Lagoon

She ran the back of her hand across her forehead for the hundredth time in an hour.

It was hot. So hot that she had seriously contemplated peeling off all of her clothes and drowning herself in the water she was currently standing in front of.

It had been exactly four days since they had rescued Jack from the Locker, and it had been exactly four days since Jack had actually spoken to her. All manners of expression upon his face had been directed at her, but she longed to hear him speak to her again.

She remembered the cool feeling of the iron when she had secured it around his wrist, she remembered the way his eyes had danced between resignation, anger, admiration, and hurt, never quite settling on one long enough for her to appropriately respond.

They had entered into a new dynamic, a new territory. Before, it had been all shameless banter and sarcasm, as exciting as it might have been. At least, that is what she had tried to tell herself, until the way her skin tingled and her heart seemed to set itself on fire every time he even looked in her direction could no longer be explained away with excuses. And when that realization had set in, the fire that dominated her body late at night grew into a mighty inferno, scorching her insides and melting her brain into mush when her fingers wandered under the waistband of her breeches. Every now and then she would wallow in guilt over betraying Will like that, but she was powerless against the hypnotizing aura that Jack Sparrow had.

Now, they were stuck in some kind of a strange impasse, united yet separated, where they had each had a taste of the other, yet were both unwilling to make the next move. And damn herself and every single traitorous part of her body, she had enjoyed that taste. The flavor of his mouth had been spicy and exotic, and as evidenced by her tracing her lips every time she thought of the way her body had fit perfectly with his, which was often, the man could bloody kiss.

She would freely admit that she had thought about what kissing him might be like more times than she had thought about almost anything else during that voyage to Isla Cruces. Daydreams of pulling him into his cabin and pushing him against the wall transfigured her face into something wild and amorous that even James noticed.

Of course, she had adamantly denied it when he had called her out, but that was just to keep up pretenses. She had been hopelessly madly in lust with the damned pirate captain, and there was nothing she could have done to relieve her predicament.

And the bloody miscreant had known it. He would smirk at her in just that way to let her know that he knew what kind of thoughts about him ran through her mind. Several times, he let her inside to see his thoughts, and she had come to the conclusion that he desperately wanted her as well, with the way his irises turned a shade darker when he trailed his eyes down her body when he didn't think she was looking, or when he would suddenly, without explanation, retreat to his cabin.

She might not know a lot about the sexual realm, but she knew enough to know exactly what was making him flee, and the amount of entertainment she had gotten from it had only fueled her own desires. Her deviant mind had pictured him doing that, and once that image had been insinuated into her brain, it only opened the door to a rabbit hole of scandalous images.

The Caribbean sea before her was taking on a sparkling orange hue as the sun sank beneath the edge of the water. It was beautiful, much like the electrifying tension she was feeling just by being on the same island as Jack. The anticipation of whether he would decide to just kill her or attempt to pick up where they left off was leaving her on a teetering edge.

When the latest wave of heat prickled at her skin, she concluded that she needed to be clean, and it needed to happen soon. The island that they had anchored off of was big enough to have some kind of water source besides the ocean on it, and she was going to find it.