“It doesn’t go there,” I lied. In Hunter’s get-your-panties-wet presence, it was hard not to fantasize about dicktopia. Especially after three years of not shagging. Sex with Phill was like having wham-bam-thank-you-ma’am with a male blowup doll: clinical, quick, and slightly deflated in crucial places.
“Your turn to quiz me.” Hunter placed a nail on the wood and slammed the hammer on it. To look away from his washboard abs as he worked would’ve been a sin. Was it a good idea for us to continue this game? I was doomed to ask a question I’d regret for the rest of the day, or worse, until we could get off this island.
“Perhaps we should just focus on the boat rescue,” I said.
“Wonder Woman, are you afraid you’ll ask a dirty question?” His teeth grazed his full bottom lip.
“No. I lost interest in the game.”
“Sure you did.”
Hunter linked his arms behind his head and bent his torso, first to the right, then to the left. As he stretched, his body got leaner, and his shorts dropped even lower on his hips, exposing a little more of where the happy trail led. Was he doing it on purpose? Was he showing off his well-cut body in front of me?
What a bastard.
I swallowed with difficulty. “Your shorts are missing a button. And you should put your shirt on. Protecting your skin from direct sunlight keeps the body temperature lower.”
Hunter stopped his peacock act, gave me a playfulwhateverlook, and then picked up a pulley with a bundle of thick cable. “Can I ask you why you dislike coconut flavor so much?”
I groaned. “You will think it’s stupid.”
“Try me.”
“Phill, my ex, loved coconut mojitos. After he stripped me of half of my money during our divorce, I woke up the following day just absolutely hating the taste. At first, it was so bad I would gag if I came close to it.” I chanced a glance at Hunter. His face held no trace of judgment, but his eyebrows were drawn together like something bothered him.
“From now on, I’ll avoid cooking with coconut. I wish I could offer you a different shampoo, but that’s all Edward stocked up with on the island.”
“Don’t worry.” I planted my hands on my hips. “Okay, what’s next?”
“Grab the blue ropes and follow me.”
Once we had a sturdy system, Hunter swam to theReely Nautiand dived to hook it up to the rope (thank goodness we had enough of it to reach). Then he linked ten lifejackets and six old fishing buoys together and attached them to the boat in the hope that it would give some buoyancy and help to fight against the laws of pushing force and friction.
Well, it didn’t. No matter how many times we tried to pull on the cable.
After several attempts, my hands and arms were tired, and I sweated more than I had ever done in my life. Hunter also grew frustrated. His answers became short grunts, and the groove between his eyebrows grew deeper than the Mariana Trench. Finally, I had to call it a day and suggest using the rest of our energy on cryptic numeric messages.
Hunter and I took turns in the ice lake, and regrouped in the hut to work on the numbers. We agreed that if the digits were indeed an enciphered message or instructions, they would surely (hopefully) be written in English. Even more hopefully, the words would be close enough to modern language that we could understand their meaning. Without the internet and limited knowledge about the cryptography used in the 1800s, our next best bet was to use mathematical concepts and principles. The obvious thing was that numbers two, three, six, and nine held the key or keys to solving the puzzle or puzzles.
“Okay. One of the problem-solving principles my father liked to follow was Occam’s Razor. The law of parsimony. The simplest explanation is usually the correct one,” I began. “We’ll start with replacing each occurrence of a number with the designated letter.”
Hunter wrinkled his forehead. “There are thousands of possibilities.”
“And that’s half of the fun.” I wiggled my eyebrows.
“That doesn’t sound fun at all.”
“Oh, come on.” I reached over the table for paper and a pencil, my arm brushing against his.
Using a trial-and-error approach, I drew a complex network with vertices and degrees, rotating numbers and moving them from place to place. Then we scribbled arrays with numerals, and shifted them by a certain quantity, assigned letters from the alphabet, and copied the results into a grid. This would have gone much smoother if my fingers could access my computer.
We counted how many times each digit appeared. On a separate page, we created charts containing the most common vowels and high-frequency consonants and paired them with some numeral combinations.
Hours later, the flame of the second lantern danced and guttered as we continued to decode, but despite making countless letter pairings, nothing reasonable came to our minds. An idea of a Braille code surfaced in our debate, but without Google, it was useless. We didn’t know the amount and position of the dots, and we weren’t sure if Braille had even been invented by the early 1800s.
The following morning, we were able to drag theReely Nautiabout twenty feet closer to dry land. When the sun reached the point of turning us into ants under a magnifying glass, Hunter and I returned to interpret the meaning behind the numbers. So many numbers.
The thick, hot air took up too much space in the room, and a drip of sweat ran down between my breasts. Judging by the numbness of my butt and where the sunlight bleached the tattered sofa’s armrest, we’d worked for long hours.
