Notes
Soundtrack suggestions:
- Wondrous Love - Bear McCreary, Black Sails.
- Streets of Nassau - Bear McCreary, Black Sails.
-o-
"Seriously?" Claire said. "I can't believe you left me!"
"Replay the conversation in your head, okay?" Owen suggested. "You said, "Do you want to live in your bungalow like a hillbilly? Go ahead Owen." And I said, "Okay."
"How is it possible you're the one who left?"
"Because I left."
"I left you."
"You left because… I asked you to.
"And then I left."
Seated at another table nearby, Alexander, Franklin and Zia listened as the couple argued about their previous affair back on Isla Nublar years earlier and its breakup. Apart from them, there weren't many people in the hotel's restaurant, as the other guests usually had their breakfast a little later.
"Who prints an itinerary for a date?" Owen asked.
"I'm an organized person," she replied.
"I'm an organized person," he repeated, caricaturing her facial expressions and intonation.
She suddenly kicked him in the shin, making the table and cutlery move a little.
"What was that?" she hissed.
She leant forward.
"Don't you dare make fun of me in public again," she whispered.
Zia and Franklin didn't know what to make of this feud, which seemed serious. Of course, it happened that even the most close-knit couples sometimes argued, but this one had been sudden and seemed to have happened without a warning sign because the day before, the two youth had again heard the couple making love passionately.
After looking at each other, they shrugged slightly and thought it was going to be okay, but during the lunch break, the couple had another argument, during which Owen ended up saying:
"Your lower districts reek so much of cod that it's like being in Dutch Harbor!"
"You're saying that because I'm a redhead? This is so low!" Claire replied, offended. "I thought you were better than that..."
Being nearby and having heard them, Jocelyn had listened attentively to their conversation and when they left their table, she followed Owen with her eyes, something Claire noticed.
Hours later, after dinner, Claire was in their hotel room's bathroom, taking a bath alone. Sitting in the hot water, she was taking from time to time a sip of rum straight from the bottle while staring blankly at the wall beyond the opposite end of the tub. When the handle on the then closed door clicked, she put the bottle on a chair positioned right next to the tub and turned her head towards the door. Owen walked in in his underwear, closed the door behind him, looked at her up and down, and took off his boxers.
She tucked her legs up against her chest and watched him as he joined her in the tub. Once seated, he flicked his mane back, grabbed the bottle of rum to take a sip and got comfortable, stretching and spreading his legs a little to take up two-thirds of the tub. They stared into each other's eyes gravely for a long moment, then a smile sketched at the corner of Claire's mouth and Owen laughed.
"Damn, how we fooled those idiots!" he said.
His laugh grew louder, as Claire lunged forward to clasp her hand over his mouth, fearing he was laughing too hard.
"Keep it down!" She told him. "I bet they're listening at the door."
He quieted his laughter and she regained her end of the tub. She grabbed a washing mitt and he pivoted, exposing his scarred back. Spreading her thighs and stretching her legs forward, she moved closer to him and put his hair to the side to fully clear his back. While he caressed her legs, she gently passed the mitt over the long claw marks a raptor had dug six years earlier, the year they both started working at Jurassic World and met.
"The fish spotted the maggot," she said.
"Eh?"
"Jocelyn heard us at lunch. She thinks we're going through a rough patch. Let's continue to argue for bullcrap like fucking indecisive teenagers."
"The fish must be tempted to swallow the maggot," he guessed.
"That's it, and the fish has to be caught within three days.
As she just finished washing his back, Claire put the mitt down, knelt and put her arms around her boyfriend's chest.
"The maggot has to wiggle if it wants to be swallowed," she whispered in his ear before nibbling it and kissing his neck.
Switching roles, he grabbed the mitt and she presented her back to him.
"The lines we learned, did you make them up or did you find them somewhere?" He asked while washing her.
"While I made up some of them, the others come from a thread on a discussion board about writing, where I first saw them over a dozen years ago. An aspiring screenwriter had written them. Last I heard, he's working in Hollywood."
"The movies he writes have to be something…"
"You said it…"
But the next day, Claire, then assigned to the small carnivores sector and working under Marisol's and Allison's supervision, realized that they had failed to convince everyone when Marisol expressed doubts, telling her that she saw through their little game but that she will not judge them if they seek to spice up their relationship. Realizing that others must be thinking similarly, Claire sent a message to Owen, informing him that they needed to step it up.
This is what they did the same evening, during a dinner in town. They purposely went to the same bar-restaurant where the DPG trio went every other evening since their arrival and located in the same street as the Cañada de las águilas. When they entered the place and spotted Alexander, Zia, and Franklin at a table in the back, they pretended to be tense and while they started drinking, they barely spoke to each other. The place being relatively quiet, Claire listened with one ear to what Zia was saying about her days with the veterinary team to her two colleagues.
She thus learned that Brice and Maribel had been watching Zia's every move since they had caught her reading medical reports from the previous year and especially those of the weeks following the fall of Isla Nublar. When Alexander asked her what she had read, Zia told him about some story of compsognathuses dying in bizarre circumstances and reports being oddly poor in detail. She added that while Juan seemed trustworthy, Brice was suspicious and she even raised the possibility of a traffic which involving him and other Site D employees and outsiders. Claire thought this story was interesting to say the least, but having other priorities, she quietly gave a sign to Owen when the time came and they faked another argument, which gradually grew in intensity until he said what she liked to call the final blow line.
"You planned your move well!" He accused her. "You knew it was the time of the month when you were the most fertile and you threw yourself on my crotch like your life depended on it! Sigurd is just a way to keep me with you and avoid being thrown straight into jail. And here I am, stuck with a wreck!"
Deeply angry, Claire threw her drink at his face, slapped him, and stormed off the table.
"Everybody betray me!" She said while she was about to burst into tears. "I'm fed up with this world."
She walked out of the bar and Owen sat in his chair for a moment, doing nothing and staring at the chair across from him with a stunned expression. He let out a heavy, bitter sigh and stood up, heading for the bar while trying to ignore the DPG trio's stares. He ordered another drink, it was brought to him and as he took a big sip, the bartender asked him in English:
"You're okay?"
"She's a stupid bitch," Owen replied, setting the glass down and wiping off the liquid still on his face. "She wants to control my life. I'm not going to put up with that. I'm going to do what I want to do, and that's it. What do you think I should do?"
"Shall I pour you another drink after this one?"
Hailing from a small village on the Caribbean coast of Costa Rica, Gerardo, a pot-bellied thirtyish man with a moustache, had come to Burgo Nuevo for business and was staying at the Cañada de las águilas hotel. Returning from the hotel's lounge bar, where he had a few drinks and chatted with other guests, he went back to his room, located upstairs like those of this group of Americans he had seen at breakfast that morning. As he had just entered the corridor, he was suddenly surprised by a loud voice in one of this group's rooms.
"You're lying! I never hit you! You're tearing me apart, Owen!" Claire yelled, showing by the occasion an acting talent superior to that of Tommy Wiseau.
Gerardo stopped and listened to the conversation.
"I hate you!" She added.
Gerardo then heard objects being thrown across the room.
"Come on, hit me!" Owen replied. "Hit me, you bitch!"
Gerardo's eyes widened when she hurled herself on her boyfriend, screaming like an insane person and thinking that he had heard enough, Gerardo left, hoping that the fight would not last too long. Otherwise, he intended to inform the hotel managers so that they could intervene.
"Calm down! Or I make an armlock to your cock!" She threatened.
But hearing someone rushing up the stairs, he turned and saw Basil, who had been alerted by the noise.
"Those Americans are nuts," Gerardo told him while tapping the side of his head with his index finger.
Then he went to his bedroom and Basil knocked on the couple's door. They interrupted their fight and soon after, Claire opened the door. Her hairs were dishevelled and she was wearing nothing but a robe, not even her half-mask, which she had forgotten to put on in her rush.
Seeing her gash for the first time, Basil recoiled slightly and his face had an expression of surprise, but he cleared his throat and spoke:
"I know that relationships can be… strained sometimes," he said in English, "and I and Sybil sometimes have a few fights in the presence of guests, but you're making such a racket that the entire hotel must be hearing you."
"We're so sorry," she mumbled.
"It will be fine this time. If you have to argue, do it somewhere else than my hotel, please. Otherwise I would have to call the police. Understood?"
"Understood. I promise it won't happen again."
"Good. Have a good evening."
"Good evening."
Basil left and Claire closed the door. She turned to Owen, who was sitting naked on the bed, with only a piece of sheet covering his crotch. He had a hand resting on the right half of his face, sore from the hook Claire gave him like he had suggested to her, hoping that the resulting mark would draw Jocelyn's pity. Although she had no choice for the sake of their plan, Claire couldn't help but feel a little guilty for hitting her boyfriend.
"Oh, my elk…" she said softly in a pitying tone.
"You didn't miss me!" he moaned.
"Hush…" she soothed him, stroking his head.
She then went to the bathroom and came back with a damp towel, which she applied to her boyfriend's face.
"If Jocelyn doesn't take the bait…" he began.
"You'll make sad puppy eyes," she suggested.
She placed a kiss on his lips and turned on the bedside lamp. Taking the towel from her, Owen laid on his back and held it against his skin, waiting for the pain to go away. While looking at the ceiling, he wondered if they hadn't gone too far with this fake fight inspired by the one he had seen in the film Borat. When they had their affair years earlier, on Nublar, they had a few arguments, including the one after which they had broken up, uglier than the others, but they had never come to blows. It had been an unprecedented situation for them, fighting hand to hand, even if it had only been a sham and they had felt like two teenagers having fun. The fact that they were naked had added a certain spice and both had to fight against their libido in order to give a believable duration to their fake fight… If Basil had not interrupted them, she would have ended up straddling Owen on the floor.
After turning off the lights of the bathroom lights and the bedroom's ceiling, Claire stripped, letting her robe fall on the floor, and joined Owen in the bed, leaning on her side next to him.
"After effort, comes comfort… What would you like me to do to you? She asked him while describing circles on his chest with her fingers.
"I don't know. I have to think about it."
"Say what's on your mind," she said, passing one leg over his.
He turned his head towards her and replied:
"A threesome with a beautiful lady of the night."
She slapped his shoulder.
"No, but you really want your lesbian porn! All you want to do is stay on the side and touch yourself while I bang another woman, you pig! Since Francis told you about our escapade at the brothel, you haven't stopped making allusions to them. He should never have told you that! You can forget because the closest brothels are in San José and I can't see myself paying a taxi for a whore. And that's not to mention venereal diseases like Syphilis and co. In order to have a whore clean on that level, you have to put the price."
"More seriously...," he began, before leaning into her ear and whispering the rest of the sentence.
She shook her head.
"You need to stop watching Westworld! My prosthesis is not a toy and I am not sure that its caress is the most pleasant."
Her left hand then moved down to his crotch.
"It's not worth flesh...," she added while starting to stroke him. "And I'm afraid I'll break it. What would I do without it?"
"Yeah, you're right. Or we could try new positions from the Kâma-Sûtra? I have the impression that we only did a small fraction of them during our many fucks."
"Oh, that's sexy! That will sell!" She said. "Too bad the copy I bought in India is still in the boxes at home."
"You have a copy of the Kâma-Sûtra? You should have told me earlier. I would have gladly taken a look at it."
He grabbed his cell phone and suggested:
"Internet search?"
"Internet search," she agreed, leaning against him to look at the screen.
Their ploy worked because the next morning, Jocelyn went, as if by chance, to the large predators' paddocks.
Having heard by word of mouth that the couple had a violent argument, she decided to see Owen. Knowing where he was assigned, she went to the large predators' paddocks and saw him with Juan and Mark at the acrocanthosaurs paddock. The three men stood in some sort of cage, designed for cleaning and medical training (*) sessions. While the outer side of the cage was a fence identical to the one that delimited the enclosure, the inner side consisted of a fence whose bars were spaced enough to allow an adult man to pass between them. Of course, no one was doing this in the presence of the enclosure's occupants and the three keepers then stood at a respectable distance from the bars, as Pierce was lying on his stomach directly behind them. While Mark sprayed the animal's back with a hose, Juan and Owen scrubbed it with long brush brooms. From time to time, Juan stopped for a moment to reward the dinosaur for his cooperation, throwing him pieces of meat which the carnivore immediately swallowed after an abrupt snap of his jaws. Jocelyn was always amazed by the fact that such monsters let the keepers check and clean them and take their rewards without particular brutality whereas they would not have hesitated to devour them in other circumstances.
The head keeper noticed the manager's presence:
"Yes, Jocelyn?"
"Can I speak to Owen for a second?"
"No problem."
He nodded to Owen, and the latter pulled his broom from the enclosure, put it on the ground, and went to talk to the manager, who was standing behind the fence.
"You wanted to talk to me?"
"Yes. Excuse me for being indiscreet but I noticed that you and Claire were going through a rough patch. I heard that you had several arguments, with some of them being quite violent… I wanted to make sure that it was not going to interfere with the operation…"
"Have you spoken to her about it?" He asked her, half mumbling.
"Not yet, but I intend to..."
It was then that she noticed the mark of the blow that Claire had given him, by the cheek. She winced.
"She did this to you?" She asked in an almost inquisitive tone.
He nodded weakly.
"What a bitch…," she muttered.
Keeping his eyes on the ground, Owen nodded in agreement.
"Hey," she said, reaching her arm between the fence's bars to touch his.
He then raised his head, looking at her with an expression that could have been compared to that of a sad puppy, just like Claire had suggested.
"You can't go on like this," Jocelyn added. "I'm going to see if you can stay at the hacienda tonight until the situation calms down or you find something else. I'll tell you about that at lunch, okay?"
"Okay."
She smiled at him and then walked away, heading back to the hacienda while he returned to his post.
As she left the acrocanthosaurs paddock behind her, Jocelyn felt watched. She turned to the paddock on her left and noticed that Toro, the burnt carnotaur, was staring at her, watching her without making a sound. He reminded Jocelyn of a horror-film serial killer studying his next victim. Troubled, she shivered and looked away.
-o-
Notes
(*) Based on reward, medical training allows animals to show some parts of their bodies to their keepers and thus avoid anaesthesia, dangerous for large or fragile animals.