Page 20 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’s because 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 you were there 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.” I tear 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 a world of 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?”

“Not sure,” he mutters half-distractedly. Pen in hand, he’s retracing the same line he drew yesterday. Once he’s satisfied, he gives himself a small nod, and stashes away the pen.

“It’s weird, right?”

“Maybe, but it also kind of makes sense,” he says with a shrug. “If you want to pull off a big robbery, where’s better than a remote island with a ludicrously expensive resort that only rich people can afford?”

“You think they’re just after the money?” I ask. “I dunno, it feels like a lot to be risking for money.”

He gives another shrug as he takes a bite out of his bar. “Money’s a good motivator. And like I said, if you’ve got a proper plan in place, a heist here”—he gestures at the space around us—“is a hell of a lot easier to get away with than somewhere like a bank.”

When he looks at me properly for the first time all morning, I see the dark bags under his eyes, and a speck of dirt on his chin. I reach over and wipe it away. “Dirt,” I explain.

“Thanks,” he says. “You don’t buy it?”

“Buy what?”

“That they’re here for the money?”

I tilt my head side to side. “It’s not that I don’t buy it, it’s just that it all still feels so bizarre. I kept thinking yesterday that this is the kind of thing you read about in the news, you know? Like, how is this actually happening to us?”

He gives a rueful smile. “I know what you mean.”

We’d picked a spot far enough away from the trail that no one would be able to find us.

After we’ve both finished our food, Zwe points back toward the direction of the main path.

“So, we have a clearly marked trail. Obviously, we’re not operating at a hundred, but still, it shouldn’t take us more than a few hours.

Absolute worst-case scenario, we’ll be at the village by sunset. ”

He makes it sound so simple and systematic, like it’s just a matter of going on a long hike, and by this time tomorrow, help will be here and we’ll have a plan on how we’re going to get home.

“They’re going to come looking for us,” I point out.

“I know. That’s why we’ll walk in the grass alongside the path. No sneaker prints.”

“My ankle still hurts,” I say. Instinctively, I try to turn it, but grimace with pain. We determined last night that it was thankfully not broken, but it’s definitely swollen and I slept with it elevated on my backpack. “I’m going to slow us down.”

Scooting closer to me, he gives my shoulder a reassuring squeeze. “That was part of my absolute-worst-case-scenario calculation.”

“I feel disgusting.” I gesture at myself. “My body is caked in a medically unhealthy amount of debris.”

I’m wondering if I could somehow wash out the faint bloodstains at least with my hand sanitizer, but Zwe produces a neatly rolled T-shirt from his bag.

“You packed an extra shirt?” I ask, snatching it from him.

“I packed two. In case we fell into a river or—”

“Glad to see you had so much faith in my physical prowess.” I’m caught off guard when I unroll the T-shirt.

It’s not just any T-shirt; it’s my favorite one of his.

The summer after my Oxford graduation, we’d splurged on a two-week holiday in London.

One day, there was a freak rainstorm that left us drenched.

The closest open shop was a novelty T-shirt stall in Camden Market, and the only shirt they had in his size was a plain white tee that said BIG DICK ENERGY LEADS TO BIG DICK INJURY in bold black letters on the front.

“I love this shirt,” I say. “I want to be buried in this shirt.”

“I know,” he says, rolling his eyes. “Every time I put it in a donation bag, it somehow ends up back in my closet.”

I clutch my chest. “That’s an act of divine intervention if ever I saw one.

” Grinning, I take off my top. “What?” I ask at Zwe’s reaction, which can really only be described as lingering .

“You’ve seen me in a sports bra,” I say, trying to ignore the goose bumps that have popped up on the back of my neck.

He nods and swallows, although the motions are stilted, like for a moment there, his body had forgotten how to carry them out. I think I feel my cheeks blush, but that could also be the heat. Adrenaline, I remind myself. We still have adrenaline shooting through our bloodstreams.

We relieve ourselves behind some trees, and get ready to hit the road. Zwe offers to take my backpack because of my ankle, but I refuse because it’s actually not that bad once I start walking slowly.

Zwe lets me set the pace as we start off, and although I try my best to go as quickly as possible, I don’t do great.

Eventually, I tell him to go ahead, and he reluctantly does so, making sure to never be more than a couple of feet in front.

And although I also try my best to keep the complaining to a minimum, my fear and general stress keep mounting in the back of my mind, compounded by my frustration over my own slow pace.

“How are—” I pant between every few words. “—things with Julia?” I wanted to reconnect with my friend, and what better opportunity than right now, right?

I try to read his body language, but there’s nothing that I can discern from back here. “We don’t need to talk about Julia right now.”

“I know we don’t need to. But I’d like to.”

“I’d… rather not. Don’t want to jinx anything,” he adds.

“Oh. Right. Gotcha,” I say, not used to Zwe keeping things from me. I try a different route. “Hey, do you think your parents will ever retire? Sell the store?”

“The day they do, I’ll know they’ve officially lost it,” he says, sounding like he’s smiling.

“Would you ?”

“Would I what?”