Page 35 of Even If the Sky is Falling
“Congratulations, I am the last person you’re ever going to see. What did you do in your past life to deserve this?” Jones leaned forward, and Dianna could make out the shadows her irises cast up to her eyelashes like dandelion petals.
“It could be worse,” Dianna said. “I could be trapped in here with someone who wasn’t nice to look at with bad BO.”
This time, despite the deep hue of her skin and the lack of lighting, Jones couldn’t hide her blush. Even her lips were warm with it. Dianna wasn’t the first woman who had ever made her entire body feel like it was in a toaster oven, but she was definitely the first to ever even slightly get Jones to put her guard down. Not even the man she had thought she was going to marry had successfully done that. Maybe it wasn’t such a surprise he had so easily replaced her—she had never really been his. Or at least, he had never really been hers. It was easy to write over data not deeply embedded.
Jones watched as Dianna glanced at her phone and then crawled over to where she’d left it on the floor. Jones wasn’t sure if Dianna had forgotten she wasn’t wearing pants or simply didn’t care. But for just a moment Jones let herself watch as Dianna’s butt was cast straight into the air as she crawled.
“Do you want a snack?” Dianna’s voice felt far away and Jones had to concentrate to put the syllables together into recognizable words.
Dianna dragged her bag back to where Jones was sitting. Upturning its contents, snacks cascaded out onto the floor. Along with a first aid kit nearly exploding with bandages, a small pack of wet wipes, an eyeglass case, a pair of flats rolled into a ball and an AirPods case.
“Why do you have all of this?” Jones said, grabbing a tube of ChapStick that had rolled toward her. The girl was prepared for anything—zombie outbreak, contagion, lockdown in a meteor bunker.
Dianna tossed Jones a bag of Cheetos, taking a small bag of fruit snacks for herself. “If you stay ready, you don’t have to get ready.” There was more to it than that, but she wasn’t comfortable sharing that part of herself with Jones just yet. Until an hour ago, Dianna was pretty sure Jones hated her. The best she could hope for now when, if, they finally left this room was indifference, or maybe Jones would forget everything that happened here. End-of-the-world chatter was fickle. She wasn’t about to open up with an uncertainty like that.
Instead, she rose from the floor and snatched the textbook she had been waiting for from Jones’s long-abandoned seat. She pulled a notebook from the pile that had once been a mess of crap at the bottom of her tote bag.
“You’re not seriously about to do work are you?” Jones asked, incredulous. And she thought she was intense.
“Why not? We’ve got nothing but time.” Dianna dug out a pen and dated the corner of the blank page.
“If that’s how you want to spend your last moments.”
“Well, I could come up with something better.” Dianna tilted her head like she so often did. Except this time a flirty smirk lifted up one side of her mouth.
Jones looked away first, leaning back on her hands to create distance. It might be her last day on Earth, but she wasn’t sure she was ready for whatever that smirk promised. Especially not with Dianna Ellis. She pulled her arms through her sweater and folded it into a square. Lying down, she pushed it beneath her head as a makeshift pillow.
Dianna smiled conspiratorially, bringing her books closer to her chest as she began to scan for the most important passages, making note to cite them in her article. Her eyes strained as she angled the book beneath the dim emergency backup lights, but it was worth the distraction. What was a few more ticks down on her next eyeglass prescription in the grand scheme of things?
She didn’t know how many minutes passed when she finally looked up to find her once blank page now full of her handwriting, scribbled neatly until about halfway down, when her cursive became nearly illegible. She liked to call it “study blackouts,” when she was so in the zone that anything could have been happening in the world and she would never know it.
A small snore from just in front of her pulled her attention away from her notes. She tilted her book to the side to see Jones, huddled against the bookshelf with one arm thrown over her face. Snores squeaked out with each rise of her chest.
As if she could feel Dianna’s eyes on her, Jones jerked upward, awake and alert. Her head slammed into the corner of a bookend above her. She screamed and pressed her shirt against her mouth, trying to capture the drool falling from the corner of her lips. Only then did she realize she hadn’t screamed at all.
Dianna was rushing toward her in a crawl, speaking too many words at once for Jones to assort into comprehensible sentences through her grogginess. Dianna grabbed at her face, and before she knew it, Dianna was so close that she could feel her breath on her face. The blackberry from her Bubly still clung to her lips, which were so close to her own that if she leaned forward she could capture them.
“Lips,” Jones said aloud. Her brain was still moving far too slow. She felt drunk. With sleep, with something else she was still too afraid to name.
“What?” Dianna asked.
Jones puckered her lips and then laughed. Maybe she was drunk. Or concussed. Her legs had that buzzy feeling she only got after a few shots of tequila, when all of her synapses were racing to figure out which limbs needed them most. Even her face was tingling.
“Oh, you slept good,” Dianna laughed, sitting back on her butt. “My nana called it being high on z’s.”
Jones’s mind came back slowly until once again her brain was full of too many thoughts. Anxiety pressed against the back of her eyes. She had almost kissed Dianna. Dianna still wasn’t wearing her skirt. These things felt related.
Dianna dug a small pouch out of the pile on the floor. She held it and if Jones could read minds, she was sure that she’d drown in whatever was going through Dianna’s head right now. She tapped the pouch with her fingers and then sighed.
“Can you help me?” she asked finally. “I need some light.” The generator lights were getting dimmer by the minute and the small device had barely enough battery power to illuminate the small numbers. That would teach her to stop forgetting to plug it in before bed.
“Sure,” Jones agreed. She found her phone shoved beneath her thigh and pressed the small flashlight button. She got a ten percent notification and turned on low power mode. Hopefully they wouldn’t be in here much longer. No way out was one thing, but no way out with no phone felt like a horror movie waiting to happen.
She held the phone over Dianna’s hands and watched as Dianna unzipped the pouch. A small device fell out. Dianna took the device in one hand and held out her thumb on the other. Jones watched silently, holding her phone as steady as she could as Dianna pressed the device against her thumb. A sharp and sudden sound popped—the needle pricking her skin. She moved the device from her thumb, which now had a small bead of blood at the tip.
Jones moved closer as Dianna tilted the device toward her, trying to read the numbers in the light. Dianna nodded as she read and then dropped slowly to the floor, shifting through the rest of the pile until she found her first aid kit. She pulled out a small antiseptic wipe, ripped it open with her teeth and pressed it against her finger.
“Do you...need me to do anything?” Jones asked her, following her movements with the light so Dianna could see what she was doing.
