Phoenix Academy - Lucy Auburn Page 0,28

against him. He groans and fucks deep inside me as the last of his release leaves his body.

Afterwards, we lie down in the grass and pants, our bodies cooled by the green strands beneath us.

Minutes later I hear them. Laughing near the shore. Popping my head up, I see them as well: Xavier and David, wearing only their boxers. Xavier is holding my clothes.

"We gotta go join up with the others," I tell Reggie, pulling him up off the grass. "I want to make sure this is all okay."

"Of course it is." He shoots me a puzzled look as he pulls his briefs back on. "Why wouldn't it be?"

I don't know. I can't remember. There was something... some reason why it might not be okay. But I can't remember it now.

We explore the meadow together. We talk and laugh and kiss. Reggie finds a tree that bears a sweet fruit that we all indulge in, even though none of us are hungry. It explodes on my tongue, sweet and fragrant.

Something tickles at the back of my mind.

But it can't be that important.

If it were, I would remember it.

Chapter 8

I can't tell how long we spend sleeping in the meadow, drinking fresh water from the shore of the lake, and eating the sweet fruit Xavier found. It feels like weeks. Months. Decades. There's no reason to put our clothes back on, to stop touching and stroking each other, to resist giving into temptation. We're safe—we're home. Nothing could be simpler or more obvious than the bond we share. I have no idea why we ever resisted it. So I give in to pleasure.

All the while, something nags at me in the back of my head. Like a vulture circling up above or a dog nipping at my heels. I can't stop feeling as if I've walked into a room with purpose, only to lose my stride when I realize I forgot what that purpose was.

"Do you feel..." David blinks his wide blue eyes, a stupor crossing his face. "Like something is... off?"

"No. Shut up." Reggie kicks him in the side, his pants loosely slung around his hips. "Eat another of these weird melon things."

I blink at him. "Melon things?"

"That's what Xavier and I are calling them." He holds one up and bites into the soft flesh of the fruit. "I think I could live off them forever."

Licking my lips, I taste sickly sweet syrup on them. The melon things are like a dessert made for a sugar-sick child. I don't know why I like them. I can't remember how many I've eaten or if I even enjoyed them.

Blinking again, I loll back into the soft grass of the meadow and stare up towards the blue sky.

Blue sky...

There is no sun in the blue sky. Just light. No clouds, either. Only endless clear blue. As if it isn't real. As if it's never been real.

The grass beneath me cradles my skin softly. Nothing crawls across my naked body; no bugs, no rodents, not even an ant or a butterfly. There isn't anything alive here except us.

I can't remember why that's wrong. Something... something flits through my awareness, a bone-deep sense of wrongness. But like turning your head towards a mirage, the closer I try to get to the source of the feeling, the further away it moves.

Maybe I'm just hungry. Another "melon thing" will set me right. The trees near us are picked over, though, as we've barely left this area since we stumbled from the shore, dripping wet and full of desire. I'll have to venture outwards to find fresh fruit.

Pushing up off the grass, I grab my skirt and yank it on, then throw my blouse over my chest and lazily attach a few buttons. David watches me with half-lidded eyes, the sunless sky reflected in his blue irises. "Where you goin'?"

"To find fresh fruit. Out there somewhere." I jerk my chin towards the trees at the edge of everything. "There's gotta be more fruit trees."

David frowns at me. "Out there, where the trees are thin and far away? We don't go out there. We never have."

"We must have at one point. When we got here. From... outside." My mind stumbles over the thought. "There must be an outside, right? We weren't born here."

Xavier wakes from his slumber and sits up in the meadow grass, staring at me, his eyes half-lidded from the sun, which always shines. "We've always been here."

"That doesn't make sense." Something is gnawing at me insistently.