Page 75 of Here for a Good Time
“And I love you,” I say. Because of course I do.
And this, this is the moment that snaps me out of it. This is the thought that drills through all of the rubble.
I am not going to die without having kissed you.
“No,” I say.
“No?” Zwe asks. I’ve already begun stretching my right thumb again, gritting my teeth at the hot friction between the jute and my flesh, too focused to reply to him. It’s not until he says tentatively, “No, you don’t mean it, or…” that I realize he’s waiting for an answer.
“What?” I shake my head. “No, of course not. No, fuck, not no like that.” I pause to take a deep breath. “Yes, of course I meantit. I’m saying no, we’re not dying like this.”
“We’re… not?”
“No, we’re not,” I confirm. “Because we still have a lot to do. We have a ton of sex to have and several fights to get into and makeup sex to have and a wedding to plan and a movie to produce. And did I mention we still need to have sex?” Zwe snorts, but I’m on a roll. I can see it all now: the most breathtaking, beautiful story I could ever come up with. In fact, it’s better than any story I could’ve come up with. “And birthdays to celebrate and dogs to adopt and family holidays to go on together. And every morning, we’re going to sit down for coffee and look at each other and just think,Look at this beautiful life we’ve built together. We can’t die right now, becauseI want a whole life with you.” I swallow past the golf ball in my throat. “Okay?”
Zwe’s eyes are shining with tears, and despite the shittiness of it all, he’s grinning so hard that his joy radiates from the inside out.
He looks like a man in love.
A man in love with me.
A love so big and consistent and unconditional that it knocks the wind out of me.
“Okay,” he says.
“Now, maybe it’s a long shot, but when they were tying us up, did you remember Antonio’s—”
“Yes.”
Same wavelength. Always. “How’s your thumb?” I ask.
“In a lot of pain,” he says. He starts wriggling his shoulder more rapidly, no longer needing to hide what he’s doing. I’m doing the same. “Do you think this will work?” he asks.
“Yes,” I say, biting down on my lip as I’m pretty sure I feel flesh tear.
“How do you know?”
I shoot him a smirk. “Because, sir, I believe you owe me a kiss.”
His mouth curves to match mine. “That’s all the motivation I need.”
FIFTEEN
Antonio lied when he said this was, and I quote,Pfft, easy.
“How the fuck did Antonio do this?” I yell. My skin feels raw to the point of numbness.
This is one of those situations where itfeelslike we’ve been at this for a solid twenty to thirty minutes, but the clock above the reception desk tells us that we’ve actually been alone for a whopping two minutes and fifteen seconds.
“I don’t know how much gasoline they poured outside,” I huff as another trail of sweat seeps down the side of my face. The wind has significantly picked up, almost getting strong enough to knock over the lamps on the tables, and I assume the rain isn’t far behind. “But if they’re going to start the fire before the storm arrives…” I can’t finish the sentence. My determination from earlier is waning with every passing second. An image of my body on fire pops into my head, and I start hyperventilating.
“Poe! Poe! Hey! Breathe!” Zwe’s voice clangs through the room. His upper body lifts as he takes a deep breath, and he nods, tellingme to follow along. When he exhales, so do I. “Don’t give up on me now,” he says. “We can do this. It’s so easy. We know what we have to do.”
I want to argue that it would be even easier to give up now. I’m emotionally and physically drained, and my brain wants to shut down and go to sleep. If Zwe weren’t also here, I’d have thrown in the towel by now.
I test working both thumbs at the same time, but that’s making me only able to give 50 percent to each hand, so I return to only focusing on the right one. The air is pungent with the smell of gasoline. It’s slowly seeping into the lines between the hardwood paneling, which gives the whole floor a glossy sheen.
“I cannot believe—” I stop myself mid-sentence when one particular motion makes the rope dig into a soft part of flesh and sets off a flash of pain. Aware that I don’t have too much time to spare, however, I immediately start working again, wincing through the rest of it. “This whole time, you thought—” The stray hairs scrape along the side of my forefinger, but I’m getting close. The rain is starting to pelt, so I begin shouting, “I! Loved! Vik!”
