Chapter 7
Catalina
No one had ever kissed her like this before.
In fact, Trey himself had never kissed her like this.
Weird.
The kiss made her light-headed, as if she was floating or falling.
Catalina wasn’t sure she was grounded to the floor anymore, losing track of her feet, as though gravity no longer applied in this world and she’d somehow been transported to another.
Is this what it felt like to kiss someone on the moon?
Rather than the arctic temperatures one would experience in space, her skin buzzed warm.
The surrounding oxygen wrapped around her like hot steam.
The goosebumps popping along her arms tingled as though she’d become a human sparkler.
If she didn’t know any better, she could swear she heard a light zapping sound, but that was impossible, and she was positive her ears were deceiving her.
The kiss was amazing and breathtaking and—
And made her incredibly irritated because this wasn’t how this was supposed to go. Catalina swooned, and she wasn’t supposed to be swooning. She intended to say goodbye, to tell her future ex all of this wasn’t enough—that his kisses no longer meant anything to her.
Except her plan was foiled, crashing apart around her like it’d been hit by a meteor. All of this must have proved the opposite to Trey. Her damn heart made her task ten times harder than it needed to be when she preferred to feel nothing. The biggest problem was she didn’t know how to stop.
The only reason she continued kissing Trey, pressing and pulling on his warm full lips and sliding her tongue alongside his, was not because she loved him, Catalina told herself.
Instead, it was an easy way to put off the inevitable—to stave off the moment she’d have to break the kiss and pull away from him.
Then she expected his face to shift from a normal expression to one reflecting smugness.
A big, cocky grin on his face would make her hate him for real.
Why not enjoy the moment a little longer?
Their kissing might have lasted a few minutes or spanned an hour.
It was hard to know, but she snapped out of it when Trey’s fingers snuck under her light cover-up dress, then to the bikini bottoms underneath, the same swimsuit she had purposely purchased in defiance.
He began to gently tug on them while saying, “I knew you still wanted me,” against her lips with a small growl.
Whatever tingling and sparkling she had experienced previously had faded away by this time. The bones in her spine clicked together in a straight line, and she pushed his eager hands away. “Stop. Stop it, Trey.”
He did as she commanded, pulling away, and the immediate loss of him almost made her fling herself at him again. It took everything in her to resist and remain strong. Moving backwards was not allowed when trying to become self-reliant.
After emerging from the lusty mood the kiss had generated, there was no expected smugness in Trey’s face. Instead, his expression revealed nothing but dejection, as if he was coming to realize the truth of their situation: this might be the last kiss between them. “Cat—”
“That didn’t mean anything. I haven’t changed my mind.” The words were nearly lodged in her throat, choking her. She didn’t want to cry. Cat hated that tears came easily, especially in moments of extreme discouragement. She wished she were stronger.
He ran a hand through his hair, his body practically vibrating in frustrated energy. “Why even give me any hope if your mind was set from the beginning?”
“I haven’t given you anything. You just haven’t been listening.”
His hand dropped, smacking against his thigh. “I just thought…” Before he could finish, he looked side to side as if inspecting the room. “Wait. Where the hell are we?”
If they were on better terms, she would have made a crack about the kiss being so good, it altered his mind, erasing when they had entered the strange resort conference room. Except any response she had died on her lips, her own confusion descending, because Trey was right to be puzzled.
The small conference room was no more. Their location had switched into an enormous auditorium, with a ceiling so tall it didn’t make any sense.
What would a room such as this even be used for?
There were no tables with computer equipment, dog kennel, or anything else she’d noticed before.
In fact, the booth where she had experienced the hottest makeout in her life was missing. Something wasn’t right.
Catalina moved away from the wall, letting her gaze crawl upward, as if the answer to everything would at some point reveal itself.
And it did…kind of. Because what she saw—it didn't make much sense, and she wasn’t sure if she could trust it.
She traveled further back until the object became clearer.
It was a large oval-shaped banner reading What Happens in Cancun, Stays in Cancun, and, like the smaller sticker she’d noticed earlier, it was burnt orange around the edges with turquoise blue waves and a bright yellow surfboard.
It also appeared more permanent than a typical banner, seemingly adhered to a much higher portion of the wall.
She supposed it could have been a giant vinyl someone had professionally made to decorate this one auditorium, but why would a nice resort get such a tacky, touristy sentiment attached to their walls?
Their older room decor aside, the rest of the resort was more elegant and modern in style.
“Where the hell are the doors?”
It wasn’t until Trey asked the question that she realized he was correct.
Doors weren't the only thing missing. There were no windows or any other means of escape…although one side of the wall didn’t go all the way to the floor, and she could probably slide under it without much effort.
Knowing she wasn’t completely trapped kept her somewhat calm, but not by much.
Cat dropped her bag on the ground, going to the wall and bending to look through the gap.
On the other side of their current room, there were chrome pillars in the distance, some of them at odd slanted angles like a futuristic architecture installation.
The ground was even more bizarre, a tanned, expansive landscape of fluffy humps like a million small haystacks, which would have led her to believe the area was outside except for the fact everything had a synthetic appearance about it.
What kind of fun house area of the resort did they transport to? None of this made any sense.
Where the hell were they? Was this a dream? A nightmare?
Pushing her head under the wall gap even more, she rotated it, looking upward, hoping to see something familiar or some kind of clue to explain their situation.
The ceiling was incredibly high again. The expansiveness of the space was almost suffocating.
There was an anxiety building inside her gut.
“Cat? What is it? What did you see?”
She pulled back to face him, unsure of how to react. The explanation forming in her head didn’t make any sense. Cat got to her feet and pointed toward the What Happens in Cancun banner again. “See that up there?” she said to Trey, picking up her bag and slinging it onto her left shoulder.
“Yeah.”
“That was a small sticker on the wall inside of that weird booth we went into.”
“Okay. And?”
“And now it’s huge. I mean…this is going to sound strange, but…what if we…” The thought was so silly Cat couldn’t bring herself to finish it, hoping he’d come to the conclusion on his own.
Trey considered her partial sentence for a moment while studying the Cancun banner before seeming to give up on the clues. “We…transported into some alternate multiverse reality?”
Okay, well, he didn’t seem to mind suggesting his own wild theories. Perhaps she shouldn’t care about doing the same. Trey never treated any of her ideas badly. In fact, quite the opposite. It was one of the things she’d always liked about him.
“Yeah, I guess that’s also possible, but what if we…” She did not want to say it, but she had to. The question spilled from her lips in a rapid-fire burst. “Whatifweshrunk?”
Trey stopped, staring at her intently. “What if we what? Shrunk? What do you mean?”
“I mean, actually shrunk, like now we’re smaller, a lot smaller. Tiny.” Catalina brought her pointer finger and thumb together to emphasize the minuscule size in her mind.
Trey tilted his head as he considered this. “How tiny?”
She threw up an arm in frustration. “How would I know? But something happened, something strange. You didn’t feel that weird tingling sensation all over your body when we kissed?”
“Well, yeah, but…”
“But what?” she asked when it didn’t appear as if he was going to finish his sentence.
Trey ducked his head, appearing almost bashful as he rubbed along his neck. “I always feel that way when I kiss you.”
This stopped her. “You do?”
“You don’t?”
“I—You know what? I don’t want to talk about this right now because we clearly have bigger problems, literally, and—What in the hell are you doing?”
Trey had the front waistband of his shorts pulled away, lifting his T-shirt upward, revealing his flat stomach underneath.
He peered intently into the depths of his shorts, his expression dead serious.
“You’re describing a major body-changing event, and you think I’m not going to check to make sure my dick is okay?
” He said this as if it was the most normal reaction in the world.
Cat’s brain mentally tapped its foot. “Well?”
“Well, what?”
She blew out an impatient breath, waiting for his moment of crisis to be over so they could move on to the real problem. “Is your dick okay? Let’s have at least one bit of good news in this potentially catastrophic situation.”