“Please?”
“Look, Harvey, Henry, Son, Billy Green, maybe we’d just better pack it up and call it a day.”
He sat down on the hard-packed sand in front and a little to the right of her and looked at her steadily. He quit. Quit trying to make an impression.
“I’m not crazy, Jadine. Raw, maybe, but not nuts.”
“I’m not convinced.”
“A man admires your feet and you want to lock him up?”
“You need professional care.”
“Put one foot out. Just one. I prefer two, but if you want, you can show me just one, although two is better. Two feet is a pair. They go together, so to speak. One is just—” he shrugged slightly—“one. Alone. Two is better. I want to see them both.”
“I don’t know about you.”
“Take your time, I’ll see them anyway when you stand up, but I’d like it better if you showed them to me yourself.”
Jadine’s feet were warm under her skirt, each one hidden near a thigh.
“I won’t touch,” he said, “I promise.”
She looked past his face and felt wavy. The sun was still hiding in some fuzz in the sky. Gulls with dark hoods rested beyond the surf. They looked like ducks from where she sat. All the gulls she remembered screeched and dived. She’d never seen them quiet before, sitting still in water as though they were listening.
“Come on,” he said. “Show me. Please?”
Slowly she started to unfold one leg, carefully, cautiously as though she was about to do something wild.
“Just a little bit more,” he urged her. “Come on.”
Quickly then, she straightened both legs and stuck them into the air. He looked at them and did not touch. The waviness traveled from her head to her toes pointing up from the sand. He looked at them, and whispered, “Look at that.” He leaned down for a better look. “I said I wouldn’t touch and I won’t. If you object, that is. But I have to tell you how much I want to. Right there.” He pointed to the arch. “If you don’t want me to, I won’t, though, like I said.”
He wants to kiss my feet, she thought. He wants to put his mouth on my foot. If he does I’ll kick his teeth out. But she didn’t move.
“Can I? Can I touch it right there?”
She didn’t answer and he didn’t say anything more for several pulse beats. Then he did it. Put his forefinger on her sole and held it and held it and held it there.
“Please stop,” she said, and he did, but his forefinger stayed where his finger had been in the valley of her naked foot. Even after she laced up the canvas shoes.
“I’ve got to get back,” she said.
He stood quickly so there would be no mistake, and walked ahead of her, leading the way. He drove this time, while Jadine sat quietly going over in her mind the reasons why she was not going to let him make love to her; the reasons it would be impossible to even consider going to bed with him, fingerprint or no fingerprint, laughing into the sky or not. The most important reason was that he expected her to. As hard as she tried, he did not seem convinced that she was unattracted to him. Second, it would trouble Nanadine and Sydney. Third, he wasn’t manageable. Afterward. What would he be like afterward? Stake a claim? Try to trade his room for hers? Drive the jeep into the house if she said no? He was whistling now, driving along whistling through closed teeth like he already had it made. Still, she had been there two whole months with nobody. Jadine sighed and set her jaw. Fifteen more minutes and they would be back at the house where she could put the whole business out of her mind, but the jeep slowed down and she couldn’t believe it. He must have done something; did he think she would sit still for something as dumb as that? But it was true; he pumped and pumped the accelerator. Nothing happened. The gauge was securely empty. Jadine looked around: jungle muck on both sides; trees close to the road on the left. An uphill walk to the house was longer than a trek back to the pier. Jadine reached into the glove compartment and took out a key. “It unlocks the pump back at the pier,” she said.
“Got something to put it in?” he asked.
“In back under the seat, there’s a five-liter bottle. Use that.”
“I hope you’re right. That there’s gas in that pump.”
“I hope I am too. If not, get some from the boat. I know there’s some there.”
He nodded. “Twenty minutes about, to get there and another twenty to get back.”
She agreed and settled back in the seat crossing her legs.
“You’re not coming with me?”
“No,” she said, “I’ll wait here.”
“Alone?”
“Go on, will you? I’ll be all right. There’s nobody on the island I don’t know. If somebody drives down, I’ll have them pick you up and bring you back.”
He left then and Jadine rummaged around in the basket to see if there was anything left of the awful lunch. Nothing. Nothing at all. She sat for a while under the hateful sun that had come out in full dress when they least needed her. Thank God there were no mosquitoes here, just a funny jungle-rot smell. She waited until the sun burnt a hole in her head. She didn’t have a watch on but thought twenty minutes must have passed by. Only twenty more. Then she decided to seek shelter from the sun under the trees to the left of the road, in spite of that unpleasant
