“I don’t think so. I think that person who just walked by dropped it. Trust me, I would have noticed if there had been an empanada the size of a house nearby earlier.”
“That doesn’t make any sense. Why would a person be randomly eating an empanada on their way to the ocean?”
“Are you kidding?” he replied, his mouth full. “People are weird. In fact, I would eat this empanada while having sex. That’s how good it is.”
She couldn’t deny being curious, and, by thispoint, Catalina was famished. She wanted to put off tapping whatever she had in her purse until it became absolutely necessary. It wasn’t as if they could depend on food falling from the sky in the future. Maybe thiswasa lucky break, and if she took a tiny bit from the pastry portion of the empanada, it would be safer. Cautiously, she scraped her hand against the pastry wall and it came apart easily, the inside portion being soft and mouthwateringly greasy. As soon as it hit her tongue, her eyes rolled back in her head. She moaned in bliss.
“Right?” her husband responded.
With him distracted, she slyly took her next piece of pastry with some flecks of meat filling stuck to it. It was spicy and delicious and like a mouthful of hugs. Her husband was one hundred percent right. People would be willing to do all kinds of weird things in order to eat this empanada, even while doing other activities, like swimming in the ocean or having sex. In fact, she wanted to have sexinsidethe empanada. Forget getting to the resort, this was her new home, and—
A loud, piercing bird squawk ruined the beautiful, blissful food moment. Both she and Trey froze with their greedy hands plunged in empanada goodness. His eyes, large and worried, turned to her. “Was that a…”
“Bird?” she finished for him, hoping to be wrong. It was easy to believe seabirds were descended from dinosaurs because the shrieking above them could have come from a menacing pterodactyl. Theprospect of running into a hungry bird the size of Godzilla was the most terrifying thing she could imagine at that moment, especially considering they were wrapped inside of a tempting treat. A partial empanada had to be a seagull gift from heaven, something they’d be unable to resist. This was bad, very bad. As much as she told herself she’d be willing to fight a dragon for this empanada, because they had found it first and it was theirs, she knew this was her stomach talking and not her brain.
“We need to get out of here,” she whispered to Trey, and, thankfully, he nodded in agreement.
What first started as a distant cry from a single bird was no longer the case as more birds joined the hungry choir. The high-pitched squawking grew louder and more terrifying, circling around them until it was suddenly quiet. Maybe they got lucky and another person walked through the area, scaring the gulls away. She was relieved when Trey took her hand, taking a step toward leaving their short-lived empanada home.
“AAAAAHHHH!” they screamed, clutching each other, when a giant lance of a beak jabbed through the inside guts of the pastry, barely missing them by inches and blocking their path to get out.
Even through their horrified shouts, the air was once again filled with more screeching bird calls, coming from different directions, surrounding them for lunch.
Before either of them could react, they were flung into globs of greasy meat filling, a horrible feelingof weightlessness taking over as Catalina’s gut experienced a sudden lift as though on a roller coaster.
It was then she realized they were once again airborne.
Chapter 15
Trey
He had a single second to catch the absolute fear lacing his wife’s features before he lost his footing and plunged into the empanada filling, losing his grip on her hand. It was like falling into a children’s ball pit, but this one was deeper, denser, and wetter. His intense love affair with the empanada came to a quick end.
Despite this, considering everything that had happened to them in the first part of the day and the many ways they could have died, drowning in deliciously spiced meat was probably the best way to go. Although he wasn’t looking forward to the experience of sliding down a seagull’s gullet. Even after being willing to accept his fate of death-by-giant-empanada, he wasn’t happy at the thought of his wife being separated from him and afraid.
Using all of his physical strength, he tore his way upward, climbing over slippery meat clumps until he burst through and found Catalina trapped like a cartoon character who had fallen ass-first into a hole, her limbs sticking straight out and her baglocked in the center of her chest like a reverse turtle. He pulled on her limbs and hands, but because they were covered in grease, the grip he had on her was slippery. His progress was a hard battle to win, if not impossible.
“Trey,” she cried when her face finally emerged from the filling. “We’re flying! The seagull has us!”
He was about to reassure her that things would be fine, but would they? There was a good chance they were about to be digested, and his wife was smart enough to put this information together herself. Before he could say a word, the atmosphere around them was surrounded by additional seagull sounds, the same ones he’d most likely hear in future nightmares. The pastry jerked in a sudden movement. He lost his footing again, and Catalina slid back into the filling with a sob.
Then they were dropping.
His breath was stolen from his lungs at the sensation of a zero-gravity plunge while Catalina’s screams rang in his ears. This wasn’t flying. It was falling! He was once again being suffocated by filling until their ride came to an abrupt stop, knocking him around within the soft surroundings of cooked ground beef and peas, which acted like bubble wrap and kept his bones from shattering within his body.
With the distant sound of seagulls haunting him, he scrambled to the surface, slipping again and again before emerging. He’d found Catalina when the birds’ cries got closer. “Come on!” he said, yanking both her arms with all his strength and grabbing thebag before pulling her toward the empanada opening. Thankfully, they were on the ground again.
Falling to their knees when they hit the sand didn’t faze Trey at all. In a flash he was back up, tugging his wife into action and running as if their lives depended on it. All they could do was race away in order to escape the swooping shadows of the gulls, moving until his legs turned to mush and breaths burned inside his lungs. One glance over his shoulder revealed the birds were indeed snapping and fighting over the partially eaten empanada, turning the delicious pastry into shredded bits as each gull attempted to snatch and carry it away from the others.
He stopped running when he lost his hold on Catalina’s hand, the same moment she stumbled and collapsed to the ground. Trey dropped along with her, still hugging the bag to his chest as his body fought for normal breath again.
For the first time since emerging from the empanada, he took stock of Catalina, trying to see if she was hurt. Besides having difficulty breathing, she didn’t appear to be injured. Although it was hard to tell if there were any wounds caused by their empanada adventure. Her clothes and skin were coated in shades of brown and red from being fully immersed in the warm meat filling. Her cover-up dress stuck to her skin, becoming mostly translucent and revealing an equally dirty bikini underneath.
“You got a little something…” he said in between pants and loosely indicated a spot on his cheek with an index finger. Trey gave her a small grin, knowing his appearance couldn’t have been much better. They both looked as though they’d been involved in a bout of mud wrestling but in a pool filled with grease. But—holy shit! They had made it. They were both alive despite being a disgusting mess.
Rather than finding his comment amusing, she observed her present condition, rubbing a palm across her skin and into her hair before bursting into tears. “I got goop in my hair, on my skin, and I lost my last hair tie.” Her hands were shaky as she tore off her filthy cover-up dress and tossed it aside. The formerly white bikini had become an image of survival instead of seduction. Trey knew it wasn’t being dirty that upset Catalina. She’d never been a prissy sort of person. Instead, it was one thing after another and being terrified. Her tears tracking across her dirty face killed him.
He held her cheeks between his palms, brushing his own greasy thumb across her skin to wipe away the tears. “You’ve never looked so sexy and delicious to me.”
