Chapter 1

I hate people.

No, that's not entirely true. I don't hate people, per se. What I hate is the little games they play. You know the ones I mean. The ones where it's, "You scratch my back and I'll scratch yours. You scratch first". Then when it's your turn to get scratched, they're gone in a flash.

This realm of using people seems to be well-populated by women. Not all women though. Just the ones that I attract. Or maybe it's the ones that are attracted to me? Whatever. It all boils down to the same thing. I give them what they want, and they give me ... nothing.

Take Sally Johansson for instance. I gave her a roof over her head, food in her belly, clothes on her back, and all the devotion one man can shower on a woman. And what did I get in return? An empty house, an even emptier bank account, a lot of unpaid bills that I knew nothing about, and blue balls. She found herself a younger stud with more money, and the rest is history. Mind you, so is Sally, but I'm still working my ass off to clean up her mess. And my nuts still hurt a lot.

All that's part of an explanation of why I'm sitting here on the aft deck of a 32-foot sailing sloop, by myself, on the west coast of Vancouver Island, with not a soul within a hundred miles. Well, maybe there are a few, but I can't see them, and they can't see me. In my mind, that mean they don't really count.

Take the other night, for instance. I was looking forward to dropping anchor in a small cove I frequent, about eighty miles north of the last marine outpost of any consequence. Usually I have the cove all to myself. No people, no noise, no disappointments in the morning. Just me and Mother Nature. If I wanted to stay up late and get drunk, no problem. If I wanted to just sit around naked, playing with myself, that was fine. Whatever I had in mind was what I'd do without having to answer to anyone or anything. No phones, no TV, no internet, nothing. Just me, by myself, at one with the rest of the universe. In the isolation, I could sit back with whatever there was for liquid comfort and feel sorry for myself.

So it was with an undefined degree of disappointment that I found there was another boat already riding at anchor in my little secret cove. How dare they! Invading my space and making me feel guilty about my own selfishness. The nerve of some people!

In this particular cove, there aren't a lot of safe anchorages. At high tide, it's a fairly large expanse of water, but when the tide goes out, all the rocks that have a habit of punching holes in a fibreglass hull sit just below the surface, waiting patiently for their next victim. That other boat was sitting smack dab in the middle of the best anchorage in the whole cove, making my goal of isolation ever tougher to achieve. But I've been in that cove so many times that I can pinpoint exactly where I can and can't anchor, within six inches, and with my eyes closed, too. There have been several occasions when I've found shelter in this cove from some particularly strong storms, living proof that Mother Nature is definitely female, and suffers from PMS.

When I got to one of the few safe spots, I heaved the Danforth anchor overboard and let it drag until it had a secure hold, then set the sea anchor off the stern. It sounds complicated, but I can do the whole operation in less than ten minutes. Something about having had lots of practise over the years, I guess.

Once the sails were furled, I spent the next half hour settling in, getting something to eat and digging out the first of what would probably be many cold beers. These were the good ones. Two would give me a decent buzz on my way to daily oblivion. I had a couple dozen on board, just in case my math was its usual crappy self. The food was only to keep me from getting sick as a dog after I'd over-indulged. You'd think I'd have learned by now that the food always came back up first.

It was quiet. Just the wind rustling in the trees onshore and the lapping of waves against the hull. This was what I had been looking for all week. Peace, quiet, and a chance to commiserate. But the silence was broken by the greetings of a female voice.

"Hello," she called, "can I come over?"

Somehow, the word "No" evaporated from my vocabulary. There was something soft and appealing in that voice. Despite a feeling that I knew so well, the one that tells me to shut the fuck up and run or hide, I invited her over anyway. You'd think that after twenty years of involuntary bachelorhood, I'd have learned.

You'd be wrong.

She rowed over in a punt-nosed skiff and tied off at the stern. I helped her climb aboard, noting that she was probably just a couple of years younger than myself, and those years had been kind to her. Maybe it was the exercise of sailing that had kept her fit and trim. Maybe it was all the men she'd fucked over the years. Maybe it was a case of "check all the above". At the time, I really didn't care. She was definitely eye candy for a lonely old gypsy sailor like me.

As she climbed over the stern, I could see that her striped crew-neck shirt was all that stood between me and her breasts. They weren't huge, but they sure were firm looking. Her pert little nipples gave away the fact that she wasn't wearing a bra as they poked into the fabric and left definite outlines. Those breasts looked to be just enough to fill a hand, with maybe a little extra, just to make sure. The horizontal stripes of her shirt only accentuated her chest,.with a pair of denim cutoffs that might just as well have been spray painted on. And those legs! They started at her ankles and went up to God knows where! I almost had to wipe the slobber off my chin!

"Hi. I'm Brandy. Brandy Bendall." she introduced herself. The muscles in my jaw had ceased to function as I babbled incoherently, lost somewhere between civility and rampant lust.

"H-h-h-h," I started, "hi. I'm Jerry. Jerry Wallace. Welcome aboard the..."

Shit, I'd have to go look at the name of my boat where it was painted on the bow! What a hell of a time to suffer from Alzheimer's!

She giggled a little, very definitely aware of the effect she was having on my oversexed and under-supplied person. She had the bluest eyes I could remember, and in that moment, they gobbled me up and spat me out. And I didn't give a shit about anything else! I would have happily committed harikari for the chance to die in those eyes!

"Relax, Jerry. I don't bite, ya know." she crooned. "I was just trying to be neighbourly, and I could use some company tonight. Usually I'm quite happy being by myself, but tonight, for some reason, I wanted some company. But, if you'd rather be alone..."

"No, not really." A part of me wanted to throw her overboard and let her drown. The rest of me was busy trying to find a balance between a possible escape from loneliness and a bad case of raging hormones. Those hormones were winning by a large margin.

"Can I offer you a beer?" I asked her. I felt like adding something about a good roll in the seaweed too. Discretion, being the better part of valour, won out. Sometimes I hate the rules of civility. This was one of those times.

"Yeah, I'd like that." she confessed as she found one of the only two comfortable spots on the whole deck to sit. I made a mental note that the other spot was right beside her. Hmm. That was the usual pattern that played out whenever I let my poor heart become some woman's playground. Or so that little voice in my head reminded me. I was getting good at ignoring that voice.

"How about something to eat?" I offered. She gazed into my eyes as she contemplated whether she wanted to be poisoned by a lonely bachelor or not.

"Chef Boy-Ar-Dee?"" she inquired.

"Sorry, all out of that pre-digested shit. Beer-battered cod, and there's some home fries left" as I tried to calm her fears. " I think" I added.

"Yeah, that sounds good. You make it yourself, or have you been talking to Captain Highliner?" she asked, referring to another one of those frozen fish outfits that managed to remove most of the fat, and all the flavour.

"Nope. It's the real thing. I'm not what you'd call a gourmet chef, by any means, but I haven't killed anyone off with ptomaine poisoning yet. Still working on that, though." I had tried for some levity to break the feelings of stalemate stuck in my gut. It went over like a lead balloon.

Brandy accepted my offer, hiding her trepidation well enough so that I didn't notice it. I guess she'd heard horror stories about bachelor cooking before, or had maybe lived through a couple ... I seriously hoped that this wouldn't be another chapter in that book. The stigma alone would have been enough to send me into the culinary underground if it was. Hell, I'd be relegated to fast food restaurants for the balance of my existence. Just the thought of living off hamburgers from the take-outs made my stomach want to define a whole new aspect to the idea of recycling.

I served out a plate of food for her, then grabbed two more beers as I passed the cooler. I wasn't sure if she was ready for another one, but I definitely was. Passing her the plate and some cutlery, I sat down next to her and proceeded to fill my face.

"Hey!" she injected. "This is pretty good. You catch this yourself, or snag it from one of the docks?"

"The docks? Please! A guy has to have some pride, ya know" I scolded her lightly. "That one came out of Hecate Straights yesterday evening. Took me almost an hour to land the son-of-a-bitch, too. I'd guess he weighed about fifty pounds, because there's another twenty pounds of filet left. Guess what I'm living off for the next week?" At the time, I was amazed, and a little more than impressed with myself that I'd managed to land a ling cod of that size, especially with only ten-pound test line.

We ate in relative silence until Brandy tried to start a conversation by asking me to tell her about myself. There's two versions of my autobiography. One takes about two hours. The other cuts that down to five minute. I went with the abridged one, then asked her to enlighten me with her own story. She talked, I listened, and neither one of us remembered a single word. It was all a part of the game of breaking the ice between two dissimilar people.

From the little I remember, it seems that Brandy was a marine biologist, out for the summer in pursuit of information on the habits of some aquatic creature with more Latin names than all the people listed in the white pages of Rome. She picked up at the blank look on my face when she rattled off all those names.

"Ya know those little tidal crabs that always show up when the water's low? Those creatures." she educated me. I knew of them. They were the ones that were big enough to do serious damage to a toe if you were sloppy, but not big enough to make an afternoon snack out of. I tried to look intrigued anyway. Brandy started to expand on her study criteria. She went into the importance of these particular invertebrates in the overall scheme of things. I had other things on my mind. Two of them kept rising and falling with her breathing.

"You really don't give a shit about all this, do you?" she asked, finally becoming aware of my disinterest.

"I wouldn't say that." I told her. "But you've got a pair of the most beautiful breasts I can remember seeing. They're alive and heaving right in front of my face. They're more hypnotic that Sigmund Freud. And I'm supposed to be concerned about little crabs? About the only crabs I give a shit about are the ones I know you don't have."

"Me? Crabs? Not in this lifetime! Maybe I should make sure you don't have 'em either?" she teased. Promises, promises! Typical female!

Brandy spent what felt like a lifetime studying something on my face. I could see her eyes shifting from side to side as though looking for those horns that might sprout from my forehead any second now. I know about her eye movements from first-hand observation. Mine were locked on hers, focusing on those gorgeous deep blues she had. It was like hers were the gateway to all the answers that mankind needed to explore the stars. Maybe they were. I wasn't about to take a chance on missing any of that possibility.

Then out of nowhere, Brandy reached her hand around the back of my head, pulled me to her, and kissed me more passionately than I've been kissed in a long, long time. Not that it was a hard thing to accomplish. I really haven't had too many passionate kisses in my forty-something years. But if there was a kissing scale from one to ten, hers would be about an eleven-point-five.

I wanted to grab her, hold her, capture her as mine for the rest of time. Don't ask me why. Even that annoying little voice that I was so desperately trying to ignore screamed in my head. "Don't do this!" it yelled. "She'll eat you up and spit you out, asshole!" Like I said, I try to ignore that little piece of shit as much as I can. Brandy was making the job insufferably easy.

My first instinct was to reach for her shoulder before I pulled her to me tightly. My intentions were great. My aim wasn't. Instead of the shoulder, my wandering hand found her breast, which seemed to draw me to it like a fish to a flashlight. As soon as I made contact, all I could think of was how well some asshole newspaper reporter would fuck up my obituary. This woman would probably kill me on the spot and feed my remains to the dogfish.

But she didn't flinch! I figured that if I was going to die anyway, I may as well go out as a happy man. With her tacit approval, I cupped that delicate orb in my palm, my thumb on reconnaissance for that perky nipple that I knew was there somewhere. Finally attaining my objective, I lightly rubbed my thumb over it, eliciting a soft, lusty moan from Brandy's throat. For some reason, I froze on the spot.