Chapter 53 - Sawyer
SAWYER
“Pizza here?”
“Not yet.”
“You ordered wings with it, right?”
“Two dozen,” I sighed. “just like you asked.”
Carter nodded but he still looked lost, his hands moving aimlessly over the smooth, clean bar. He’d been a bartender for too long. This always happened when he didn’t have anything to do.
“What about the cake?”
“I told you, it’s in the fridge,” I repeated. “They fucked it all up, though.”
He frowned. “How do you fuck up a Carvel cake?”
“You put ‘Brodie’ on it instead of ‘Bodie.’”
He paused, confused. “So can’t you just get rid of the ‘r’?”
“I tried that, but I made a big mess of the gel lettering.” He opened his mouth again, but I held up a finger. “And before you ask, yes, I left without checking the spelling. Sue me.”
I disappeared into the back, before he could ask about candles. Somehow I’d forgotten those too. I was sure I could scrounge some up; if I went through enough drawers. At the moment though, I had a garbage bag in each hand.
“DID YOU GET CANDLES?” Carter called back to me.
I headed for the back door, pretending not to hear. For a moment I wondered if it wasn’t somewhat nice, not being able to hear everyone all of the time. I could always fake being hard of hearing. Try it out for a little while, or—
The shriek of the wind reached my ears through the open back door. As I approached, I heard it again.
This time it sounded more like a scream than a shriek.
FUCK!
The bags fell from my outstretched fingers as I rushed outside. Cold blasted over me, and darkness swallowed my vision. Somehow though, even squinting into the freezing rain, I could make out the form of two figures struggling.
One, I could see, was small. And one was very, very big.
“HEY!”
Fuckface was back, and he was even bigger than I remembered him. But that didn’t matter. The only thing that mattered was her.
I dove for him, committing fully. Cole whipped his head around at the sound of my voice, just in time to find me throwing myself bodily in his direction. It enabled him to twist at the last moment, causing me to miss spectacularly. In retrospect, I probably should’ve kept quiet.
“SAWYER!”
I found Hayden on the ground, rolling in the dirt and mud. I couldn’t tell if she was hurt, but she was holding her head in her hands.
Forgetting everything else, I ran over to her.
“Hayden! Hayden, I—”
Something connected with my side, and that something was a size sixteen boot.
The wind was forced from my lungs, leaving me gasping for breath on my hands and knees.
But there was no oxygen to be had. Long seconds ticked by, and inhaling did absolutely nothing.
Panic set in, as the edges of my vision began going gray.
“Sawyer!”
Hayden’s warning came too late; not that I could do much about it. My body had somehow left the ground, and my whole world was spinning…