Page 38 of Here for a Good Time
Zwe helps me stand back up, and as soon as I’m on my feet, Antonio throws his arms around me. “Ms. Poe! We thought you were dead! Well, at leastIdid. You didn’t really look like the hiking type when you arrived, but—” He gestures at me from head to toe. “—I was mistaken. My apologies.”This fucking kid,I think, too overcome with joy to be offended.
“You weren’t too far off, to be fair,” Zwe mutters. I give his ribs a sharp elbow.
“I’m so happy to see you two.” I can feel how big my grin is. “How did you guys escape?”
“Leila managed to cut through her zip tie,” Antonio says, jerking a thumb at her.
“I had a small knife on me,” she explains. “We have several emergency kits around the resort. I managed to get to the one at the bar before they found me. I also picked this one up—” She dangles a small square red bag that she’d been holding on to this whole time. “—at the start of the trail.” She nods at me. “I saw you take that nasty tumble yesterday. Thought maybe you’d need it. I’m not just a pretty face, you know.”
“Clearly,” Zwe says. All three of us whip our heads in his direction. His eyes widen and his cheeks redden in keeping with the symptoms of someone who accidentally said a thought out loud.
Leila blushes right back. “Thanks,” she says, and, to my evenbigger surprise, lightly shoves his shoulder with her own. Zwe looks down at his bicep as though the spot where her bare arm touched him might’ve left some sort of tattoo, like a cursiveLeila was here.There’s a spasm in my chest. I look over at Antonio, who waggles his brows up and down at me.
“Can you walk?” Leila asks, turning to me and trying to get a better look at my foot.
“Yeah. Can’t, like, climb up a tree in case of danger, but I can walk at a more-than-leisurely pace.”
She offers me her arm. “Come on, let’s get you back on the path. You can sit down and I’ll wrap a bandage around that ankle to keep the swelling down. We need to bring you back in one piece, after all. We should also generally stay out of the grass. You know there are snakes in here.”
“I am trying very hard tonotknow that,” I say. Then, remembering, I hobble-turn to Antonio. “Speaking of yesterday, thank you for providing that distraction. We owe you our lives.”
He waves us away. “You know what they say about teamwork.”
“Whatdothey say about teamwork?” Zwe asks, a curious lilt to his voice.
“If you take out the ‘team’ in ‘teamwork,’ it’s just work, and who wants that?” Antonio answers, looking proud. I can’t tell if that’s a joke, or if he genuinely thinks that’s a saying that people throw around.
“Theydosay that,” Zwe says earnestly, throwing me anI love this kidexpression behind Antonio’s head as we make our way out of the bush.
Zwe and Antonio help me sit down on the side of the path. I wince as Leila removes my sneaker. “Is it broken?”
With gentle motions, she lifts and examines it. “Pretty sure it’snot, but itisinjured. The bandage will help in the meantime,” she says, already getting started on the procedure.
“I’m so glad you guys escaped,” I say. “But Leila, how did you hide the knife from them? Didn’t they search you before tying you up?”
“When I heard the gunshots, I slipped it into my shoe right before they caught me.”
“Smart,” Zwe and I both say at the same time. I slide him a smirk that he pretends not to see.
“How’s this pressure?” Leila asks me.
I try wiggling my foot. “Good,” I say. “It’s not too tight.”
“Great, let me just tape this up.” Holding the bandage with one hand, she deftly takes out a roll of tape with the other, and Antonio helps cut off a piece. “There we go. Perfect. I’m going to hold on to this knife, but ditch the bag. And now—” She stands up, tucks the knife into her back pocket, and indicates in a random direction. “I’m so sorry to be blunt about this, but, um, I have to go pee. Be right back.”
“How about you?” I ask Antonio after she’s left. “How’d you get free?”
“Pfft, easy,” he says. He holds his fists out side by side, palms facing down. “When they ask you to put your hands together, you give them your hands like this because it makes your wrists bigger.” He aligns his fists so that all eight knuckles form a straight line. “Then after they tied me, when they weren’t looking, I just turned my fists so they were facing inward—” He rotates his hands to demonstrate, his thumbs now facing upward. “It takes a bit of time, but as soon as you get the first thumb out, the rest is pretty easy.”
Zwe and I look at each other, speechless. “How the hell do you know that?” I ask.
Antonio shrugs. “Don’t remember. I know a lot of things.I’mnot just a pretty face either, you know.”
“Did you help Leila get free?” I ask.
“Nah, we kinda managed it at the same time. There weren’t any guards around so it was pretty easy to sneak away, too. Actually, I think they were scattered because they were trying to find you two. Anyway, I was already close to freeing my right thumb when Leila took off her shoe and retrieved her knife.”
“Why didn’t you two free everyone else?”
