She interrupted with a loud scoff. “Are you seriously wasting our last few minutes on this earth telling me a story about being constipated?” If her hands hadn’t been koalaed around a giant pole, she would have thrown them up in the air. Or she would have punched me. She probably would have punched me.

In fact, there were a lot of things I wanted to say to her, but if I said them, it would mean I was resigned to our deaths. And I wasn’t.

Not just yet.

I said, “We’ll have plenty of time to talk when this is all over. And it was more than a constipation story. If you would have let me finish, there was a boar involved.”

“When this is over?” She nodded at Bill and one of the soldiers—the three others were busy restraining or confining the villagers—and said, “I hate to be the bearer of bad news, Thomas, but Bill can’t let us go. He’s going to kill us.”

“Kill schmill.”

“Kill schmill?” she said, violently shaking her head. “Do you not understand the reality of the situation?”

“I’m trying to keep a positive attitude.”

“You are ridiculous!”

“What do you want me to do, give up? Use my last minutes on this earth to tell you how much I’ve missed you? That not one day—not one single day—has gone by that I didn’t think about you. Wonder about you. Wish I could teleport to wherever you were and just smell you for a few seconds. That watching a movie isn’t nearly as fun without you constantly hitting pause and telling me what you think is going to happen. Or that of all the women I’ve been with in my life, and there have been some chart toppers, you are by far—by far—the coolest, sexiest, and most frustratingly good at Scrabble.”

Her lips were pursed, and her eyes were sort of glowing. “Wait,” she said, fighting to keep her face from jumping off her head and doing a cartwheel. “You want to smell me?”

“Yeah,” I chortled. “I mean, you always smell good, even when you, um, smell bad.”

After a short pause, Gina said, “There’s something I need to tell you.”

I leaned back, ready to absorb her apology for leaving me, that she was sorry she’d bugged out when I’d asked her to move in with me, sorry she’d run five thousand miles away. And that she looooovvved me.

“I hate your outgoing voicemail message,” she said.

“How dare you.”

“Special Voicemail Unit?” She smirked.

“Clever, huh?”

She scoffed and said, “I’ll tell you clever.”

Gina spent the next couple minutes detailing how she’d gotten her hands on Bill’s gun and thought they’d have had a good chance of escape, when suddenly the villagers showed up and surrounded them.