my shoulders, and I nod.

She climbs up, and the feel of her thighs around my head…

fuck . I want to throw her down on the ground and spread her open.

Taste her again. But I simply blink and clench my jaw, my hands grabbing her thighs as her hands thread in my hair.

“I’ve got you,” I say as I reach my feet.

When I approach the building, Riley reaches out, trying the window. It lifts up. “Oh, thank God,” she exclaims, opening it all the way, leaning forward.

“You okay?” I ask, looking up. The swell of her breasts is all I can see. Jesus…

“Yeah. There’s a bed right below the window. I got it.” She pulls herself in the window, and I step back, steadying her legs. They slip in and out of my sight, and I hear a small crash. “I’m okay. It’s fine,” she yells.

I smile, running to the door. A few seconds later, she opens it, dust covering her top and face. “It’s dirty in here.”

I look her up and down. “I can see that. Not the first time you’ve been dirty, though.”

Riley glares, but I see the redness in her cheeks, and I know she enjoys this more than my grumpiness. We never teased; we never played. Not then. We confessed to each other, and we touched each other. I should have been her friend. That’s what she needed more than anything.

Or maybe what I should have been was a fucking bodyguard and nothing else. A nameless face that blended in the background.

Sometimes, I wish she never saw me, that I could have watched her in my silent torment.

I never wrote about us in the journal I kept back then because I was too busy stealing moments with her.

If we had left each other alone, what version of ourselves would have been born on the page? Ones that lasted? Not this. Not these scared people in this forgotten place.

Inside, there’s a small dining area with a tiny kitchen.

I open the fridge. No power. Like everything else, the contents are gone, just as the captain said.

Everything emptied before building can commence for the research facility.

A scribbled note on the fridge door catches my eye as I let the door shut. I run my hand over the scrawl.

It makes the part of me that longs to tell stories stir in my chest. I brush it away and turn back to Riley. “I don’t think we would have wanted to find anything in there.”

She laughs and points to a door. I nod and walk toward it. I don’t want her to walk through any doors in case there’s danger.

Just as I hoped, I find a pantry. Canned foods line the walls, along with bulk bags of flour and sugar. And I find coffee. Riley rushes past me, transfixed. “Oh my God, smell it. Just smell it. It smells like heaven and the sun, and I need a damn IV of this.”

I shake my head. “You’re going to have to learn how to make a fire if you want a hot cup of that in the morning.”

She lets go of the bag. “How do you make coffee on a fire? Can’t we just do a cold drip?”

I shrug. There’s a coffee pot, but we can’t plug it in. “We’ll figure it out.” God forbid she doesn’t have her coffee. I’ll pay for that.

I know how she used to take her coffee—with a shot mixed in. It was the only way she could face the chaos of that house.

I shake the thought away, taking stock of our surroundings. “This is good. This is really good. We can catch fish with the poles and use everything here.”

“It is good,” Riley repeats, walking out of the panty.

“And we won’t have to stay in that little tent together. We can sleep in these beds.”

“It’ll be weird, though,” Riley says, unsure.

“What will?”

“Sleeping in someone else’s bed in here?”

I shrug. “I mean, Gerald left. He returned to civilization. He did love it here, though, the captain said.” My voice falters at the mention. Too fresh. “This bed isn’t…he doesn’t live here anymore.”

Riley walks over to a wardrobe and opens it, finding nothing. “He didn’t leave much behind, did he?”

I ignore the sadness in her voice, pushing for something brighter. “No. But we can bring our stuff in here.”

“I don’t want to live here,” she says to the darkness of the wardrobe.

“You know what I mean. We can stay here after we radio home.”

Riley shuts the wardrobe and then walks to the door out of the cabin, leaving me alone.

I follow, stopping at the door just as my eyes snag on what we came to find. I look away, to Riley. “Are you okay?”

She looks back. “There was room. So much room.”

I know what she means, and I step down. “Yeah.”

She looks off into the jungle, past water, and shore, to Ironhold Island, where he rests. “It would have been perfect. It would have been okay. We could have had a nice vacation here. And the captain could have enjoyed it, too. We could have had fun.”

I want to rush down the steps and pull her into my arms. But I don’t. I can’t. Because if I do, I’m afraid I’ll break, too. “I know. We’re going to make it right. We’re going to make sure he gets home.”

Riley looks at me, her eyes far away, lost. “How?”

I look back toward the building where Gerald made a life. “I saw…I just saw the radio in there.”

Riley’s eyes go wide. “You…where? When? When did you see it? We can call home?”

I nod, though it feels like a lie. Like I’m lying to her—lying to myself.

I’m a stupid fucking man. Safety is my life, my business. And I took Riley with me on a boat I was never meant to step foot on, with a captain I just met.

We exist to no one.

I failed her.

Riley rushes over to me as I turn toward the building. We walk back inside, and I turn toward the radio.

I can hear Riley behind me. “Do you know how to use it?”

I turn back to her, meeting her gaze, the fear in her eyes.

In slow motion, I approach the radio, tuning it with uncertainty. Would there be static, a signal, or perhaps a friendly voice? There’s nothing—no sound, no sign of life. I try different frequencies, hoping for a response, yet the silence persists.

Taking a step back from the radio, I shift my focus to Riley. “Let’s check out back. See where the generator is that the captain mentioned.”

She nods and leads the way out of the cramped space. My heart echoes in my ears. After exiting the building, we circle around it. I try to count my breaths, an attempt to regain my composure. I need to be strong for her.

Riley halts, fixated on a disturbed patch of grass. Something was here. Her gaze rises to meet mine. “He took everything,” she states, her tone solemn and unwavering.

“Maybe he didn’t.”

“What do you mean?” Riley asks.

“Maybe he did leave things behind. But when he was no longer the manager of the island, it was empty. No one to guard it. No one to guard anything.”

My instinct is to reach for Riley’s hand, to offer comfort and reassurance. But I resist the urge. Instead, I turn away and head back in the direction of our supplies. There, at least, I can retreat into the tent and find a momentary reprieve.

Just one moment.

Just one fucking moment.

But I don’t have that.

I don’t know what I’m hearing at first. It’s hard to hear over the birds as we return to our supplies, but something captures my attention. When I look at Riley, she has a strange look on her face, and her eyes dart around. Then, finally, we both stop, turning slowly, eyes searching the trees.

When I see it, I blink twice, shaking my head. Riley follows my line of sight to the orange furball by the tree line. The cat has a rat in its mouth and is meowing around its capture.

“Oh my gooooooodddddd,” Riley exclaims, dropping to her knees. She beckons the cat to her without hesitation.

“Riley, it has a rat in its mouth.”

“So?” She glances at me before making kitty sounds to the cat.

I reach for her arm, attempting to pull her up. “Riley, that cat doesn’t look domestic.”

Riley rolls her eyes before walking toward the cat. But, as I suspected, it growls around the dead rat in its mouth, then runs into the trees.

“Fuck,” Riley whispers.

“C’mon,” I say, walking away.

Riley rushes to catch up. “Why is he all alone here?”

“How do you know it’s a he?”

“I don’t know. It’s an orange cat. Most orange cats are boys.”

“Who knows why it’s here? Stranger things have happened.”

“Someone left it here. All alone,” she says as we make it to the airstrip.

“On an island with rats and birds,” I retort. “Sounds like a cat’s dream.”

“But without anyone to love it.”

“Not all animals need love, and he looked happy with his feast in his mouth.”’

Riley scoffs, crossing her arms as we reach the edge of the airstrip and Falcon Island. “It was looking into my damn soul, Rowan. It was meowing. And all animals need love.”

“Not true.”

Riley rushes past me into the water, turning around to look at me as she walks backward. “Are you an animal that doesn’t need love?”

“I’m exactly that kind of animal.”

Riley shakes her head before turning around. “Yeah, right. Don’t talk to me like I don’t know you.”’

“You did know me. Past tense.”

Riley doesn’t reply as we approach our belongings.

Above us, the sky is getting dark. The blue deep and ominous. Riley looks up, too. “Another fucking storm?”

“This island is one of the rainiest places on the planet.”

We pick up our pace, and I wonder if we should stay in the Hilton. I don’t want to stay in one of the buildings until we’ve cleaned it up a bit and planned for us to stay in the tent the first night on Falcon Island. But it looks like we may not have a choice.

It starts to drizzle as I reach for the lifeboat. Wasting no time, Riley and I carry our supplies to a building on Falcon Island bearing the sign Yacht Club . The irony of the name isn’t lost on us, given our current circumstances.

I glance at Riley as the rain falls, noting the weariness on her face. We’ve come a long way since the crash, both physically and emotionally. The radio being a dead end weighs heavy, but I see her looking around from time to time. Perhaps looking for the cat. Looking for hope.

As we enter the building, the interior reveals remnants of a past long gone—nautical décor, faded posters, and an abandoned bar. It’s a strange contrast to the personal feel of the building that Gerald made his quarters.

“We could set up our tent outside, maybe find a good spot,” I suggest as we at last secure all of our supplies, eyeing the space under a sturdy-looking lean-to attached to the side of the building.

Riley looks around, considering the options. “Yeah, that could work.”

“I bet all the spiders want to be inside,” I edge. “We can stay out there. Under cover, but not covered in spiders.”

She looks at me, her eyes conveying she knows I’m trying to cheer her up.

She nods and we get to work. The tent goes up under the lean-to, providing a sense of security against the elements.

As we work together, the process becomes a ritual, familiar as the sun begins its descent, casting long shadows across the Yacht Club.

We sit together under our lean-to as the rain starts to come down in buckets.

There’s more room in the tent now that it isn’t crammed with supplies we were afraid to lose.

The light outside begins to dim, and the intimacy of being this close to Riley again feels suffocating.

I could read my book or write down a plan, but I’m too tired to do either. So we lie together, breathing silently with the sound of the rain.

“I’m scared, Rowan,” Riley whispers. I barely hear her, but I do. And I don’t want to tell her that I’m scared too. Something pushed inside me as we crossed the sea, some ominous threat to my heart, our safety, this life we lead.

I should have asked the captain to turn back, but I had no reason other than a feeling.

Now, that feeling has us here, alone on an island known for taking lives.

How many have died here with no record?

Will we be those people?