Page 29 of Chasing Paradise

“Six or six-fifteen, year-round.”

Finished with his bar, he reached for an orange.

“What about sunrise?”

“Six or six-fifteen, year-round.”

“What? How?”

“The equator runs right through Ecuador and the archipelago. It cuts the days equally in half.”

“What do people do with twelve hours of night?”

“Well, most people have electricity.”

“Right,” I said, finally opening my bar to eat. I should have been starving. But I found myself mostly disinterested in eating. “Well, what arewesupposed to do with twelve hours of darkness ahead of us?”

“We rest.”

After eating—and changing back into fresh clothes—that was exactly what we did.

We silently decided to stay somewhat close, each using our bags for pillows.

The night came on fast and dark.

The temperature dropped a solid twenty degrees in what felt like a blink, leaving me cold and curling up tight into a ball and praying for unconsciousness.

Eventually, it came.

CHAPTER SEVEN

Violet

I woke up warm.

But not the sun-on-my-skin kind of warm like the morning before.

This was a cozier, dreamier kind of heat. A veryhumankind of heat.

Even as that thought formed, my eyes shot open.

Everything came to me at once.

The steady rise and fall of a chest below me, the thump of a heart beneath my ear, the arm draped heavily across my hips, the fingers that had drifted just up under the hem of my shirt to rest on my bare skin.

In my sleep, I’d sought his warmth like, well, like my little lizard friend Hank, I guess.

That thought almost had a snort escaping me until I realized I maybe had a slight chance to get carefully away from him before he even realized I’d climbed up on him in my sleep.

Okay.

Slow and steady was the way to go here.

I took a deep breath and slowly shifted my arm to brace on the ground on the other side of Wick. That way I could inchmy body off of his little by little before fully moving away. And scooting ten or twenty—or a hundred—feet away.

Despite my little mission, my damn body betrayed me. My blood warmed, my breath went quick and shallow, my heart hammered in my chest, and a deep pressure started in my core.

I shifted my weight, making my leg slide.

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