Wonderland | H.S.

Chapter Fourteen

Sunday is the new Saturday!

P. S. This is my favorite chapter. It's similar to Chapter 29 of One Word (the first kiss), but since everything's flipped upside down, Presley meets Levi instead of meeting Harry. Quite wild, indeed.

We're a looong way from Wonderland.

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Red's POV | Cozen Lake

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Sometimes, I feel as though the scenarios I've made up in my mind are simply the lives I lived before this one.

When my back sinks into the worthless couch, and my eyes find a rusted ceiling painted in black mold and water-stains, I feel content. Not because I like the circumstances I live, but because I know that somewhere, however many lightyears away, I'm lying on my back in the grass as the stars form constellations that'll soon be studied for millennia.

Comfort? Perhaps I find comfort knowing that in another world, another lifetime, it's better.

But then my brain catches up and asks me why I would find myself in another life if the last one were so memorable.

I don't think we can control it. Even if the last life we lived was the final one we wished to experience, we can't control if there's something else. We can't control where our chapter ends if we are not the ones writing the book. Peace and goodness don't mean the end.

Pain and suffering don't mean the end, either.

Hatred and horror.

The feeling of screaming in a soundproof room.

The feeling of hugging a person who holds you out of self-righteousness, not because they want to hold you.

The feeling of losing your heart, only to find a different version of it.

Of saying goodbye, knowing you will never meet again.

Maybe that is why I haven't given hope—as Cade said.

Maybe I'm serene knowing that though there's pain, there's another world of sunshine waiting.

Maybe the reason I'm stumbling to my feet in the presence of Levi is that I know that there was a world in which he wasn't trying to kill me.

And if he succeeds in this one,

may we meet again in the next.

Water sprints sideways against our cheeks, the biting winds picking up anxiousness as neither of our bodies makes a move to step. His reflexes are outstanding, given he's a pussy, but I can't say the same for mine. Despite his master plans failing like all of my exam scores, Levi is more than aware of the sheer advantage he has over me.

If he has Papa Glock, then I'm toast.

If he has the Sexy Sword—

I look to the gravel in a hurry, biting my lip at the names that do not fit my agenda. Papa Glock, I'm sure about, but I don't remember any of them having a sword? I shake my head, allowing tiny droplets of water to rejoin their friends from above, and contemplate why my memory decided to run away like a distressed, young Presley in a moment like this.

Only I would embarrass myself right before I get popped in the face.

If he randomly asks me to name his gun before he takes a bullet to my cheek—hopefully not the pancake ass-cheek—and I give him the wrong name? For starters, that's disrespectful. But even more so, if he goes to back and tells Harry that I completely butchered the name of his weapon—