Page 124 of A Heart of Bluestone

I drop it to the hard, dried dirt. It bounces on landing before it knocks into a stone with a clatter.

I stagger onwards.

The paths I take now are random, no thought behind them, because I can’t even guess the right one to take.

My path is wrong.

I learn that when I stumble around the mouth of a clearing, like an old abbey has crumbled here within the ruins, and stonesare still stacked in slanted pillars, and the debris is built up in a crescent wall—

And I see Landon.

My frown is as drunk as my milky vision.

Takes me a moment to realise that he slouches on a steady pile of rubble. His legs are spread, his eyes hooded, and—

The cloud starts to clear. My sight adjusts to the gleam of the moonlight that hardly washes over this little pocket of the maze.

And my jaw fucking drops.

Landon’s head lolls back with a moan.

A head bobs on his lap.

It takes me all of a second to realise who is sucking him off in the hidden shadows of the maze.

My hands flatten to my face, and I peer over my fingertips.

I force my boot to slide backwards, over the ground. Then again, and again, until I am out of sight and ear, and I don’t hear the moans that Landon lets build through him.

I drop my hands to my sides.

For a moment, I just stare ahead at the path.

Then, I loosen a heavy breath and the only thing on my mind is ‘James?’

Never thought I would see James on his knees sucking off a Snake. When did he even get to the party? I didn’t see him. Matter of fact, I don’t remember seeing either of them. Not once, not even walking down the trail to enter the maze of rubble and debris.

“Oh, shit,” I whisper to myself.

I scurry down the route for as long as it goes before another path cuts off, and I take the new one.

Only then do I feel safe enough, far out of the way of Landon and James, to climb a stack of rubble.

I look to the North Star, then to the moon…

I frown.

They weren’t where I left them.

They moved.

Not in the ‘the stars move and the earth moves’ kind of way. In the, ‘I fucked up’ kind of way.

And I did.

The tequila could have been spiked. The potions at the pong game could be blurring and twisting my brain. Or I’m getting to that point of drunk where the stars are smears across the sky, blended into a single brushstroke of gleaming white, and stirs of nausea are curling my toes.

I am lost.

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