Page 21 of Here for a Good Time

I make an effort to keep inhaling and exhaling through my nose instead of my mouth. “Sell the store? If it were up to you?”

Zwe doesn’t answer for a long while, keeping his focus down and on the grass. “It doesn’t matter,” he finally says. “The store isn’t mine. What would I do if I sold it, anyway? That bookstore’s all I’ve ever really known,” he adds with a dry chuckle. “I’m happy as long as they’re happy.”

I could immediately list ten things for him to do if he sold the store, but instead I bite my tongue. Zwe’s happy if his parents are happy, and I’m happy if he’s happy.

We keep going in silence until I have to pause to take a breather.

“You okay?” Zwe asks as soon as his hearing clocks that I’ve stopped moving. He immediately turns around and walks over.

“I’m okay, just tired.”

“Hi, okay, just tired,” he retorts.

“Don’t test me right now, Zwe Aung Win. I swear to god, I will impale you with a branch.”

He chuckles under his breath. “Come on, we have to keep going. We can’t stop yet, we’ve only been walking for—” He checks his watch. “—thirty-one minutes.”

“You’re lying.”

“Hand on heart,” he says, placing his palm on his left chest.

“Ugggggh! I hate nature!” Although I try to keep my groan quiet, there’s a rustling commotion as two birds fly out from the branches of the tree next to me.

“Sorry, no offense!” I whisper-call after them.

“Great, now I’m apologizing to birds. Maybe the dehydration and exhaustion are already getting to me.

Whoever said nature was relaxing was a bold-faced liar. ”

“You know, if I were a dick, I would point out that you booked this trip because you thought all of this nature would be rejuvenating.” I go to punch his arm, but he laughs and hops out of the way.

“However”—he lifts a quieting finger—“I’m going to be nice and not point that out.

Come on, let’s distract your brain. Tell me about…

this newest draft of yours. It must be good if you risked your life to save it. What happens?”

Despite its innocuousness, I’m taken aback by this specific subject change.

I hate talking about my work in progress.

It puts too much pressure on me, forces me to talk about an idea that might or might not even turn out to be a real book as though it already is one.

Generally, Zwe knows this, too, and the rule is that we don’t talk about my new project unless I bring it up.

But then again, we’re kind of short on conversation topics right now, and I was the one who made a big deal about bringing my laptop with me in a life-or-death situation because I couldn’t bear to leave my precious manuscript behind. So I guess I had this one coming.

“It’s… time travel,” I try to explain. The words come out slowly, because the truth is that I don’t actually yet know what does happen in this book.

“This woman discovers a time-traveling manhole and she becomes obsessed with changing parts of her present-day life and then traveling forward in time to see how the changes have impacted her future.”

“Time travel, that’s fun,” Zwe muses. “How does it end?”

This is how I write: I know how a book starts and how it ends.

“She dies,” I say.

He laughs out loud, then clasps his hand over his mouth because we’re not supposed to be making any distinctly loud sounds. “Sorry,” he says. “I didn’t expect that. That’s funny, though.”

I stop in my tracks. “What’s the joke?”

He turns around, confused once he sees that I’ve stopped walking. “That she dies.” He’s drawing out each word as he gauges the situation. When I fold my arms, he adds, “Right?”

“Why’s that funny?”

“Wait,” he says with a small snort that makes me grind my teeth in response. “You’re not joking? She actually dies?”

“Well… yeah.”

“Okay, fair enough.” He shakes his head. “Why?”

I shift my weight to my other foot, remember that that’s my bad foot, and promptly re-shift to my original foot.

“Because it’s supposed to be a dark ironic ending.

She spends all this time tweaking her present-day life bit by bit so that she forgets to actually live in the present, but after she makes the final tweak that will give her her dream life in ten years, she… dies.”

Wordlessly, he scrutinizes me in that way that makes me feel like I’ve been shoved under a magnifying glass. “I see” is all he says at last.

“What?” I demand.

“Nothing. It… sounds like an intriguing story.”

“Just say what you’re really thinking,” I snap, surprising myself. Zwe flinches, not having expected that reaction either.

“Okay, fine, you want the truth?” he asks, eyeing me like he doesn’t think I can handle it.

I nod, but my shoulder muscles pull back, readying myself for whatever his truth is.

“It… feels like it could be more fleshed out. A person who exploits their newfound time-traveling powers? It feels… clichéd.”

The word feels like a kick, the exact kind that I delivered yesterday to that woman: forceful, out of left field, hitting me dead center.

“But this is a first draft,” he backtracks as soon as I react. “None of your first drafts are fleshed out. Sorry, I shouldn’t have said clichéd. That was shitty of me.”

“Yeah, it was.”

He scrubs his face in frustration. “I’m sorry.

I didn’t sleep well last night. I kept having nightmares where you tripped and…

” He cuts himself off and turns toward the sea, the angle of the sun not letting me make out his expression from just his profile.

“I’m sorry,” he repeats. “I don’t know what I’m saying.

Look, can we make a deal that we can’t hold the other person accountable for whatever they say in the next forty-eight hours, give or take?

I think you were onto something back there about the exhaustion and dehydration already getting to us. ”

My anger all but melts the moment he turns back to me with his patented puppy face.

He’s right. We’re both cranky. I can’t think too hard about how badly I want a shower because I’m positive that, best-case scenario, I’ll start crying on the spot, and worst-case scenario, the delirium will make me take off all my clothing and run down to the beach so I can skinny-dip in the ocean. “Deal,” I say, holding out my hand.

His demeanor visibly relaxing, he strides over and shakes it.

For a few seconds, we stay grinning at each other.

Reset.

I move to drop my hand, but Zwe doesn’t let go.

Or maybe I don’t let go. I don’t know, but we’re just…

holding hands now. And it feels… nice. Comforting.

He is the closest thing to home I have right now, and I wish we could call it for the day and sit down and read our books and try again tomorrow.

“I’m tired,” I say, restating the obvious.

I expect him to say I know or Me too or It’s just a couple more hours.

But instead, he closes the gap between us and, one hand still laced with mine, moves the other under my hair so he can rub the back of my neck.

It feels so good, his skin on mine. I close my eyes and try to sync my breathing to the up-and-down motion of his hand.

I’m so focused on the movement that I don’t notice him letting go of my fingers until he’s pulling me into him for a hug, arms completely enveloping me around my shoulders, his chin lightly resting atop my head as I bury my face in his chest.

“We’re going to be okay,” he tells me.

“You are not allowed to try to convince me to go on any more hikes for the rest of our lives,” I mumble into his shirt. “I get an indefinite number of plays with this card.”

He laughs, the action causing friction between my face and his chest. “That sounds fair. Now come on, let’s get you to that village so we can get some lunch.”

I smile but don’t move. Neither does he. “Do you think they’ll have cake?” I ask.

“No,” he says. “But I’ll phone my parents once we get cell service, and I’ll make sure they have a cake waiting for us when we get home. I’ll even tell them to write a message on it. Something like—”

“WE’RE HAPPY YOU’RE NOT DEAD?”

“HOPE YOU HAD A GOOD HOLIDAY,” he says.

I snort. “They would do that. Ugh, they’re going to give us a proper Asian-parent scolding for this, aren’t they?”

“‘You wanted to run away to a remote island? Was that remote enough for you?’” Zwe asks in a dead-on imitation of his mom. “‘Or should I drive you out to another forest and leave you there overnight? I’ll only charge half of what that resort charged you.’”

I snort again, my voice still muffled by his shirt. “They are never ever going to let us live this down.”

“Never,” he agrees.

I take a long inhale and pull back. “Right. Shall we—”

At first, I don’t place the footsteps as footsteps. At first, for some inexplicable reason, I think it’s a rabbit who’s hopping rapidly through the grass as rabbits do in cartoons. “Do you hear—”

“Someone’s coming,” Zwe confirms, his embrace suddenly rigid as it transforms from affection to protection.

My brain tries to decide between fight or flight. “We have to hide,” I say.

He points at a tree that’s just close enough that I can sprint to it if I don’t think too much about my ankle. Before I can even nod, he snatches my hand and starts dragging me in its direction.

“Ow, ow, ow,” I mutter through gritted teeth as we navigate the underbrush.

I place too much weight on my bad ankle on one particularly forceful step, and heat shoots up my leg like the ball in a pinball machine, ricocheting against every pain nerve.

The tree now seems like it’s a mile away, and there aren’t any others closer by that could hide both of us, and there are too many roots and uneven patches for me to be able to move quicker.

The footsteps get closer and louder, enough to make out that the person is not walking quickly, but running .

“I can’t make it,” I say, shaking my head, the pain so acute I’m tearing up.

“You have to—”

“Poe? Zwe?” yells a female voice.

A female voice that… we recognize.