Dean moved back to his fire-building supplies and took up the bow again, his shoulders setting in the same resigned stance that I’d seen before. I said nothing as I scooped and ate, scooped and ate. He picked up the bow and began to saw at the wood again, the sticks twisting back and forth with great speed… and little results.
When I’d pried the last ounce of coconut from the empty husk and licked my fingers clean—gritty sand and all—I watched Dean for a moment more. His face was dripping with sweat, his movements exhausted but steady.
“You’re doing it wrong,” I decided to blurt out despite my better judgment.
He lifted his head, squinted at me and swiped at his forehead with one hand. His mouth set in a hard line. “What do you mean, I’m doing it wrong?”
I crawled over in the sand, moving to the other side, and pushed his hands away from the fire-making implements so I could study them easier. It was obvious to me where he’d gone wrong. “Here,” I said, and pointed at his bottom stick, where he’d carved a small hole to catch the spark. “You need some tinder and then cut a notch here for the ember.”
Dean tried to take it back from me. “Listen, I have—”
I held it away from him. “Can you just trust me and do it, already?”
We glared at each other for a few moments and then he got up and headed down the beach to get a palm leaf. By the time he returned, I had a notch cut into the wood and had started setting everything back up again—wood, coconut fluff for tinder, and the leaf itself. I put everything in place and then handed him the bow again. “You want to do it, or do you want me to?”
“By all means,” he said with a gesture. “Go ahead.”
Clearly he expected me to fail. I snorted at that and positioned the bow, then set to work.
If you’ve ever made a fire out of sticks, well, you know it’s not an easy task. You have to get the friction going really well, and that means sawing very hard, which also means sawing very fast. My arm was screaming after about thirty seconds, but I wasn’t about to give up. Instead, I ignored the sweat beading on my brow, bit my lip, and continued to continually move the bow back and forth, trying to coax a spark from the implements.
And after what seemed like eternity, a small plume of smoke rose. “You got it!” Dean yelled in my ear, and leaned in to blow on the small kernel of fire. It flared and we hastily shoved the fire-making sticks aside, adding more bits of dried coconut husks to try and keep it going. And when it was a real flame, Dean wrapped the entire thing in the palm leaf and carried it back to our fire pit, placing the smoking bit at the bottom of the wood pile with delicate hands. I followed behind him, wiping my brow.
“How did you know?” He glanced over at me, then turned back to blow on the flame some more.
“Know what?” I said. “How to build the fire?”
He shook his head, not taking his eyes off the fire pit as he fed the flickering flame more and more tinder and small sticks of wood. “I’ve been trying since last night. I rubbed those sticks for so long and so hard I thought my arms would fall off, and you managed to do it in twenty minutes.”
I moved closer to the building fire, pleased that he’d been so struck by my efforts. “I reviewed a book for a celebrity survivalist once. Very big deal for the publisher, and the guy was a total ass**le. He wrote it himself instead of having his ghostwriter do it, or so he told me. Anyhow, he was a real jerk, so I hired a wilderness survival guide and we went through each ‘survival’ tip in the guide. And I gave him an F.” I nodded at the fire, my mouth curving into a smile in remembrance. “He got the whole fire-making thing wrong too. Same reason—that stupid notch at the bottom.”
Dean shook his head at me, his mouth not quite curving into a smile. “You just love proving people wrong, don’t you, Abby?”
I didn’t respond, but I didn’t need to. The smile on my face was enough. It felt good to smile after three days of complete and utter misery, and I got a funny, warm feeling in my stomach when Dean smiled back, his own mouth moving into a slow and devastating curve.
God, why did I have to get stuck with such a beautiful—and arrogant—man?
To distract myself from the look he was casting in my direction, I nodded at the fire. “I can take care of it.”
Dean glanced over at the stump with our Tribal Summons. “We have mail, you know.”
I groaned at that. “Again today?”
He nodded. “Probably some sort of reward challenge. The boat should be here soon.” He glanced over at me, blue eyes focused on my face, so vivid against his dark tan. “I think we need to have a serious talk before we go, however.”
I wanted to growl at that. We were being civil adults for the moment, and it was a nice change. I didn’t want to go back to hating him just yet. It was far too exhausting. “Do we have to?”
“Look. We’re both here because we want to win. I think we need to reconsider our… tactics.”
I had to smile reluctantly at that. “What, you mean screaming at each other is not exactly going to get us to the end?”
A hint of a smile tugged at his mouth as well. “Something like that. We need to work together if we’re going to make it to the final rounds. If we keep ending up at the bottom of the heap, we’re going to get knocked off, no matter how much of a train wreck we seem to be.”
I nodded at that. He had a very good point.
“I hate losing, and I think that we’d be a good team if we could just get it through our hard heads that we need to work together—”
I began to roll my eyes at him. “You don’t need to butter me up—”
“I’m serious,” he interrupted me again and gestured at the fire he was slowly feeding. “Look what we’ve accomplished in a short hour. We’ve eaten, we’ve got fire, and we can boil our water. You have a shelter, but you’re still freezing at night. I have a blanket but no shelter, so I’m warm and covered in bug bites from sand fleas.” He paused to scratch his arm, as if emphasizing his point. “The point is, neither one of us is sleeping.”
I remained silent at that, thinking about how well I’d slept last night with his borrowed blanket. The blanket that he’d given to me. He’d gone and walked the beach the entire night, probably trying to keep warm, and spent the morning trying (unsuccessfully) to build a fire. Yeah, we weren’t exactly rocking Endurance Island with our skills.