Bartosz came and scowled the entire way up to the sheep pasture. I could feel that he was aching to argue with me. Good. I wanted to fight with him; I just needed something from him, too.
The pasture opened up into a wide oval. Of all of the different sections of the island, the beach, the ring of forest, the pasture, and the clearing with the cabin, the pasture took up most of the space. It was a good-sized pasture too, the same size as the fenced-in sheep fields that my godmother’s neighbors had. The island was quite beautiful. I could see the potential idyllic-ness of the place with a proper cabin or cottage where the ramshackle cabin was now, better-maintained sheep, a jetty out into the ocean, and maybe a gazebo and a couple of Adirondack chairs facing the water. I had some money saved, actually more than some, but I didn’t think it was private island money, even a small and forgotten one like this one. Plus, the beauty and potential price of the island were irrelevant if I died of starvation here, which brought me back to Bartosz.
I turned to face him and was met, immediately, with his anger.
“What the fuck do you want?” He yelled, “You can’t just call me like I’m some sort of fucking dog!”
In a smooth moment, I had one of my hands against the side of his face, in not quite a caress.
“I think I can, and I think I did.”
I gripped harder, pressing my fingers into that sharp cheekbone, slipping my pinky finger into his mouth, and tugging lightly.
“And I think you liked it,” I rubbed my now wet pinky against his full bottom lip, watching his pupils grow huge, “I can stop now, we can go back to being random fucking people on this fucking island. Or,”
I drew in close until I could feel the lean planes and bones of his body and pushed myself against him, slowly enough thathe could step back any time until his hardness was pressed against me and his breaths were becoming ragged.
“Or, you can use your football skills or whatever to catch a sheep and bring it back to feed us and become mine, and be rewarded.”
I ground our bodies together, then took a large step back.
“Your choice.” I shrugged nonchalantly, as if my blood wasn’t racing.
He swallowed hard.
“I’ll get the sheep,” his rough voice was music to my ears.
“Good.”
There was a large boulder that I climbed up and sat down on before I freaked the fuck out. I had never been dominant with anyone I had ever slept with. Not that there were that many, just a short series of quick, unsatisfying fucks within mostly long-distance relationships that had petered out quickly. I had never had the energy for a relationship that only half satisfied me, in bed and out of it. I had never minded being single, just lonely, and honestly, I would take loneliness over the feeling of almost disgust when someone blockheaded, unambitious, and uninteresting had been lying next to me. It had always felt wrong somehow. A therapist had said that maybe I was unhealthily hanging onto Oskar, but I didn’t even feel a twinge of that disgust when I was with Ettore, Jin Woo, and Bartosz. Maybe reuniting with Oskar had let me work through things, and I was free to actually find love. Or maybe I was going fucking crazy.
I pulled my knees to my chest and watched the quick dark shape of Bartosz creep around the edge of the meadow, moving closer and closer to the sheep in a bunched-up group on the far side of the grassy space. In a quick burst of movement, fast, so fast, that it almost should’ve been impossible, he was sprinting and throwing himself at the sheep. The little crowd of grey-wooled creatures scattered. Leaving Bartosz with a sheep in his grasp!
Sliding down the boulder, I was shooting towards him. The sheep was bleating, and he was kneeling over it, each of his hands holding two of its hooves. He looked up at me, flushed, his eyes wild like he was more creature, more hound, than man. This time, I held his face with both hands as I kissed the ever-living shit out of him.
***
Oskar had deigned to be in my presence, or at least didn’t tell me to go away as he finished butchering up the sheep. It was smaller than it had looked now that he had cut all of the wool away from it. I hadn’t watched them kill it, but did watch now as he and Bartosz neatly packed parts of the sheep into the makeshift smoker. They weren’t sure if the smoking was going to work. Oskar had dried and smoked venison he had hunted with his father, but apparently, preserving meat in a warm, dry house with everything you needed, rather than outside on an island with basically no supplies, had left him to be less than sure of his success.
“What part will be best to eat roasted tonight, and which part would be better to cook in a thick stew tomorrow?” I threw out into the air between us, as if his answering me meant very little.
Oskar paused and placed his hands on his hips, drumming his fingers against his abs where they peaked out from his shirt that had ridden up as he had bent over to wrap each carefully butchered cut with leaves and dry grasses.
“I think that the most tasty parts would be the shoulders and the shanks, maybe the rump and ribs would be better to stew,” he said after a long moment of seriously considering my question.
I stood up from the overturned bucket that I was using as a seat.
“Could you put those aside? I’ll come back in a bit to grab them.”
He nodded in my direction but didn’t look at me.
Fine by me.
“Bartosz, would you help me with the getting the stew set up ready?” And this time it was truly a request, not a demand. The gremlin within me had settled; it seemed that it liked Bartosz killing things for me. The obsessive gremlin was a complete psycho.
Yesterday, I had found a curved piece of reddish metal sticking out of the mossy earth; it had turned out to be a half-overturned wheelbarrow, the rim of it calling my attention like the hand of a drowning man. It had left me with numb fingers and dirt under my fingernails, but I had been able to dig it out and rinse it in the ocean. After removing the last clinging bits of rotted wood, I had a rusty and warped bowl. Despite the salt water, I still eyed it suspiciously. If I wanted to use it as a pot, I wanted to do everything I could to sanitize it. I didn’t think you could get tetanus by consuming things from a rusty pot, but I had read somewhere, probably in college, that rust was quite porous and so harboured more bacteria than normal metal. There was no way that I was going to allow my men, well, the men, to get sick.
Bartosz joined me on the other side of the cabin, where I had dragged the clean-ish wheelbarrow. It rested next to a ring of rocks that Jin Woo had insisted on dragging from the shore for me. Ettore had also insisted on unhelpfully directing him on where to place them. In the center of the ring was a small pile of tinder.
