A light breeze blew my hair across my face and suddenly I felt dizzy. I put my hands out in front of me, but the beach tilted and spun. My sore butt hit the sand hard, radiating pain up my spine. I blinked a few times, trying to get my bearings. Then I laughed.
A breeze had blown me over. Things could not be good if a little breeze could knock me down like that. I rolled over onto my stomach, folded my arms in the sand, and rested my forehead on my forearms. Probably the backs of my legs were a lot whiter than the fronts. Maybe I should just lie here and even out the color.
Red in front, red in back.
I laughed even harder. Laughed until I coughed. Coughed until I was gasping for air. My throat constricted, my lungs burning with
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pain. Was this it? Was this dying? I tried to push myself up on my elbows, but my muscles quivered and I face-planted in the sand. Sucked sand into my mouth with the next cough. Gagging. Gagging. Gagging. I rolled onto my side. Heaved. Spit sand everywhere. Convulsing, drawing my knees up toward my chest. Tears streamed down my face into the sand.
Dying. This was me, dying.
"Reed."
I blinked. Covered my mouth with my hand to try to quiet the cough. Surely I was imagining things. I had not just heard my name.
"Reed."
I squeezed my eyes shut. I was hallucinating. Dammit. I really was dying. How many times could one person die?
"Reed. Up here. Lookup."
It was Thomas. Son of a bitch. Thomas was here. So maybe I was already dead.
"Come on, New Girl," he said, his voice teasing. "You can do it."
I rolled over onto my stomach again and looked up in the direction from which I thought the voice was coming. Looked at the tree line, just a few feet away, and gasped. Blue eyes stared back at me from the darkness of the forest. Thomas's blue eyes.
Had God sent him here to take me to heaven? Because if I was going to go, that would be a really cool way to go. But wait, Thomas had not, tech
nically, been the most pious do-gooder on earth, what with the drug dealing and the lying and the short-temper problem. Had he even one to heaven? Crap. What if he was here to take me to hell?
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"You're not dead, Reed. Just come here."
"I can't," I said.
My arms were so weak they felt like noodles. There was sand in my mouth, up my nose, in my eyelashes.
"Yes, you can. You can do anything," Thomas said. "I've been watching you, Reed. You have no idea how strong you are."
"But I-"
"Just come here," Thomas said, growing impatient. "There's something I want to show you."
Well. That was intriguing. My dead ex-boyfriend had something he wanted to show me? I mean, who could turn down an offer like that? I braced my hands under me and pushed as hard as I could, lifting myself up onto my knees. The head rush was excruciating and long. Way too longto be normal. But eventually, my vision cleared and I could make out shapes and colors again. Thomas was still there, his blue eyes peeking out at me now, from under a low bush.
I squinted. How could he be that low to the ground?
Edging forward on my knees, I called out to him. "Thomas? What are you doing? I so don't have the energy for hide-and-seek."
I shoved the low, thick leaves of the bush aside and gasped. The blue was not Thomas's eyes. It was the label on a bottle of Evian water. I grabbed it, fully expecting it to disappear right in front of me, but it didn't. I was holding an actual bottle of water. A full bottle of water.
But no. It wasn't possible. This island was deserted. I hadn't seen a soul, a boat, anything, in six days. This was just another hallucination
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