The Last One | Project Fear

𝐂𝐇𝐀𝐏𝐓𝐄𝐑 𝐓𝐇𝐈𝐑𝐓𝐄𝐄𝐍

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"Dude, you're almost done," Melissa says as I lay across my bed in the RV, my phone propped up in front of me.

The RV is stuck in dead-stop traffic on the highway, and I don't even know how I have service, but I didn't decline her call when it came through. I have nothing else to do anyway, since the road is backed up and we haven't moved in an hour.

I watch her forehead crinkle—the only part of her face visible on the FaceTime camera—and sigh. "It's crazy," I admit. "Number nine. Two more, counting this one, and then we're done."

"That's actually so crazy," Melissa states. "I feel like just yesterday you were telling me about the trip and now you're basically done."

"Not done yet," I remind her. "It may look like I'm close to the finish line, but literally anything can happen in a night."

I shudder, thinking back to the previous night. The way my stomach dropped into my feet and my heart shot up to my throat at the images of Dakota's back, all scratched and inflamed.

"Girl, don't do that," Melissa's voice says, pulling me out my head.

"What?" I ask her, pinching my brows.

"Don't get all flashbacky on me," she clarifies. I raise my brows at that. "Girl, I don't know how to say what I'm trying to say!"

"Well, I don't know what you're trying to say!" I exclaim back to her, laughing.

"Like—you went all far away and were totally thinking about something else," she says and I nod, understanding what she means. "Did something happen?"

I chuckle. "What hasn't happened?" I ask rhetorically, shaking my head. I know I'm not supposed to divulge too much information, but I can trust Melissa. I know she won't go and blab any of this to anyone else. "So, basically, we went to the Statler Hotel in Buffalo—it was, like, eighteen floors and I drew the eighteenth floor. The closest person to me was Tanner, on the eleventh floor."

"If something ran you out of there, you would have been fucked," Melissa notes. "Because I've seen you run up and down the three flights of stairs at St. Thomas's. Someone get the asthma inhaler 'cause this girl needs a hit."

"Okay!" I laugh, thinking back to those times I trudged up the steps at our high school, heavily out of breath. "We get it, I'm out of shape. But anyway, so that was, like, crazy. Then, last night, we're in a prison in West Virginia and Dakota ended up getting scratched all over his back—"

"Kinky," Melissa interjects.

I frown. "We were in Red Snyder's jail cell. The leader of the Aryan Brotherhood."

"Oh, not kinky."

"Yeah, there was a lot of activity in the prison, so it just goes to show that you literally can never be sure about what's going to happen," I sigh, pushing myself up and sitting cross-legged on the bed. "But enough about that. What's going on with you? Anything fun or exciting? You're at orientation, right?"