Page 77 of Mexico Can Choke On It
I have no idea what that means, and I’m sure I’ll be angrier once I figure it out.
I shift my weight, trying to find footing on the uneven slope, when I step on a branch shaped like a damn baguette.
CRACK!
The sound echoes (FYI, that’s how you properly use the word, you self-absorbed hack)as if I fired a weapon. Birds scatter.
Petra stops. Whipsaround.
Shit.
I raise my hands in surrender. “I can explain.”
She stomps right up to me, poking me in the chest. “Are you stalking me? This is harassment! I know my rights!”
Echo moans somewhere up ahead. “Nature iswetwith revelation! She offers herself to us, moist and pulsating with ancient longing!”
Her mouth opens, closes, then opens again. “Whatever. I don’t have time for this.”
She spins on her heel and plunges off the path deeper into the wild. Without hesitation, I pursue her into the green chaos. I dodge one branch, then another. My blazer sleeve snags on a thorny, overachieving plant. There’s sweat pooling in my shoes…Inside them.I trudge onward as my designer loafers squish with every step.
“So… this is your type? Guys who hump tree trunks and yell about chlorophyll?”
“You just can’t leave me alone, can you?” she teases. “No need for jealousy, Moneybags. I do not find Echo and his woodland orgy charming. My gut is telling me he and Fiona have a secret. I’m guessingaffair.”
“I know you aren’t exactly a Fiona fan—”
“Understatement of the decade.”
“Do you really think she’d do something to hurt Gavin?”
Petra stops so abruptly, I nearly crash into her. She turns, eyes blazing. “Abso-fucking-lutely.”
She drops into a crouch behind a massive fern and yanks me down with surprising strength. A cloud of tiny insects scatter into the air as my knees connect with the jungle floor. I groan as I slam my arm down to avoid faceplanting into the mud.
“Shh,” she hisses, raising the binoculars. “If you’re going to spy with me, Moneybags, be quiet.”
I don’t respond because my brain is melting—literally melting—inside my skull. If Satan opened a sauna in the ninth circle of hell, it would be ten degrees cooler than this Mexican jungle.
Why does Petra have two heads?
I blink hard, trying to clear my vision, but that simply redirects rivers of sweat directly into my eyeballs.
Through the salty sting, I see Echo—or what I’m increasingly convinced is a heat-induced hallucination—standing in a clearing ahead.
“I must release my artistic spirit from these fabric prisons!” he bellows.
Then he growls and rips open his mesh shirt. He quickly shimmies out of his pants and is now fully nude—twirling in the mud like a twerking caterpillar.
He flops to the ground. Rolls. Stretches his arms wide.
“The earth accepts me as its lover,” he moans, thrusting his hips against the ground. “I become blank canvas. I become vessel. I become—”
“AHHH! MOTHERFUCKER! MY BALLS!” He leaps to his feet, slapping wildly at his groin. “FUCKING ANTS! THEY’RE BITING MY DICK!”
I slap a hand to my mouth to keep from snorting.
Echo takes off sprinting down the path toward the house, bare buttocks clenched in terror, abandoning his clothes and sketchpad.
