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The enormous sinking ship emitted another whale-ish type of groan as we began our slow but steady ascent to the ship’s top deck. Traversing through the water, though, was much more difficult than I thought, as it constantly required a significant amount of legwork to take that one extra footstep forward. Once we got higher from the last floor flooded with water, Harry and I had to stop and take a rest.
I panted heavily as I lay my back against a wall. “Phew, that was quite the job.”
Harry chuckled grimly. “Tell me about it. At least the water drained the piss out of my pants.”
Oh, I was so grossed out when he shared that with me. It was repulsive, but I couldn’t pity him more. “Oh my God, they didn’t even allow you to use the toilet when you were chained there?” I gasped.
“Yeah,” Harry continued, his dimples stretching across his face, “and once I just about took an enormous shit in my trousers.”
I groaned in disgust and felt a lump coming at the back of my neck. “That is so disgusting, Harold.”
He chuckled, feeling good about himself all of a sudden as he wrapped his arms around my lower back. “You’re so clean and . . . simple-minded, Louis Tomlinson. I’m usually the filthy, intricate one here.”
My cheeks burned red and my spine rippled with goosebumps as his body pressed closely against mine. Clearly, as I felt a familiar throbbing pressed against my waistline, he wasn’t ashamed of getting some right where we stood. “Imagine, if we get out alive, you can brag to the world that you had sex while the almighty Titanic was sinking.”
He laughed, genuinely amused but caught off his guard at my blatant answer. “Nah, it’d be too rushed. I like you . . . slow. Really unusual of me to have a preference, but then again, we’re aboard the sinking Unsinkable.” He shrugged. “Life gets more strange by the minute.”
I couldn’t help but snort at the irony. “You like me slow, yeah? Explain how fast we were down in steerage the other night!”
Harry mumbled something incoherent to my ears, but then flashed a smirk at me. Whatever suspicion I had about his murmuring evaporated as those really boy-ish, jade eyes looked straight into my own. I almost lost my footing just from that intense look from him.
I suddenly felt a familiar chill of water overwhelm the cushion of heat between us. How did it get up so fast? We just went up an entire floor not three minutes ago, or what maybe felt like three minutes. But now was not the time for emotions, especially when there was none to spare. Time was not in our favour.
I shook my head as I snapped out of whatever sexual trance I was experiencing.”Come on, Harry, we have to go. This is complete foolishness.”
He whirled me around, causing my feet to inadvertently splash him with water. “Alright, but just in case, I want a favour from you first.”
“What—?”
I almost began to break down and mourn on the spot I stood. He slammed his lips against mine and sucked the breath right out of my body before we stood and embraced for what felt like forever. I couldn’t hold back the tears and just let it all pour out. And though I was silent, my heart was crying as Harry started to consider a likely possibility: we were probably not going to make it out alive.
“Come on,” he grumbled, pulling me by the hand and guiding the both of us upstairs.
I didn’t bother to clean my eyes of the salty tears. My pride was out of the way, and whatever man left inside of me was replaced by doing everything to ensure our survival. Even if I had to give up my soul to have Harry by my side through the rest of our lives. I continued shedding those silent tears as we were met with an angry mob forced to wait behind barred gates.
“Please, madam, step away from the gate. Thank you.”
Several gunshots rang out, and a few sparks flared up where the bullets struck along the narrow hall. Everyone ducked their heads and covered their ears as the sounds were amplified against the metal walls. Then a woman screamed, and a thud resonated from the top of the staircase where the people were shoving against each other to get past the locked gates.
“Adalene? Adalene?!” a middle-aged lady, presumably her mother, shrieked in a thick, European accent. Her tone grew more panicked with each word that came out of her mouth. When the body at her feet refused to budge with each poke and shove, the lady began to moan in despair and grief swept across her pale face. Burying her face in her daughter’s chest, she wept and wept while the two dozen people around her looked on with pity.
Harry and I approached the stairwell behind the prisoners when suddenly, the men at the front of the crowd shouted curses and various kinds of profanity to the guards on the other side of the bars. They quickly became infuriated as the guard raised his gun threateningly, shouting if he was going to kill more innocent lives after the poor girl that just died.
“D’you think it’s worth staying here any longer?” I said in a low voice.
“Just a few minutes longer, to see if they’ll open the bloody gates or not.”
I crossed my arms in front of my sodden chest, anxiously awaiting for something to happen. The men continued to shout, but no other gunshots rang out. When the guard wielding the gun still refused to unlock the barrier, the bigger blokes started tearing out the hinges where the gate was connected to the wall.
“Hey, you! Stop that!” the scrawny gunman said shakily. He fumbled with his weapon before managing to lock onto one of the men, pointing the barrel at him from a safe distance. Apparently, his gun was still in reach of the brawny man. Grabbing the gun swiftly out of the guard’s hand, he flipped it in the opposite direction with two fingers protruding from the bars and stared down the barrel. He was definitely one who knew how to handle a pistol.
“Open the fucking gates right now, or die,” he growled. Everyone stood silent as they waited for a response, whether it was a set of keys jingling or another gunshot at point-blank range.
“This changes things,” Harry whispered in my ear. I smiled as his breath spread goosebumps across my cheek and neck. It sure did.
The guard raised his hands in a flash, a mortified look on his face. “Alright, alright, mate. You got me, eh?” The man fished for the keyring attached to his belt and quickly opened the gates. “There you go . . . Yeah, go on, you scum of the Earth.”
“Thanks, mate,” the brawny man said. But just before he climbed down and joined the throng of people swarming through the gates in near-silence, he pulled the trigger and put a bullet into the man’s forehead. “And that’s for Adelene.” He threw the gun into the pool of blood accumulating at the corpse’s head.
I flinched when the loud ringing aftermath of the gunshot temporarily deafened me, and still had my ears covered as the crowd around me began to surge through the narrow entrance. Harry beside me looked completely unfazed by the violence that sprang up, as well as the rest of the crowd. Were the citizens of Third Class always passive or just used to it?
Who would have known that a sinking ship fashioned by human hands would cause such turmoil?
“Louis, come on already!” Harry hollered.
I glanced up at him—I hadn’t even realized that I was staring at the blood-soaked weapon all along—while he took me by the hand and rather forcefully dragged me through the crowd to his side. We still had a long way to the top deck, and by how long we’ve already been since . . . God, since I ran down to get him, who knew how much more Titanic was going to bear before something else happened?
Harry pulled me by the hand still, as he was fighting to get through the thick throng of commonfolk. The air in the low-ceilinged room began to feel stuffy, and the loose-fitting clothes I wore began to stick to me from the sweat. My breaths became more forceful and deliberate, and just before I thought I was going to suffocate from lack of space, Harry managed to pull me and himself into yet another abandoned hall.
“Where are we now?” I said, my chest heaving.
“We’re probably on C Deck right now. Two floors left to go, Lou.” He looked into my eyes briefly before they lowered to my shirt. “You look really desirable, all hot and sweaty.”
I couldn’t help the blush as well as the snort that jetted out of my nose. “Any more fancy word dress-ups, Mr. Styles?”
He shrugged, and began to slowly walk away from the people still pouring out through the newly established exit. His hand was still interlocked with mine. “Well, I could say that . . . um, you-you practically are . . . sex that grew legs.”
We were silent for a moment while I was trying to decipher his intricate word usage. When it finally clicked in my rather ignorant twenty-year-old brain, I roared with laughter and inevitably rushed to hug him. The intimacy began to morph the atmosphere between us from light and filled with laughter to somber and somewhat sensual.
I sighed deeply, feeling the muscles in my torso and thighs beginning to relax as Harry stroked my hair. With every caress of his fingers, I felt more at ease despite the growing panic on the sinking ship. It was a strange tranquility in light of the unusual yet highly dangerous predicament we were trapped in at the moment.
I really did not have the heart to break our one-on-one time, but it had to be done. I wasn’t ready to die yet, with Harry or not. “We should go.”
He nodded against my head, and pulled me close to his surprisingly warm body radiating the heat I craved. The water levels hadn’t yet ascended to the current floor we were on, but I knew it was coming. On the floor we were trapped on behind iron gates, the icy chill already began to seep into my leather shoes. But that was about five minutes ago. And a lot could happen in five minutes’ time.
“Here,” Harry gestured.
I looked up to find ourselves approaching the Second Class dining room. Plain but still a tad nicer than the Third Class version, we enter to find that the ship already took on a gradual tilt. From where we stood at the bow end of the ship, I almost tripped over my own feet while going up the slight incline. Harry held me with a vicegrip as we trudged upwards.
“So,” I said, “Harold Styles, I knoweth not of whereth you cometh from, and yet I am closer to thou than my own mother.”
“What’s with the old talk?” he said wistfully.
I shrugged, which he didn’t see from in front. “Dunno. But really, I’ve only known you for less than a week and now that we’re, you know, together . . . I haven’t gotten the opportunity to know more about your life before you came aboard.”
The lights went out again, for longer than previous times, but Harry and I kept our pace constant. We already knew that the few meters in front of us was just empty space and then the exit, so it wasn’t a problem to tread through the dark with confidence in each step.
“Well, I grew up in the slums of Cheshire, raised by my parents who taught me the advantages of being neighbors with the cockroach nest next-door, vainly aspired to become the next Picasso, and before I knew it, I took the opportune moment to bring us all aboard. Y’know, start anew in America.”
“So you’re an artist?” I said.
“Eh . . . no,” he murmured. “I gave up on it. Turns out I don’t enough patience for art.”
“And yet you claim to be patient enough to ‘like me slow’?” I challenged. That little speck of honesty he exhibited a few minutes earlier would forever be branded into my mind. So of course I would take advantage of it.
He shook his head and tsked me. “What have I done to you, Louis . . .?”
“You freed me from myself,” I said matter-of-factly. “Otherwise I’d never be here with you. Nor to have ever met you.”
“No, I freed you from your family,” he corrected. “You were like a little songbird trapped in a cage. You wanted to get out, you just never had the guts to do it.”
I shrugged indifferently, but my reddening face betrayed my emotion. Harry smiled and kissed my forehead, and to top it off his straying hand wove behind my back and squeezed my butt!
I scoffed in surprise, swatting away his misbehaving fingers. “Harry!”
“Don’t lie,” he said seductively. “You like it.”
As we rounded a corner after exiting the dining room and the distant, indistinct noises from the main staircase were muted out from the great distance between us and them, Harry and I teased and poked and even groped each other just for the sake of love and fun. It would’ve been ridiculous to say that we had the time of our lives in a few precious minutes as we were stuck on a sinking ship, but, well . . . we did.
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