Page 33 of Here for a Good Time
EIGHT
I groan at the sunlight that attacks my eyes as soon as I stir awake. “Zwe,” I mumble. “Why didn’t you close the—”
And then the night’s events all come rushing back to me like a movie that someone’s played on fast-forward.
I dislodge the sleep crumbs from my eyelids. “Are we dead?” I ask, groaning with pain this time as I sit up. “My back feels like I slept on a boulder. Is this what death feels like?”
“Like you’d be able to stay on top of a boulder through the night with the way you flail about in your sleep,” Zwe says, already awake. “You slept slumped against the trunk of this majestic banyan tree.”
“Is that why I just heard my spine crack?” I ask, wincing as I try to stretch upward.
“No,that’sbecause of the whole precipice-of-entering-your-thirties thing. We’re not teenagers anymore. Things crack when we wake up now.”
“I’m still in my twenties, you dick. How’d you sleep?”
“Terrible. You?”
“Like a baby who popped a Xanax.”
He tosses a pebble at my calf. “I really think that’s a medical condition that you need checked out. It is alarming that if I hadn’t been there, you would’ve slept through a group of armed intruders taking over an entire resort.”
“Yeah but thankfully youwerethere to give me all of these lovely scrapes and bruises,” I say, pulling up my sleeves. My arms are covered in long red scratches, some of them barely scabbed over. I look like I was tossed into a cage of rabid cats.
“You’re welcome. You know, for keeping you alive,” he retorts.
But I can’t respond to him, because the sight of my arms brings the previous night to the front of my mind, the red marks on my flesh making it all real and not just a terrible nightmare I can laugh about.
“That really happened,” I whisper, rolling my arms left and right to take in the full extent of my injuries.
“It did.” Zwe’s voice has sobered, too.
We fall into a silence that feels eerie. Weird. Scary.
“What should we do now?” I ask.
“Stay hydrated,” Zwe says matter-of-factly.
As he pulls out my water bottle, I’m temporarily impressed that we both managed to escape with our backpacks still intact.
I’d mentioned it last night as we were trying to find a safe, dry spot to sleep.We would have been fucked without our bags,he’d said.We’d have a better chance of surviving by turning ourselves in.
“Afterward?” I ask before taking a gulp of water.
“Probably split one of your protein bars. We need sustenance.”
I put my water bottle back in my bag and take out one of the two granola bars that I always carry with me in case I forget to eat while caught up in a writing spree. “We should eat as we walk.” Itear the paper wrapper and break the bar in half, giving him a piece. “We don’t want to waste time.”
He considers it for a minute, bar in hand. “I don’t think that’s a good idea,” he says. I was just gathering the energy to get up, but pause. “Eating might distract us. We don’t want to be distracted, or running around in circles. We’ll solidify our plan before we leave.”
I take a deep breath to calm down the part of me that wants to snap at him. “I think we can handle eating while we walk. Not exactly rocket science now, is it?” I ask, trying to sugarcoat my sarcasm. Why isn’t he panicking over the general fuckery of this all? Why isn’t he moving so we can get out of this whole thing as soon as possible?
“Multitasking means we’ll be giving half our attention to two different tasks,” Zwe replies, not the least bit bothered by my quip. “I’d rather we sit here for an extra ten minutes and give a hundred percent of our attention to each task. Look, I’ll double-check the map while we eat, so as soon as we’re done, we can be on our way.”
I want to remind him that he already double-checked it last night using the last of his phone’s battery to turn on the flashlight, but for Zwe, “double-checking” actually means “quadruple-checking.”
“Fine,” I mumble, and take my annoyance out on my half of the protein bar by chomping down hard on it. If I weren’t indebted to Zwe for saving my life, I’d put up more of a fight; but I am, so I don’t. Ten minutes won’t make aworldof difference.
“Hey, who do you think those people are?” I ask. We’re barely above whispering, but our voices boom here. “The ones with the guns. What do you think they want?”
