by Grace Draven
“Let it be, Chuck,” he rasped to himself. “Get back in the car and drive. You’re not thinking straight. Go home.” He was sun-sick and hot. The water would be sweet. He could already feel it on his face, welcome as rain.
He leaned in and lifted the bottle, held it up. Studied the way it caught a little bit of light from the slow-rising cup of moon still low in the east. His hands shook. Sick.
The bobwhites called again, three repeated dovelike notes and an upward scoop. Nothing like the cartoon calls of the ivory-bills, or Jenny’s heartbroken wails.
Napier twisted the cap off the bottle. He caught the scent of the water strongly, the way he sometimes did when he was on a trail and came across one of those sandy-bottomed streams. The moon moved past a pine bough and limned the trunks ahead of him. A few stars glittered as the day’s humidity gathered at ground level, waiting to become dew.
He splashed a tiny bit of the spring water into his palm and wiped it over the hot, tight skin of his face. Moisture coated his lips and he licked it away, following the taste with a desperate groan. The water was better than he remembered, and so sweet. Almost cold, despite the heat of the night and the trapped warmth of the seat of the car.
Just a swallow, enough to slosh around his mouth. Then he would cap the bottle.
He tilted back his head and dribbled a thin stream into his open mouth.
Napier held the water in his mouth for as long as his parched throat would allow—not very long at all, but a sip was all he needed, just something to jump start his salivary glands again. Then he would crank the car, turn it around, and drive north. Buy a soda somewhere, something fizzy and bright and cold enough to stab an ice-spike in his brain. Swallow it all down inside of a minute, then crack a second one. Feel all his cells taking in that sugar and moisture, driving the waves of sun-sickness and headache back.
In the pine woods, fireflies lit the night one after another, tiny green stars that flared and darkened, flared and darkened.
Another mouthful, and no more. He had to have enough left to test.
Napier put his mouth to the bottle’s neck and drank, closing his eyes in the ecstasy of the spring water coursing down his throat. One swallow. Three. Half the bottle. He stopped, gasping for breath. Moonlight shone on the pale sand at his feet. Where there had been grass, there was now a path.
Such sweetness could not be denied. Napier tilted up the bottle and downed the rest. The first trunk he put his left hand on, as he made his way into the trees, was rough-barked pine.
The next was smoother, like a sweetgum, and silver-gray in the moonlight as an elephant’s hide.
Napier let go of the drained bottle to push aside the sword-fans of a palmetto. His hand, brushing against his right hip as he walked, flexed once where the old man’s knife had been, then continued past, empty.
About Mel Sterling
Mel Sterling started writing stories in elementary school and wrote her first full-length novel in a spiral-bound notebook at age twelve. Her favorite Christmas present was a typewriter and a ream of paper. After college, she found herself programming computers and writing technical documentation.
A few years ago, she rediscovered romance writing during a bout of insomnia and began to indulge her passion with a vengeance. She lives with her computer geek husband in a quiet happy house full of books, animals and ideas. Trueheart, first in the Portland After Dark series, is available in print or ebook. Wordless, first in the Pink Sofa Secrets romantic suspense series, is available autumn 2016.
Learn more about Mel and her books at her website.
Other Stories by Mel Sterling
PORTLAND AFTER DARK
Trueheart
Ironbound (2017)
PINK SOFA SECRETS
Wordless (October 2016)
HARLEQUIN ROMANTIC SUSPENSE
Latimer’s Law
NOVELLAS
No Accounting for Magic
