Page 47 of Marlin's Faith

“I’ll do better, I promise.”

“I suspect you will, just promise me somethin’ okay?”

“What?”

“If you can’t talk to me, you feel uncomfortable or whatever, just tell me so and promise you’ll talk to someone about it. Be it the doctor lady, or one of yer sisters. You can’t do it all by yourself. Ain’t no one can after all of that.”

She looked pensive for a minute, eyes distant, before she nodded finally, “That’s reasonable…”

“I also know it’s hard as fuck for you, isn’t it?”

She looked up at me sharply, and I pressed on, “You been told your whole life what’s what and how to act and you just lock it all down, bottle it all up, then you’re kidnapped, sold into sexual slavery, they get you hooked on some of the nastiest shit to keep you shackled and in line… Baby, it’s no wonder you have a hard time speaking your heart and mind. You been nothing but punished for it for a long, long, time.”

Her eyes welled and she nodded, before quickly averting her gaze toward the dipping sun. I sighed, and gathered her close, holding her tight as she gave a muffled sniff. A tension that she just about always carried had eased out of her some and I pretty much figured I’d just hit the damn nail on the head. It was a shit way to live and she’d been living that way for so long… I couldn’t even. I’d grown up similarly, but at some point I’d just stopped giving a fuck what my ma and pop had to say about things. Their religion hadn’t really done anything for me or any of my brothers that I could see, ‘cept’n for giving us a boat load of guilt about any given subject.

Faith cuddled into me and I wrapped my arms around her tighter, kissing the top of her head as she stared sightless and thinking into the setting sun, the cloud front moving across the water in our direction until the breeze carried with it the damp, ozone scent of imminent rain.

“Come on, Baby Girl. Time to go down and take cover,” I murmured into her hair. She nodded and let me lead her by the hand down the steps. At the bottom, I rounded the corner and got my keys out of my pocket. I unlocked the padlock holding the hatch shut and opened it up.

“It’s dark,” she said.

“Afraid?”

“Are you with me?”

“Always.”

“Then no.”

I smiled and she took the ladder carefully down into the bunk. I went down after her, shutting the hatch tightly against the coming rain. Our stuff was already down here, but with the growing dark, it wasn’t like you could see it. Hell, it might as well be light tight already.

“I can’t see, Marlin,” she uttered softly, and I could barely see her myself.

“Stay there, Baby. I’ll move this stuff off the bed and then I can hold you.”

I shifted our bags of clothes to the floor and dug around in the top of mine. I went to her and she jumped at my light touch. I trailed fingertips down her arm and put my tee in her hands.

“Can’t see a thing, Darlin’,” I led her around to the side of the bed and put her hand on it, “Go ahead and change.”

I felt my way around as cloth whispered in the dark and turned back the fresh bedding that’d come from my boat. I took off my cut and felt for the hook in the side of the headboard, and hung it up. The shorts I let hit the floor. I tugged up my boxer shorts and got into the bed. Faith stole in beside me and I held myself at the ready.

“Make yourself comfortable, Faith, however you’d like.”

She lay her head on my chest, and cuddled in close and I dropped the sheet and light blanket over the top of her.

“It’s cooler down here,” she uttered.

“Yeah, it is,” I kissed the top of her head and held her, and it felt right. Like this was where she was meant to be, in my arms each night, where I could keep her safe from the world that seemed pretty much dead set on stealing any light she had left. Truth be told, I was beginning to wonder that she still managed to hang on to any at all.

“What’re you thinking?” she whispered into the deep night.

“How you’ve been hanging on for so long, and how you really shouldn’t trust anybody anymore. How it’s both kind of amazing and beautiful that you trust me.”

“I do,” she looked up, I could tell by the movement of her head against my chest. She pushed off of me and a second later her lips touched to my chin, she giggled a bit and hit her mark on the second try, her lips soft and silky against my own.

She settled back down after the slow, relatively chaste, kiss and sighed as if content. Wasn’t long after that we was both asleep.

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