Confusion holds him for a heartbeat.
He lowers the meat-stick. “What do you say?”
I hold his stare. “Blow me.”
His lips curl with his cold impatience. He repeats the question, slower this time, enunciating each word, “What. Do. You. Say?”
I shift around to face him.
Leaning my weight on my hands flat on the sand, I tilt close enough to him that I can smell the smoky flavour of the meat-stick.
The glow of the torchlights is dim without the campfires. But lashes of crimson and orange light battle over his marble complexion and in the frosting green of his eyes.
I shouldn’t.
But I do.
“Blow. Me.” My teeth bare. “It means fuck you, arsehole.”
A moment passes.
Samick just stares at me. Not bewildered, not raging, just staring—
Then that moment ends—and the bay is thrown into a whirl around me.
I come down on his shoulder, hard. Hard enough to shove the air out of me.
My breath comes out in strangled grunts as he storms towards the treeline—leaving the bay behind.
I dangle with his swift bootsteps, all the way through the dim torchlights speckled around the bay, until the light fades, and it’s only darkness and the sound of his boots coming down on foliage.
But he doesn’t put me down.
Not yet.
He goes deeper and deeper into the forest.
I’m upside-down for so long that my face is purpling from the pressure of my blood, and my hands are pushing down his back, as though I can get enough grip to leverage myself upwards.
It’s all futile.
Then he comes to a sudden stop—and the darkness tilts with a wave of dizziness before I come slamming down on the ground.
He doesn’t give me the chance to catch myself, to stumble to my boots. He just heaves me off his shoulder, like back at the start, and foliage comes lifting up all around me.
The packed dirt beneath me thuds.
I feel it.
But I don’t see it.
I scramble for my jacket pockets, sifting in and out of them in a hurry.
He must be watching me. Sees me just fine in the dark. Watches me search the outer pockets, left and right, then dive into the inner ones before fumbling with the torch.
I aim it at him like a loaded weapon—and switch on the light.
White, harsh light blasts him.
