He opened his eyes and sat up, feeling groggy. As his eyes adjusted to the bright sunlight he suddenly registered what was going on. Plane crash. He was in a plane crash.
He looked down at himself and was surprised that he couldn't find anything wrong. No cuts or bruises or missing limbs. Well, that was something. He got to his feet and looked around, trying to work out what he should do. He should help. Of course he should help.
He noticed Shannon standing in the middle of the wreckage, all miniskirt and lip gloss and screaming her head off. Boone had done first aid classes when he was training to be a lifeguard in college and one of the first things they told you was that if someone was screaming it was safe to ignore them. It was the ones that couldn't scream that needed immediate attention. So Boone left Shannon to it and went to find someone quiet he could save.
He came across a woman lying on her back, unconscious. He ran up to her and knelt by her side listening for breath sounds. Nothing. Okay, this is something he could handle, CPR, just like from his course. Admittedly he'd never gotten a chance to do it on a real person before, just the resuscitation doll, but surely it couldn't be all that different.
So there he was, minding his own business, giving this woman CPR, waiting for her to miraculously wake up like they always did on TV, when a man in a suit started yelling at him.
"Stop," the man ordered. Boone looked at him. "Her head's not tilted far back enough. You're blowing air into her stomach."
"You sure?" Boone asked, suddenly worrying if he'd been doing it wrong all this time. The man didn't bother to answer and just took over performing CPR on the woman. Boone watched him but couldn't tell what change in technique he'd made. "That's exactly what I was doing," he insisted. "I'm a lifeguard. I'm licensed," he added in his defence.
"Yeah, well, you need to seriously think about giving that license back," the man told him in a rather condescending and so not sugar-coated way. Which, hey, Boone should be used to by now.
So he watched this man try to resuscitate the woman and admired him for the hero type he clearly was. Boone wished he was strong and self-assured and capable like that. And rugged, and handsome and slightly rough around the edges but not too much and those hands were also pretty amazing. Okay, Boone, crisis and you start thinking about sex. Hang up from last night, he told himself. He was just deliberately looking for something that was the complete opposite of Shannon. Still he could find a better time to look for such a thing.
But the woman wasn't doing that miraculous wake-up thing that always happened on TV and Boone was starting to get worried. Maybe it was time for heroic measures, something a little out of the ordinary, going out on a limb so to speak. He thought back to disaster shows he'd seen and bad action movies his ex-boyfriend Harry had made him watch.
"Maybe we should do one of those hole things," he suggested. "You know, stick the pen in the throat."
The man glanced at him. "Yeah, good idea, you go get me a pen."
Okay, see, Boone knew he could be useful. Find a pen, that's a task he was up for. He ran to the nearest people that were wandering past and asked them for a pen. No luck. The next person he asked handed him one and he was just about the run back to the hero man when he looked down at it. It looked like a cheap pen, maybe he could do better. And so he kept asking and collecting pens until he had a whole handful. One of these had to work, right?
He looked back to where he left the man but he couldn't see him. He scanned the beach and saw him stood gazing into the heart of the wreckage, the fuselage. He walked up to him and held out the pens.
"I didn't know which one would work best," he said, hoping he didn't look or sound too pathetic.
The man looked at him and Boone thought he saw his expression soften a little. Was he being sympathetic? "They're all good," the man assured him. He reached out and took the pens and Boone tried not to inhale sharply as their hands touched and he felt a spark. As he held his breath he thought he heard the man thank him and then he was gone.
Well, if Boone was a real hero, he wouldn't want to be stuck with someone like him either.