It's demanding small chapters, and work is beating me down so hard that short chapters are about my speed.
Paradise Lost, as one person said, sounds familiar probably because there's an actual classic named Paradise Lost by Milton which talks about the war in heaven and the initial fall from grace of Adam and Eve. I'm not that fancy to have read more than a few excerpts, but I did think the title fit. Romance novels are more my speed these days, I don't have the energy for high art, lawl.
Disclaimer: see part 1
Somehow Enishi had built a small smoky fire, and they were huddled next to it in relative silence as twilight descended. Bugs where everywhere and Kaoru slapped at them ineffectively. It was better when the smoke blew in her direction, but that inevitably also led to coughing and her lungs continued to burn in that recriminating way that told her she might not be able to sleep until she was so exhausted she just blacked out. Enishi sat across from her concentrating on the fire, and Kaoru tried to ignore her minor aches as she clutched his jacket close to her like a safety blanket and not just baldly stare at him. Without him this would have been much worse. Without him, a little voice reminded her, she would have been dead on a beach.
"Were you headed home, too?" Kaoru hazarded.
There was a period of silence long enough that she wondered if he had heard her, but as she opened her mouth to repeat the question he cut her off. "Yes."
"Did you come with anyone?"
"No."
Kaoru sighed. "Neither did I. It's a relief in a way, because if I had they would have been on the same flight."
"It was a last-minute itinerary change," Enishi volunteered reluctantly. "My direct flight had been canceled and this was the next best my assistant could arrange on short notice."
That was interesting. Maybe he had come from China? "Do you always travel a lot for work?"
"Yes."
The silence stretched between them again and Kaoru felt her annoyance rise. Handsome, competent, fit, but socially backwards. Kaoru would have to try twice as hard to grasp at a sense of normalcy when talking with him was like pulling teeth. Would it hurt him to pretend to be friendly with the only other human on this island?
"I was supposed to come with someone, but those plans fell through. I decided I would go anyway since the tickets were nonrefundable." Kaoru looked to see if that sparked some interest in her silent companion. He barely glanced up, clearly not intrigued by her tawdry problems. That just made her want to share more. "Honestly, it was my former fiancée. I was supposed to be married a week before last Saturday. As you can tell, that didn't precisely, um, happen." She held up the bald left hand where her rings should have been—where her engagement ring had been until a month ago.
Enishi was watching her, clearly listening, but not seeking extra information like most people would. It was almost refreshing after weeks of being whispered about at work while people pretended they weren't pitying her. It had gotten so aggravating that Kaoru had decided to take the vacation by herself; after all she had already requested the PTO and she had nothing to lose. Or so it had seemed at the time.
Maybe direct questions would net her some answers. "What do you do?"
"I'm a consultant." Enishi answered slowly. "… Cyber security."
"Oh come on," Kaoru huffed, losing her temper a bit despite trying to be calm and respectful. "You have to give me a little more to work with than that. For one I have no idea what that even is. For another I don't care what you tell me so long as you just use more words. I want to hear another human's voice a little bit."
Brows drawing together in a way that totally explained those growing crow's feet, Enishi gave her a scowl then did actually add a little more. "I find security flaws in software that large companies use to record their financial and personnel information, as well as the outward facing programs their clients interact with. I offer my consulting services to them if I think the breach would be embarrassing enough for them were it made public."
Kaoru nodded along but now she felt her own brows draw together. "Wait, they don't hire you to come in, you just come to them when you find a problem?"
"Yes."
"And if they don't pay you, then they are left with the knowledge that they have some huge issue and no idea what it is and how to fix it?"
"Essentially." He gave her a slight smile, pleased that she at least grasped the animus of his work.
Considering how he was dressed and how he carried himself clearly he was fantastic at what he did and it made him a lot of money, but Kaoru came away with the feeling like his job was basically extortion. Corporations may have a lot of the same rights as a person, but they didn't have feelings so she wasn't particularly disturbed by his work conceptually. Then, something else occurred to her.
"You just find this stuff out theoretically right? You don't actually take their data do you?"
Now Enishi's smile was both full and sinister. "At some point proof has to be offered of the problem."
It wasn't something she could condone, but at the same time it wasn't like he was going around shooting people. It was a world so beyond her own that she wasn't even really sure if what he was doing was considered wrong in the circles he travelled in, or just business as usual. Most businessmen seemed like they were crooks on some level anyway, so maybe she needed to be less holier than thou.
"You don't approve." Enishi said, stating a fact that was written all across Kaoru's face. She couldn't play poker either, if he was curious.
"Well, no, but it's not for me to lecture anyone on how to live their life. It's not like I'm doing that great." And the floodgates of self-pity opened. "After all, most of my savings are drained from a wedding that didn't even happen, and I just had to move into a crap apartment because the one I thought I was leaving had already been leased to someone else. I'm the only thing half the office is gossiping about so every work day is like my worst day in high school, and now I'm stuck on a desert island with a guy who I'm pretty sure only saved my life because he couldn't reach a piece of metal sticking out of his back. And who knows what happened to all those other people…"
All that was missing was a dramatic flounce, but she didn't have anywhere to go so instead Kaoru just laid down on her side and faced away from the fire. She didn't want Enishi to see the hot tears of stress and frustration that had started to leak from her eyes. Kaoru wasn't sure what pretending at strength was getting her when this man had seen her at her literal worst, and would probably continue to as she was decidedly not ok. The hunger and thirst she felt was exaggerating her reactions, but she felt like she was allowed a little bit of drama given the events of the day. She wiped her runny nose with Enishi's expensive jacket sleeve and tried not to sniffle too loudly.
"I didn't just save you to help me." Enishi's voice felt like it pounced on her as it emerged from the dark. Only the tiny fire and the crescent moon provided any light now that the sun had fully set. "I'm not that kind of monster."
She heard him add more twigs to the fire as the radiant heat hit her back. It was probably the closest thing she could expect to a hug right now, and Kaoru wished she was anywhere but here even as she sent a silent prayer to the heavens that the other hundred odd people on her flight had been recovered and rescued.
Where there was life there was hope.
"Thank you, by the way." Kaoru responded, and she heard Enishi's amused snort. It would have been hard to know what exactly he found funny about her statement.
The fire had gone out while they were both asleep and Kaoru shivered in the early morning cold. It was being too cold that had awakened her, and it would have happened much earlier except that Enishi had curled himself around her back and the shared body heat was the only part of her body that felt pleasant. She could already feel itchy spots on her legs where the bare skin had been bitten by bugs as she slept her mercifully dreamless sleep. It hadn't been that restful or restorative, but her brain didn't feel as foggy as last night. Kaoru gave a little gasp when Enishi pulled her in closer with an arm around her middle, like she was a favored stuffed animal.
The urge to snuggle was strong, and Kaoru was unable to parse whether that came from the desire to be close to anyone or the desire to be close to him in specific. She needed to be on the lookout for wobbly feelings considering he saved her life and she was in a very vulnerable position out here alone with him. Even injured he seemed formidable. It wasn't like she was totally malformed, and while not conventionally beautiful like her best friend Megumi or athletically appealing like her cousin Misao there was something special that had initially attracted Aoshi at least.
Even if it turned out that that was all he thought she was: a cute face, a passable body, and most importantly a low maintenance girlfriend. God, how that argument still galled her. He had been settling for her. Passion is overrated, he had said. Stability is what matters, he had said. It was supposed to be a nice evening, where they wrote out their vows and instead it became a relationship ending argument. Pots were thrown. Police were called—by Aoshi's downstairs neighbor—and suddenly Kaoru found herself picking up her toiletries from his bathroom at far too late on a worknight.
That should have tipped him off that she was serious. One didn't move one's shampoo without real conviction. But he didn't stop her.
He didn't stop her.
"Stop what," since his lips were right behind her ear, Kaoru's whole body went stiff when Enishi spoke.
"Nothing, I was just thinking of back home." She should have been irritated at their intimate positioning, legs tangled together, but she knew it was for survival not a weird pick up artist trick. She had heard from Megumi once that her on and off boyfriend Sano had tried the infamous 'naked man' move on their second date. Enishi was no Sano. The man had not indicated he even saw her as a woman, or if he liked women... or people. Kaoru lifted a leg enough to itch at a particularly worrisome bump above her knee, unable to ignore the itching a second longer but also unwilling to withdraw from Enishi's warmth.
They lay there for a few more minutes in that space of time before the sun was officially up for the day, and Kaoru could have sworn she felt Enishi's hand twitch when a shift in positioning forced it to brush against the underside of her breast. She forgot all about it shortly thereafter when her stoic companion suddenly pulled away and left her cold.
"Take these," He tossed his shoes in her direction. "We need to find water and the only way to do that is move inland."
"They'll be like clown shoes on me."
"You can take the socks instead, but I assumed you'd need the extra protection." They both glanced down at Kaoru's feet with the pedicure that was still largely intact. Kaoru burrowed her royal purple toes in the sand as if to hide them. She hated that he was right again, and he had his arms crossed in front of him as if waiting for her to admit to his superior planning skills.
Without saying another word, Kaoru dusted off her feet and calves as well as she could and tied the laces as tightly as she was able after slipping her feet into the shoes. As suspected, she was swimming in them, but it was a better approach than tromping through the jungle with no protection. While Kaoru had been fiddling with the footwear, Enishi had been dusting himself off and picking up the jagged metal piece.
"These shoes look like they were expensive." Kaoru tried to say something conversational, even though he had proven time and again yesterday that he was a lost cause in respect to small talk.
Enishi used a swift downward motion to separate a long thin branch from a nearby bush. He was already making a pile to add to the one he had started the evening before. "They were."
Kaoru wondered if he was being infuriating on purpose because he liked winding her up, but he seemed to register something in her expression when he finally looked at her because he added a little more for her sake.
"Those things matter when you're in a boardroom, but if you're asking me if I'm upset that they will get ruined here and now, then the answer is no."
"That wasn't what I meant," Kaoru said with a sigh, helping him shift the branches over to the SOS that mostly Enishi had laid out yesterday on the beach after sparking the fire. It was huge and hopefully they had built it well enough and large enough to be seen from high above them. The wind had knocked some of the branches out of place overnight. "I'm just trying to get to know you better. You're not making it easy!"
Getting far too close to her, forcing Kaoru to look up at him with what she knew was a somewhat exasperated facial expression, Enishi stuck the metal piece in the sand and made sure they had full eye contact before he responded. "We never would have spoken to one another if we were not in this situation, and I see no purpose in pretending like we're friends." He sneered the word in such a way that Kaoru seriously doubted he had any friends at all.
"Are we enemies?" Kaoru asked simply. He wasn't the first arrogant man in a suit she'd dealt with, and if their SOS worked he wouldn't be the last either.
Enishi blinked down at her, momentarily wrong footed. "No."
"Allies then?" Kaoru asked, turning on her best receptionist smile. She knew it was a good smile, that it made people feel warm inside, and it was one of the reasons why she was often brought in to deal with the pricklier chemists and unfriendly doctors. It was how she had met Aoshi. Kaoru, for all her moments of temper, knew how to make people feel seen and accepted. "I haven't been much use to you yet, but I promise you I'm a hard worker and you've shown me you know what you're doing. I trust you."
Unable to come up with a biting comment in the face of her almost embarrassing sincerity, Enishi simply allowed his eyebrows to draw together once more. "Just keep up and don't wander off."