Total pages in book: 105
Estimated words: 100561 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 503(@200wpm)___ 402(@250wpm)___ 335(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 100561 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 503(@200wpm)___ 402(@250wpm)___ 335(@300wpm)
Annie and I lock eyes, and I feel the decision solidify inside me. I promised to do better and that means no more lies.
Dammit.
“Let’s sit down,” I suggest, and Annie reaches for my arm.
“Are you crazy?” she hisses.
“We have to tell him,” I say. “I have to. Besides, he knows too much already.”
“Or we could kill him,” she counters, and Crash cackles behind us.
“She’s a little scary,” he tells Luca. “It’s sort of hot.”
“I’m going to pretend you’re kidding,” I say to her.
“Try me,” she says, moving to the other chair while I take up the spot beside Luca on the sofa.
“Okay,” I continue, “before I start, you need to swear on your shirtless life that you won’t breathe a word of this to anyone.”
Crash bends his arm and brings the side of his straightened right hand to his temple. He’s momentarily distracted by the flexing of his own biceps but finally blinks back over to me. “Scout’s honor.”
“That’s a salute, dumbass,” Annie tells him.
“I’m serious. You can’t tell your mom, your fuck buddies, or even your cat,” I say. “Do you understand me?”
Crash’s brows pull low, and he hesitates before nodding. “Sure, yeah, whatever. What the fuck, Em?”
Annie and Luca watch me with keen interest while I take a deep breath and put the story together in my head. “On Friday night, I was late getting home—”
Crash barks out a laugh, saying, “Yeah, no shit,” before turning to Luca, who stares blankly back at him before shrugging. Crash’s concerned attention lingers on him for a beat before he looks back to me. I have to admit, this stings.
But it’s not unfair.
“Right, well, Luca was out for a run, and I was parked, waiting for him. We were going to go the beach. He started to cross the street, and someone hit him.”
“Wait, for real?”
“He was really hurt and was bleeding out.”
“He bled out,” Annie corrects.
Crash stands up. “What?”
I nod. “I know.”
He points to Luca’s leg. “That? No way that’s from Friday.”
“Just listen to me, okay?”
Slowly, he sits back down, sending both hands through his hair. “Jesus.”
I explain to Crash that my job isn’t really what he thinks it is. That I work for a privately funded company as a research scientist.
“So you’re not actually a—what was it? Project manager or, like… laser queen?”
I shake my head. “No. And Annie isn’t at a vet practice anymore. She also works for BioNEX.”
Crash huffs out a laugh. “Got it. Cool.”
I feel the way my head pulls back on my neck. That’s it? He’s not even a little surprised?
He and I have always gotten along, but I have to wonder now whether Crash has been faking a friendship with me for the sake of Luca. None of these revelations—my lateness on Friday, my enormous lie about my job—seem to faze him at all. He must think the absolute worst of me.
I chance a look at Luca, who is quietly taking all of this in. I’ve admitted as much, but I hate that he’s seeing such a shitty side of me before we even get to know each other again. Hell, I hate that I’m seeing such a shitty side of me.
“Luca didn’t have a pulse,” I say. “There’s a very advanced, very secret technology at my work—I’ll skip the specifics—”
“Because I’m just a shirtless dummy,” Crash says.
I quickly shake my head. “Sorry, no, I just—”
“No, no, I’m being serious.” He smiles. “No shade heard. I barely followed conversations about your job when it was supposedly simple. From now on, I’m just going to assume you’re a mad scientist.”
“Fair enough. Well, the machine we’ve developed can diagnose and heal illness and injury. Not all, but many. And it can also… revive.”
“Sweet, like, bring back from the dead?” Crash says laughing, clearly thinking we must be joking.
But none of us are smiling. “Exactly that,” Annie says. “Within a very limited time frame.”
Crash’s smile slowly melts away. “What the fuck?” He looks over at Luca. “So he’s like—a zombie now?”
Luca barks out a laugh at this and then stops. “Wait, am I?”
“No,” I say forcefully.
“What about superpowers?” Crash asks. Luca looks at me with a hopeful expression, and I regretfully shake my head.
“That sucks,” Crash says.
“From what we can tell, he’s basically the same as before. With some minor side effects,” Annie says. “Such as reduced coordination and…” She clears her throat. “Memory loss.”
“Amnesia?” Crash asks. “So—what? He doesn’t remember his name?”
“Or yours,” Luca says, finally joining in. “Or anyone’s. Or anything about my life before three days ago.”
“So, like, if someone owed you five hundred dollars, you wouldn’t remember?”
Luca laughs again, and I see that these two were destined to be best friends.
“What if they made out with your sister in eleventh grade? Would you want to know? Hypothetically, of course.”
“Hypothetically,” Luca tells him, “I’d tell them to keep that secret to themselves.”