Page 104 of Dear John

“Don’t be. They wouldn’t want anyone crying over them.”

I stayed silent for a long time after that. I didn’t know what to say, but all these questions were burning in my mind. IKE had this hard exterior, but something told me he was kind of a softy. Maybe I was wrong, but I chose to believe it.

“Where was Kavanaugh?” he asked out of the blue.

I almost forgot that he didn’t remember the night we were taken. I had purposely left out the fact that he kissed me, though he might have guessed it. I figured it would be easier to getthrough this if we weren’t worrying about the awkwardness of talking about that kiss. Or the second one. Everything about that night was lost to him, but I still remembered every second of it. How his lips felt pressed against mine, how my body reacted to his, and the feeling of guilt that washed over me as I realized I liked his lips on mine.

I hadn’t meant for the kiss to happen, but that didn’t mean I could forget about it. What would I tell Kavanaugh if we got out of here? Would I tell him what happened or keep it to myself? It would only cause more problems between us, and further his paranoia that IKE was someone he had to worry about. But if I didn’t tell him, I was doing the very thing I was so angry at him for. Lying.

“Isla?”

“Hmm?”

“Where was Kavanaugh?”

“He left. We got into a fight and I was going to leave. But he did instead.”

“He just left you in another state?” he asked incredulously.

Men. They were all the same. “I’m not helpless. I’m capable of booking my own ticket and getting on a plane without a man’s assistance.”

“You were kidnapped,” he snapped.

“So were you,” I shot back. “I’m not sure how having a man around would have helped me out of our current predicament.”

He grunted in response because he had no argument to fall back on. “What did you fight about?”

“Does it really matter?” I asked, sighing heavily. “Same thing as always. Secrets,” I whispered, not wanting to elaborate.

I shivered again and he pulled me tighter to him. As I was shifting to get more comfortable, I ended up brushing my face against his, and for a moment, both of us stopped moving. Our lips were so close. I could almost feel them against mine. Myeyes slipped closed as I remembered what he tasted like, but I quickly banished those thoughts from my mind.

Instead, I went for things that would actually help. Facts. “How long can we last like this?”

“Three days,” he said, no bullshit anywhere in sight. “Given that we were taken and left here for at least a few hours, I would say we’re nearing the end of the first day.”

“Two days to live,” I murmured.

“Of course, I’ll live longer because I was in the military. I was trained for this sort of thing.”

My lips formed a smile at his words. “I didn’t realize the military trained your body to go without water.”

“It’s one of the first things they teach you,” he continued. “See, the trick is in making your body think you have water.”

“And how do you do that?”

“Well, you talk to yourself a lot. You believe you have water. You pretend like the urge to suck the blood from another human just to have liquid in your throat is all in your head.”

I shifted to look at him again. “You want to drink my blood?”

He shrugged. “There’s nothing else to drink.”

“What about pee?”

“That’s just disgusting,” he grimaced. “No, blood would at least be nutritious.”

“And they teach you all this in the military,” I teased.

“Like I said, I’ll live longer than you.”

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