00000 It's BIRTHDAY TIME! 00000 Those aren't zeroes by the way, they're balloons. I tried, but I couldn't get the real balloons to stay on.

Happy Birthday JWood201! Thanks for being my GI/MAG buddy. If I hadn't chanced by the Gilligan's Island fandom and read 'The Butterfly Effect' that fateful day in Dec. 2010 (and then all of your other stories immediately after that) I'd probably still be pottering around in my other fandom, oblivious to all the magic that you created. And that does not bear thinking about! Thanks for all the crazy lols, the marathon email sessions, the writing advice, the support & encouragement thru my bouts of depression and anxiety attacks, which I appreciate more than you know. (And that goes for TereseLucy384, too.) Thanks for being one of those rare writers whose words and sentences are vibrant, living things- the butterflies emerging from their cocoons in 'At The End Of The World' is there in my mind every time I shut my eyes. (As is the apocalyptic nightmare- TEDDY! NO! :) :)) As for Uncle George- well, if we can't get John Goodman for the role then we may as well give up right now.

Anyway hun, have a great birthday, this one's for you, from me and Teobi. Right on, as the Denver would say!

This story is Rated M for adult situations, although they're not explicit, and there isn't even any actual sex, it's all metaphorical. I think that's the right word...correct me if it isn't, but be kind enough to leave a review as well if you do, that would be lovely. Thanks all for reading, and I hope you enjoy it!

While He Sleeps

Poor Gilligan. He's been working so hard lately, since all the huts seem to fall into disrepair at the same time- which I guess is understandable, since they were all built at the same time. But it never seems to be enough for some people. The minute he finishes one job, the Skipper has another one lined up. On top of that, Mr. Howell, who never does anything to help, complains because Gilligan takes too long to bring him a drink, or doesn't pay enough attention during a round of golf. I know deep down that Mr. Howell is all bluff and bluster, and that he really is very fond of Gilligan, but I think to myself, when did you ever do a full day's work, Mr. Howell? When did you ever physically tire yourself out carrying a heavy load or patching a roof or digging a ditch? There's no effort involved in lying on a sunlounger all day counting money. Or, in Mr. Howell's case, getting someone else to count it for him. It's not surprising he hardly ever gets tired.

Gilligan hasn't worked this hard since the time the Professor thought the island was sinking. Even Mr. Howell was forced to work that time. On top of that, we girls, being unaware of the situation, wanted the island landscaped. Why, the Professor nearly slipped a disc trying to build a rock garden. When I look back, all that work was too much for a boy of Gilligan's stature, but by Golly, he did his best, even when he was fast asleep on his feet. And now I watch him trudging around camp with his sneaker laces trailing, looking like he can't understand how he got himself into this mess, and I can't help thinking that out of all of us castaways, somehow Gilligan and I were the ones who ended up drawing the short straw where the bulk of the work was concerned. But Gilligan has been working extra hard lately, and he seems to be getting little or no thanks for it.

This morning I decided to go visit Gilligan just to say hello and see if he needed anything. As I approached the hut, I happened to look through the window and there he was- fast asleep in the lower hammock because he was too tired to climb up into the top one. For the first time in two weeks he looked completely relaxed- his elbows were bent with his fingers curled lightly on his chest and his head was turned towards me. His hat had slipped off and was lying on the pillow and there was a little smile on his face, as though he were having a lovely dream. He was framed in the window like a painting and as I stood there watching him breathe, I thought he looked so peaceful, so calm, yet at the same time small and distant- a single star flickering at the edge of the universe. And I had to turn away then, because it scared me how much I wanted to be part of that universe. I have always wanted to be part of that universe- a twin star to Gilligan, joining him on his journey through time and space, so that he won't ever have to be alone again.

That's when I decided to bake him a pie. Not just any old coconut crème pie, but a confectionery masterpiece. A Mary Ann Special- a towering mountain of sweetness and light. A coconut, pineapple and passionfruit pie.

Now, I'm not one to believe that just because something has the word 'passion' in its name, it will automatically make someone feel passionate. I don't think passionfruit works like that, and I'm not even sure I want to rouse anyone's passions- that's Ginger's territory. She knows how to handle passion, whereas I've always found it vaguely...well, terrifying isn't quite the right word, but it's an unknown quantity- you can never quite predict where it will take you. I suppose it was just wishful thinking, really. I thought if I made the pie with passionfruit, it might stir up some unconscious feelings in Gilligan that would make him look at me in a new light, and if he was in a sleepy mood then he might be more receptive to a bit of nurturing. That's all.

Oh, who am I kidding. I've been wanting Gilligan to notice me from day one. As I ran back to the Supply Hut to gather up my ingredients, I can assure you that my conscience told me off very sternly for plotting to try and seduce Gilligan while he slept, worn out and exhausted, with leaden limbs too heavy to let him run away.

So I made the pie, and it turned out beautifully, considering the short space of time in which I'd had to prepare it. Ignoring my conscience, I carefully carried the sweet, fluffy mountain with its peaks of golden, crispy meringue to Gilligan's hut and I went straight in without knocking. I knew that the Skipper and the Professor were down at the lagoon and the Howells had gone for a walk, and the last I had seen of Ginger, she was sitting in the shade filing her nails and listening to the Hollywood Report with the radio at full volume, so there was no chance I was going to be disturbed. Gilligan was still sleeping soundly as I approached, but when I knelt on the ground by the side of the hammock, holding the pie in both hands so that I wouldn't drop it, he stirred and mumbled and his fingers opened and flexed against his chest, rumpling his shirt a little and creasing it across the front.

"Hi, sleepy," I said, keeping my voice low as a whisper in case I startled him. You shouldn't wake people up suddenly, but Gilligan and the Skipper are as bad as each other and it's very rare for Gilligan to be allowed to wake up gently, lifted out of slumber by the soft, friendly voice of a woman rather than the loud barking of an ex-Navy captain whose voice still booms with authority even at seven o'clock in the morning.

"Ummmmm," Gilligan mumbled. He moved his fingers again, straightening them like a nervous child warding something away, and not for the first time, the thought of what it might feel like to have Gilligan's hands resting lightly on my bare skin sent a little shiver up my arms and across my shoulders and my spine tingled like a bowl of Rice Krispies going snap, crackle and pop.

I reached out and stroked Gilligan's hair across his forehead, enjoying the feel of the soft, dark strands tickling through my fingers. I teased it into points that stuck up on his head like a rooster's crest, but as hard as I tried, pulling them this way and that, they didn't stay up for long. They flopped back onto his forehead and he smiled in his sleep and turned his face towards me and mumbled something I couldn't quite hear. "I brought you a pie," I told him, and stroked his cheek gently with the tips of my fingers, guessing by the slight roughness of his skin that he hadn't shaved that morning.

"Pie," he slurred, only barely awake.

I dabbed my finger into the crème topping, scooped up a large blob, and brought it to his lips. His mouth instinctively opened, and, feeling very daring, I slipped my finger in and placed the sweet sugary blob onto the tip of his tongue. I had not fully withdrawn my finger when his mouth closed unexpectedly around it and sucked gently, removing all traces of the sweet crème. I sat on my haunches with my eyes wide, savouring the wet warmth of his tongue as it rolled around my finger, and when I finally took my hand away he smiled with his eyes closed and licked his lips. It was safe to say I was stunned by what he had done, but I quickly regained my composure.

"Would you like some more?" I asked, but my finger had already scooped out another blob of topping, and the same thing happened when I placed it against his mouth a second time. His lips parted and I touched the quivery wet tip of his tongue and he closed his mouth gently around my finger and sucked it clean.

I had been hoping to stir up feelings in Gilligan, not in myself. I didn't need to stir up feelings in myself- I've always liked Gilligan. I've told him so, too, on more than one occasion. Once, I even used the word 'love'. But in spite of all the times I've batted my eyelashes at him and kissed his cheek and told him he's wonderful- because he is- he's always accepted my awkwardly unsubtle 'advances' as declarations of friendship. We do have a close friendship, Gilligan and I, and in fact we have, over time, become best friends, but sadly, nothing more. Nothing has ever taken me that extra step into girlfriend territory, with all the special privileges that it brings and that I dream about. However, as I fed him the pie from my finger, and he continued to suck gently every time I put the blob of filling past his lips, waves of electric heat surged through me and had an effect on me like never before. Modesty prevents me from going into too much detail, but if you're a woman then you'll know what I mean. We'll call it liquid warmth, and be done with it.

After Gilligan had sucked my finger clean three more times, his eyes cracked open into tiny, narrow slits. At once there was a sparkle of blue, like the ocean under a sunny sky, and there he was. They say the eyes are the windows to the soul, and if that's the case then Gilligan's windows are so brilliantly clear and transparent that you can see the man inside even through a 2mm gap in his girlishly long, black eyelashes.

"Zat you, Mary Ann?" he asked, groggily.

"Who else gives you pie in the middle of the day?" I teased, happy that he'd woken up at last.

"Thought I was dreaming," he replied. "A beautiful angel was feeding me from the tip of her wing."

I leaned forward over the hammock so that our noses were almost touching. "Don't tell anyone," I whispered, "but that was me." Then I kissed him softly on the end of his nose and sat back to wait for his reaction.

Gilligan's left eye cracked open but his right eye remained almost shut, giving him the appearance of a comical pirate without the eyepatch. He lifted his head off the pillow a fraction and spied the pie plate in my hands. "My dream came true," he said. "I've been visited by the Pie Angel." And his smile went even wider and made his cheeks dimple, and I have never felt such an urge to kiss him as I did right then.

I picked up the spoon I had brought with me and showed it to him. "Would you like me to keep feeding you, or would you prefer to do it yourself?" I watched him think about it, and hoped he'd choose the first option.

He did. My heart did a strange, fluttering backflip as he took the spoon out of my hand, and, with a deft flick of the wrist that did strange things to my insides, sent it spinning across the hut where it lodged itself firmly in the palm frond wall.

"You do it," he said, fixing me with a sleepy, expectant grin.

I could feel by now that I was trembling like a leaf. Balanced on my knees and the balls of my feet, I leaned towards him and scooped out a large fingerful of cream and filling. "This could get messy," I murmured, as half of it fell off onto the sand before it had even left the plate.

"Don't worry," said Gilligan, "I'll just open my mouth extra wide." He demonstrated this talent, lying in the hammock as though it were a nest and he was a giant baby bird. When I told him what he looked like, with his cavernous maw showing all his fillings and that I could see all the way down to his stomach and what he'd had for dinner the night before, he giggled so much that he jogged my hand and the pie ended up splattered on his chest. "Oh," he said. "Sorry."

"It's all right," I told him, amused by his forlorn expression as he stared at the pie staining his shirt. "I have to do the laundry later, anyway." Then I picked up the blob of pie and placed it in his mouth, where it should have gone in the first place.

I fed him like this for a while, and the pie sometimes ended up on his shirt or on the sand or in my lap, where I scooped it up and fed it to him, fresh from the warmth of my thighs. Pastry crumbs speckled his lips and dusted his cheeks and tumbled into the collar of his shirt to nestle in the dip behind his collarbone. When they tickled him and made him fidgety, I reached in and picked them out, and some of them I fed to him and some of them I licked off my fingers, and when I did that I saw that he was watching me, and the blue of his eyes darkened briefly, like the passing of a cloud across the sun, and I shivered and felt such pure liquid warmth that I couldn't stop the rosy flush that crept into my cheeks.

All the while that I was feeding him, and even though I could barely think past the sweet sensations that were coursing through my body, I could see that Gilligan was trying to pluck up courage. When he finally felt confident enough (just as the pie was almost all gone) he reached over and dipped his own fingers into the creamy filling and began to feed me, although his fingers never lingered near my mouth long enough for me to catch them between my lips, and when I tried laughingly to grab his wrist he pulled his hand away and sent a blob of pie flying across the hut. I wanted so much to show him how nice it had felt when he did it to me, but it was the one thing he seemed unsure of and I didn't want to push it. It didn't really matter though- I was happy enough knowing that he was feeding me pie, and besides, we were too busy giggling about the mess we were making- two naughty children eating with their fingers- to ruin the fun we were having with awkwardness.

Finally, when there was nothing left but a handful of fine, golden crumbs, I made as if to put the plate down. Gilligan's lower lip jutted out and he stared at me with such mournful longing that I almost forgot where I was. "Can I lick the plate?" he asked, hopefully.

I let out a laugh that was tinged with only slight disappointment when I realised that his look of longing wasn't for me at all, but for food. For those last little remnants of pie that were too small for our fingers to pick up. I handed him the plate and told him that if he got stomach ache from being so greedy it wouldn't be my fault, and then I sat back and watched silently as Gilligan began carefully licking up every last crumb. He became so absorbed in what he was doing, so deep in concentration, that he had no idea what the sight of his briskly lapping tongue was doing to me as it slid wetly up, down, around and across the flat of the plate and right up to the edges, delving everywhere for crumbs. Unable to tear my eyes away, I squeezed my legs together, tightened my shorts around my thighs (and everywhere else that modesty prevents me from going into detail about) and rocked gently back and forth on my heels, biting down on my lip to stifle my murmurs as the sensations built and built, while Gilligan expertly licked up every last tiny speck of pie that his searching tongue could find.

A small, involuntary sigh escaped from my lips just as Gilligan handed me back the empty plate. I don't think he heard it, at least I hope he didn't, but I doubt he would have realised its significance even if he had. Let's just say that he had perfect timing, even though he was completely unaware of it.

"That was a delicious pie, Mary Ann," he grinned, licking his lips perfectly innocently. "But it tasted kind of different. What was in it?"

"Oh, just coconut and pineapple," I replied, casually, omitting to mention the other ingredient. But you should never underestimate Gilligan- especially when it comes to food. When he folded his chin into his chest and fixed me with a beady eye, I knew I was in trouble. My blush intensified and I began to feel decidedly lightheaded.

"And something else," he said, leaning back on the pillow and gazing at me intently, like Sherlock Holmes waiting for me to give away the clue that would finally solve the mystery.

"All right, Mr. Know-All," I said, with a dramatic sigh. "Passionfruit."

Despite how tired he was, despite the heaviness of his limbs, I must admit that I fully expected Gilligan to bolt up out of the hammock and run for his life at the mere mention of the word 'passion', but he didn't. He may have widened his eyes just a little as he took in what I had said, but apart from that, he didn't register any shock at all. In fact, dare I say it, he looked rather impressed.

"Passionfruit," he repeated. "Well? Did it work?" Then suddenly, without warning, before I had a chance to tell him that yes, it had indeed worked, but on me instead of him, he yawned- a tiger's yawn, a yawn so wide and cavernous that the hinges of his jaw cracked. The energy required to keep him awake was fading, and he looked as though he were once more battling to keep his eyes open. "Should have named it Sleepfruit," he remarked, and fell back into a deep sleep before my very eyes, so full of creamy pie filling and sweet, crispy meringue that even the strongest aphrodisiac known to man would have had no effect on him whatsoever.

I didn't want to leave the hut so soon, not after the fun we'd shared. Not after the excitement I'd felt as Gilligan ate pie from my fingers and watched me with his soulful blue eyes as I ate pie from his, and certainly not after the wonderful experience of having my fingers in his mouth and the thrills I got from watching him lick the pie plate clean. There was still no sign of anyone arriving back at the huts, so I quickly decided on a course of action so daring I still get a fluttery feeling when I think about how easily it could have all gone wrong.

First, I did what I had been desperately longing to do since...well, if I'm honest, probably since the day we first met. I leaned forward on my knees, laid my hand on Gilligan's unshaven cheek and kissed him full on the mouth. His lips were wonderfully warm and soft, and they yielded under the pressure of mine. As I got a little bolder I licked gently along his lower lip, tasting the sweet remnants of pie on my tongue. I kissed him until my head began to spin from the sheer pleasure of it. Then I broke away with a last gentle tug on his lips and got up from the floor. I brushed the sand from my knees, and as carefully as I could so as not to startle him, I climbed into the hammock beside him. I couldn't do it completely quietly, because the combination of my weight and Gilligan's made the hammock sway and the ropes creak in protest against the bamboo support poles. But Gilligan barely stirred from his pie-induced stupor, even though I was now almost on top of him. As I settled down and snuggled into his side, into that unfamiliar yet somehow wholly familiar terrain, that soft, bright expanse of red, the smell of passionfruit wafted up from his shirt where the blobs of pie had fallen, and the warm smell of his skin came after that. Filling my senses with the scent of Gilligan, I folded my arm gently over his stomach and laid my leg between his with my foot tucked neatly under his calf and closed my eyes in bliss.

Gilligan lifted his chin and I slotted my head in under it. I wondered if he actually knew what he was doing, but I didn't question it because it felt so natural. Maybe it was instinctive. Sometimes I wonder if maybe Gilligan knows more than he thinks he knows about everything. Maybe that's why his dreams are so expansive, so detailed, so full of three dimensional characters and colourful images. But I knew that he was asleep, which meant that subconsciously he knew I was there and he didn't mind my presence.

I kept a keen ear out for the return of the Skipper and Professor. The last thing I needed was for those two to find me wrapped around Gilligan in the lower hammock with a licked-clean pie plate lying on the ground. They'd laugh at us, and say they can't leave us alone for a second. Not only that, they'd tease Gilligan mercilessly when he woke up, and the poor boy wouldn't know what to say to answer back, let alone understand why they were doing it. But the sounds that drifted in from outside right then were peaceful sounds, calming, tranquil sounds. Birdsong, the swish of palm trees in the breeze, voices and snatches of music from the radio as Ginger tuned it to a different station, and the distant hush-hush-hush of waves breaking on the shore. And from inside the hut, from right next to me, the comforting sound of Gilligan breathing, each puff of air gusting out of his nostrils and tickling my hair against my cheek, almost snoring, but not quite.

The longer I lay there, the more I could hardly believe that Gilligan was in my arms, breathing gently just inches from my face. I had never been this close to Gilligan. I have never, ever slept in a hammock with him, or slept anywhere with him, or cuddled up to him in any way, except once or twice when we've shared a dance at the end of a punch-fuelled party. And even though it will be a long time before Gilligan lets me in and allows me to become anything like his twin star, I felt that my journey had begun. Lying there in the hammock with him, our bodies pressed closer together than they've ever been, I was no longer waiting in the nebula with the other stars. For once I was close enough to enter the outer reaches of Gilligan's orbit, if only for a while.

Gilligan began murmuring in his sleep. "Angel," he whispered, as though one had just appeared before him in his dream. I wondered what visions he must be seeing, what heavenly winged beings were bestowing their smiles on him, and I wished with all my heart that I could see them too. As I lay there wondering, Gilligan suddenly tightened his arm around me and pulled me close against him. Time stopped and I held my breath for as long as I could, waiting for him to wake up in a panic when he realised where I was and what he'd done. But he didn't. He just kept holding me and murmuring angel until finally he fell silent and drifted back into a deep, dreamless sleep.

I knew that as soon as the others arrived I would have to get up quickly. The Skipper would barge in through the door and Gilligan would wake up and drag himself back to work and the hustle and bustle of our daily lives would begin all over again and the silence would be shattered by Mr. Howell. This little interlude of ours that no-one else knew about, that even Gilligan didn't know about except in his subconscious, would feel like my dream- something almost too wonderful to be real, a small series of events so perfectly linked in every way that they would never again be repeated for as long as we existed. Yet while those perfect moments lasted, while the hammock swayed gently under the rhythmic rise and fall of Gilligan and me breathing in harmony, I knew I wasn't dreaming. Fuelled by warm tingles and sweet, creamy pie, I was travelling with my future twin star at the edge of the universe. My best friend Gilligan, who may not get the thanks he deserves while he's awake, but whose hard work is rewarded with angels while he sleeps.

END