The ship had become adrift in the doldrums, not a whisper of wind to fill the sails. With little else to do, the idle thoughts of the seamen had turned to the only woman aboard, the surgeoness, taken aboard at Port Royal. The Captain had been reluctant to have a woman among the male crew (though even more reluctant to leave such a comely young lady behind in the wickedest city on Earth) and had requested she seclude in her quarters until her services were needed.

It wasn't that the sailors were trying to injure themselves, but they had certainly grown sloppy. While hauling up new rigging, Elias had accidentally allowed the rope to slip through his grasp. As it built inertia, the rough rope ripped through the palms of his hands and raked the skin of his chest into a bloody, ragged mess. He skipped merilly to the surgeon's quarters.

"What delicate hands you have, my dear," he admired, as her warm fingertips traced along his bare chest, pressing the raw, open flesh back together before fixing it with needle and thread. He barely noticed the pain, enraptured by the first woman he'd seen in months. "Our last barber-surgeon was quite a butcher, and that's no exaggeration. Were you a seamstress back in Port Royal?"

"Something like that," she said with a quick smile. She'd certainly called herself such once when she'd run afoul of what few officials Port Royal had. Eventually, she'd discovered that she possessed a talent for patching up the other 'seamstresses', setting broken noses or burst lips after an encounter with a rough client. After setting the hooked nose of a rather hideous old bawd, people had begun to remark how pretty it looked, and, in time, even healthy women were requesting her services to correct perceived flaws in their bodies, until there were few whores back in Port Royal that didn't flaunt her work to their clientele. "I'm afraid I'm still much more familiar with a woman's body than a man's," she said.

She'd succeeded in stemming the bleeding, piecing the pectorals back together like a patchwork quilt. She palpated the pulped, softened flesh, pressing it upwards, and threading the needle through the ugly male meat. It looked quite hideous until she, at last, drew the thread taut, and the ragged flesh pulled together neatly, drawing the chest higher and outwards, the nipples stretching wide and full across the resculpted flesh.

She snapped off the thread and examined her work, blushing as the man's perky chest sloshed and rolled with the movement of the ship. She had worked exactly as she had done with whores back home, unaware that it would have the same effect on a man. "Oh, dear. Um, perhaps I have a second try at your sutures before it fully heals?"

"Nonsense, my sweet. You've done wonderful work," Elias crooned, still enraptured by her eyes, buttoning his shirt over his newfound breasts without even noticing them.

As he left, another sailor was stood outside the door, clutching a limp arm.

"Goodness me, you boys need to be more careful," she tutted. "Well, come in, I'll have you fixed."