Blue paint bursts across his vest.
Something wakes up inside me that I've been missing for weeks.
I take off before he can recover.
“That’s very good,” he calls after me.
His voice carries across the course, and I can hear the laughter underneath it.
I don't look back.
I duck behind a low wall and crouch there listening to him move. My heart is racing, but for the first time in a long time it has nothing to do with fear.
The next forty minutes pass in a blur.
There is no polite word for what we do to each other on that course.
I dive behind a stack of padding. Adrian appears from the opposite direction, and we're both firing before either of us can stop ourselves. We both get hit and spend a full thirty seconds arguing about whether it counts as a draw.
Later, he catches me by the waist and pulls me behind a barricade when I'm fully exposed and seconds away from getting tagged by a ricochet off the side wall.
His grip is quick.
I'm laughing before I've even recovered my balance against his shoulder.
“You were going to get hit by your own paintball,” he says, not letting go of my waist until I've found my balance.
“I was fine,” I argue.
“You were completely exposed.”
“I had a plan.”
“The plan was about to fail.”
I pull free and take off into the course before he can say anything else. I hear him behind me, and I run harder. The sound of my feet on the padded floor, the sharp hiss of compressed air, the sheer ridiculous joy of this settles somewhere in my chest like pressure finally releasing.
He rounds a corner twenty feet ahead of me.
I see him.
He sees me.
I fire before he can raise his gun.
Point blank.
Center mass.
He goes down.
Not just down. He goes down theatrically, one hand clutching his chest, his gun dropping from his grip as his entire body folds toward the floor in slow motion while he makes a sound I cannot believe is coming from a professional actor.
“Adrian.” He's on the floor now, one arm thrown dramatically over his eyes.
“Adrian, are you actually—”
“It's too late for me,” he says to the ceiling. “Tell them.”
