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Jessi woke up to the smell of frying bacon. She hadn’t broken her fast in what felt like a week. She stood up, and threw her one spare clean outfit on, before she practically floated on the smell lines from the sizzling bacon, and went down the house’s sunlight-filled hallway, into its slick, modern-looking kitchen.
Adam was at the stove, dancing to a 90’s rock song while cooking. His back was to the hallway, but when Jessi came in, he turned around, and met her gaze with a start, like she had just caught him slacking off at work. He was wearing a tight-fitting white tanktop that hid very little of his broad figure, which looked like the body of an old-fashioned farmer: like a man who had to do manual labor for hours every day, but who also had access to all of the food that he needed, plus a little extra.
“Hope you eat bacon and eggs,” he said, as he placed two portions of thick bacon and bright-yellow-yolked eggs onto two plates. The toaster sprung up four slices of toasted, seedy, whole-grain bread.
“I’d eat anything hot right now. I haven’t had anything but tuna fish, protein bars, and dried fruit for the past 3 weeks.” She caught herself visibly salivating.
“Your boat trip was that long?” he asked.
“I was competing in the Cross-The-Pond,” she replied.
“I’m sorry, the what?” he asked, as they dug into breakfast together. Everything tasted like heaven. This man bought that thick, quality bacon, and he knew his way around a skillet.
“The Cross-The-Pond? The annual solo yacht race from Plymouth, England to Rhode Island, USA? It’s three to four weeks long, by yourself, on the ocean. Windpower only,” she ended. She sometimes forgot that not everyone followed her sport. She tried the coffee. It was rich and dark and hot and amazing.
“Four weeks by yourself? On just a yacht? Isn’t that dangerous?” he looked at her with an expression not unlike that of a little kid speaking to a firefighter.
“Eh, it depends-” she started selling herself short, telling him the lines about GPS phones and beacons that she tells her parents and friends to keep them from worrying about her.
“Now that I think about last night, yes, solo sailing is kind of dangerous. But, I’m a bit of a thrillseeker,” she admitted.
Adam’s eyebrows raised when she said this, like he had just heard someone say something either offensive, or exciting. It was hard to tell at first.
He looked away quickly, and drank a long chug of coffee. He was feigning indifference. She had stumbled onto something that he liked to hear.
If this kind-seeming man was secretly a monster, as her true crime podcasts had warned her about, then he would have been way better at hiding his emotions than this. This man’s every spare thought seemed to seep out onto his face, like he wasn’t aware that he was in the room with someone else.
“You like that I’m a thrillseeker?” Jessi teased.
He chuckled awkwardly before responding. “I guess it reminded me of my most recent girlfriend. She was the opposite. Even moths scared her,” he said, before changing the topic to practical matters.
“Now that I know you’re okay, and fed, what do you need next?”
“I need to tell the race referees what happened to me, and get to Newfoundland. No racers will want to pick me up, so I’ll have to charter my own way. Do you have a boat?”
“Just a kayak, right now. It’s a bit dodgy to take all the way to the mainland. And the motor on my real boat is out, a mechanic is coming out with a replacement part to fix it next week.”
“Do you have a satellite phone, or any internet out here?” She asked.
“No. There’s a stationary radio, in my workshop.”
“Does anyone else nearby have satellite?”
“I’m not just the only person in this house. I’m the only person on this island,” Adam said.
“Oh,” Jessi said. The psycho detector on her mental backburner started ticking again. “Why do you live entirely by yourself?” she finally asked, unable to hide her judgement, in front of such a clearly strange person.
“I am very afraid of being around people,” he said.
“But, you said that you have had a girlfriend.”
“That was before I moved here, years ago. But, this doesn’t matter right now. You need to get on the radio,” he said, standing up. He put both of their dishes in the sink, splashed them with water to soak, and finished his coffee.
She finished her cup, and followed him, through the sun-soaked living room, with a view of the rocky shore below, through another hallway, and into a large room, filled with electronics, power tools, art supplies, and vintage technology. It looked halfway between a mad scientist’s workshop and an artist’s studio.
“I want to clarify something,” Adam said, as he turned on a stationary radio on the edge of the room, and checked that it was working.
“I don’t live here because I dislike being around people. I love people. I miss them terribly. I live here because I am afraid of what happens when I’m around other people. I’m afraid of hurting them.”
Jessi crossed her arms, and stared at him hard. She didn’t even feel it in her feet, but she was inching backwards.
“No – I didn’t try to hurt anyone – it’s. There were two terrible accidents, that I blame myself for, even though cops and doctors and shrinks, and my family, have all assured me, that I didn’t do anything wrong,” he said.
“Nobody was killed – thank god – just a lot of property damage, and some minor injuries. But I can’t stop blaming myself, because I don’t know how to prevent an accident again. And it could be worse, next time.”
The radio had one office chair in front of it for the operator. Adam sat down on the ground next to the chair. He looked down at the corded radio microphone in his hand as he continued speaking.
“My family has enough money to fix lots of problems. They bought this island, and hired an architect to build this house. I’ve been living here for years, now. The only person I see regularly is the fisherman who does weekly supply runs for me, captain Jacques. There have also been a few tourist sailors who have landed and said hello throughout the years.”
“Four sailors, including you.” He looked up at her, with this line. Jessi uncrossed her arms, and sat down on the wall next to him.
She couldn’t imagine that level of solitude for that long. Just three or four weeks at sea left her feeling half-crazy. The only reason she could stand it was her focus on trying to place in the race. Competition kept her going out there.
But this prolonged solitude of his - It explained his rawness. By not spending time with people, he had clearly lost his skills in the subtle arts of acting normal.
“Adam. Nobody can control accidents. That’s why they’re called accidents. It’s not your fault,” she said, putting her hand on his shoulder. He startled at her touch, like he had forgotten what anything other than a handshake could feel like. He moved her hand away, and smiled apologetically, while standing up. Jessi then sat in the radio chair.
“Thank you for saying that,” he said, clearly not believing it. “And sorry. I really said too much. I know I should have saved all that for a therapist,” he said. “I keep on getting distracted. Here. the radio works.” He handed the mic to her.
On the airwaves, Jessi reached the race organizers, who were relieved to hear that she was alive and well, and gave her condolences on the crash of her yacht. The organizers also said they’d contact her family to let them know what happened.
“True Crime Prevention To Do List: Let Outside World Know What Happened To Missing Woman: Completed,” Jessi thought to herself.
Adam then used the radio. His friend Captain Jacque had a weekly run to his island scheduled, with supplies on Wednesdays. As long as Jessi could wait three more days, she could hitch a ride with him back to Newfoundland. Jacque and Jessi both agreed to this.
There was one more thing that Adam had to check before he was okay with this plan: if the two of them had enough drinking water to last until then. He insisted on showing Jessi the drinking water system while he checked the levels. Expecting a big ugly tank, Jessi reluctantly agreed. What else was there to do?
They walked out of the house’s back door, and into a lush, fertile garden, with bed after bed of vegetables, a row of berry bushes, and a flock of a dozen chickens pecking in a fenced-in yard. Next to that was a wetland-looking habitat, with tanks next to it, and a series of pipes connected to the house gutters.
Adam explained that he did all of the back-breaking work of setting up and maintaining this garden and utility area, and that it allowed him to live off the land as much as one person could. He got about half of his calories from the garden, which took year-long labor, including the eggs from the chickens.
The artificial wetland served double duty as a water filter and fish farm. Most of his drinking water came from filtered rainwater. Most of his electricity came from a combination of solar panels and a wave-powered generator that he had engineered himself, all with a diesel generator backup.
This is what the mad scientist workshop surrounding the radio was for: all of the technology and modifications he needed run his own private Public Works and food farm. He admitted that he had a PhD in physics, that he didn’t really use for much, unless you counted fish farming as a physics problem.
Jessi marveled at how Adam had used his clearly brilliant mind to build an entire life around relying on other people as little as possible. Her specialty was Emergency Medicine, not engineering or physics, but she had met enough wickedly smart people to recognize genius when it was in front of her. Unapplied genius, for some bizarre reason, maybe agoraphobia, she wasn’t experienced enough in psychology to really figure it out, but she had a feeling that he was capable of so much more.
Adam checked the water levels in the tanks. The storm had added plenty. Jessi took note of how many vegetables were currently growing. She had several friends with gardens in her home neighborhood in Massachusetts, but this put them all to shame. This was professional-looking.
“This is amazing," Jessi said.”
“Those are just tomatoes,” he said, and started checking the plants for pests.
“Not the tomatoes – everything. The power, the water, the sewer. It’s all by you.”
“You know, it’s just that sustainability trend I’m following. I want to step as lightly on the world as I can.” he said. He found a large caterpillar munching on his tomato plant, and tossed it into the chicken pen.
“This is beyond eco-friendly, Adam. You created your own, little world.”
Jessi took out her phone, which, when on land, she instinctively carried in her pocket at all times, and started framing a picture of the hens crowding around the caterpillar.
“Jessi! Please, don’t take pictures,” he said, with alarm.
“What?”
“I didn’t want to get into it, because I know it makes me sound crazy. But I have an insane online stalker. I have to keep everything about my life, including my garden, and my location, off the internet, to keep me safe. All right?”
Jessi put her phone away.
“I have some watercolors in the workshop, if you want to paint the farm. Just don’t mention what the painting is of online,” he added. When she declined his offer of the painting set, he walked over to the berry bushes, and checked on them.
In the morning sunlight, with his long, dark curly hair and well-trimmed beard, surrounded by berries and flowers that he had somehow grown by himself on this salty spit of rock he called home, offering her a painting set, he reminded her of a Romantic-era painting of a gentleman.
“Who are you,” Jessi said, full of curiosity, and stepped towards him, looking up at him invitingly. He was about a foot taller than her, and something on him smelled like rosemary and black pepper. He stepped away from the berries, and towards her, before meeting her lips with his, timidly kissing her on the mouth, unsure of what she wanted. She kissed him back, harder, and dug her hands into his hair.
He wrapped his arms around her back and placed his hands on the back of her head, kissing her back deeply.
“I ache for you. Will you have me?” he panted, before lifting her up, placing her against a tree trunk, and kissing her deeply again. He then planted kisses down her neck in an orderly line. He placed his hand under her shirt. She wasn’t wearing a bra.
“Please, take me,” she replied, pushing him off of her and moving off of the tree, so she could take off her shirt, and her pants. She had a fit, athletic body, her skin a few shades darker than Adam’s pale color, and a dark, fluffy bush. She grabbed a condom from her pants pocket, and laid down, beginning to touch herself, as she gestured to him with a “come here” motion.
He tossed his shirt to the side, and took his pants off around his impossible-to-ignore erection. As he did this, Jessi admired how the whole of him looked from below, before he bent down towards her pussy. He sucked her cunt masterfully - apparently in his solitude, he hadn’t forgotten how to make a woman cum.
Afterwards, with his thick cock, he fucked her kindly. He fucked her passionately. She fucked him back with fervor and joy. In the remote garden he had built over his years of solitude, the pair of them fucked like it was the only thing that could possibly matter.
