Total pages in book: 65
Estimated words: 63068 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 315(@200wpm)___ 252(@250wpm)___ 210(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 63068 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 315(@200wpm)___ 252(@250wpm)___ 210(@300wpm)
“Be honest with me about how you’re feeling, Lo. You can catch some bad shit in places like this just from a bug bite.”
I sighed heavily. “I’m really tired.”
It was the truth. I was exhausted. And while I could have mentioned that I also felt nauseated and weak, I didn’t. I just wanted to sleep.
“Drink this,” Archer said, passing me a canteen.
It tasted fruity, so I knew he’d mixed in some Gatorade powder. I thanked him, hoping I’d be able to keep it down, and then curled up and went back to sleep.
“Lo, wake up.”
It took me a few seconds to open my eyes when I heard Archer talking to me. Why was I so groggy?
“Hey,” I said, putting a palm to my forehead.
I had a mild headache, but I felt more rested than I had earlier.
“Hey, sorry to wake you up, but it’s been four hours and you need to drink more water. You’re sweating like crazy.”
“It’s hot.” I knew it was a weak explanation, but it was all I could come up with.
I took the canteen and found I was thirsty enough to drink it all. My stomach hadn’t rejected the rice from earlier, so hopefully I was on the mend.
“There’s something I want you to do,” Archer said. “I think you need to go get in the water for a little bit and see if we can get your fever down.”
Ugh. First of all, movement. And second, just the thought of leaving the shelter and exposing myself to the hellfire that was the sun in Fiji made me coil up into a ball.
“It’s hot,” I repeated.
That was all I had. My sweat was sweating, and I just wanted to sleep through this brutally hot part of the day. But Archer wasn’t taking no for an answer.
“Can you walk or should I carry you?” he asked.
I blew out a breath. I didn’t want to leave the shelter, but it would be nice to rinse off, and maybe getting up would do me some good.
“I can walk,” I said. “And I see what you did there. Giving me two choices, both of which accomplish what you want. We do that in teaching.”
He stood next to the shelter, bending down and offering me his hand. I grabbed on tight to his hand as he helped pull me up from the ground, and after a couple of seconds of dizziness, I felt okay.
Archer grabbed our other canteen and a bowl from one of the stumps, and we walked to the beach together. The sun was high in the sky and it was wicked hot. When I saw the setup where water met sand, I turned to face Archer.
He’d used long branches as posts, covering them with a tarp to make a little sun shelter in the water.
“Your cabana awaits,” he said with a grin.
My throat tightened at his thoughtfulness. He really was an amazing partner.
I walked up to the shelter and into the protection of the shade. The makeshift cabana was about five feet tall, so when I sat down in the sand, the water lapped over me up to my chest, and there was still some air flowing through the top of the cabana.
“This is great.” I smiled at him. “Thank you.”
He sat down next to me in the sand, looking out at the horizon.
“It was weird adjusting to life here, but it’s also going to be weird adjusting to life once we get back home,” he said.
“I’m glad it’s summer. I might just sit in front of the air-conditioning vent at home eating ice cream for a week when I get home.”
He leaned back on his hands and looked down at me. “When this is over, will you still talk to me?”
“Why wouldn’t I?”
He shrugged. “You’re stuck here with me so you don’t really have a choice right now, especially since we need to work together during the competitions. But when we both go back home, I hope that won’t be it for us.”
I couldn’t deny that my feelings for Archer had changed over the past twenty-five days. I no longer despised him and held him responsible for breaking my heart. Our breakup had been mutual, and that was a realization that I wasn’t ready for at such a young age. If I had agreed to move to Minnesota with him, I honestly thought we would have stayed together. Together forever? I didn’t know the answer to that, but Archer had remained adamant until the day he left in a moving truck that he wanted me to go with him.
“Do you think we can stay friends?” I asked him.
It pained me to do so. I was more attracted to him than ever, and there wasn’t a man in the world that had ever treated me better than Archer. But we lived in different states, and our love story already had a beginning, middle, and end.