“Finish! You haven’t even started, sweetheart.”
“And I never will if you don’t leave me alone!” By this time, I was shouting, gesturing in his face as much as he was gesturing in mine. “Why don’t you go do something manly and go kill something for dinner?”
That seemed to surprise him. “Why don’t we just eat your peanut butter?”
I shook my head. “Absolutely not. That’s mine. You got an axe, I got peanut butter.”
His mouth curled into a sneer that still made him sexier than he should have been. “Is that how we’re going to do it then? What’s yours is yours and what’s mine is mine?”
“If that’s how you want to be, fine! That is exactly how we can do it,” I huffed. Fuck him if he thought I was going to share my peanut butter with him, when all he did was yell in my face. “You keep to your side of the camp and I’ll keep to mine, and we’ll see who’s better off, won’t we?”
“Works for me.” Dean stomped off to the middle of the small area that I’d cleared and dug his heel down in the center. “We’ll build our fire pit here. You can stay on that side, and I’ll stay on the other.”
“That’s fine with me,” I said in my iciest voice. “And are you going to make a fire?”
“Why, no I’m not,” he said with a drawl. “I’m going to go see if I can find myself something to eat.”
“Fine then!”
“Fine!”
We glared at each other for a minute longer and then he stormed off again, tearing through the brushy leaves at the outskirts of camp and spraying sand with each furious step he took. As he left, I caught a glimpse of the cameraman, a delighted look on his face as he filmed me standing in camp.
Hell, he’d just caught everything. How embarrassing. My cheeks flushed with color, I turned away and began to head into the brushy jungle to see what I could find.
Dean had taken the axe with him, so I was forced to do everything by hand. I’d managed to find a few fallen tree branches that would be large enough and straight enough to serve as baseboards for the bed I was going to create. I used some more equally long wood that I placed crosswise, forming a really sorry, hard, and uncomfortable bed two feet off the ground. But at least it was off the sand (which I suspected would be crawling with sand fleas and crabs as soon as the sun went down).
To make up for the discomfort of my bed, I grabbed as much loose greenery and palm fronds as I could, stacking them all into a makeshift bed. When I had several feet of padding on the bed, I climbed onto it and tested it out. Just as I had predicted, the palm fronds flattened within an inch or two, and I was left with a moderately fluffy bed. It’d do for now.
By the time the sun had set entirely, I had gathered enough wood for a fire and dug out the fire pit, but I was too tired to even attempt fire on my own. I lay on my narrow bed (just wide enough to fit my body) and stared up at the intensely beautiful stars overhead, using my bag—hard can of peanut butter and all—as a pillow.
It was unnerving to lay in the darkness, all alone, with things inching and creeping and rustling as things on a deserted island were wont to do. I tried not to think about how I didn’t have a roof over my head, or any real protection from anything. I supposed I could drag a palm leaf over my head if it rained, but if anything tried to attack? I was pretty much laid out to snack on, a human pu pu platter.
The underbrush rustled in an alarming way and I glanced up from my bed to see Dean returning to camp, flipping the axe in his hands in an almost-frustrated fashion. I couldn’t see his face, but his shoulders seemed tense, and I was a little more gleeful than I should have been. He hadn’t found anything to eat, either. I patted the jar of peanut butter under my ear. I was hungry right now, but not so hungry that I’d break into my stash. It could wait until tomorrow.
He fumbled around in the darkness. “No fire, I see.”
“Nope.”
I’m sure he wanted to say more, but he didn’t. In the distance I saw the small red dots signifying that our cameraman was still there, filming, and I glanced over at Dean again. He was shaking out something long and thick and it rustled like fabric… a blanket? I sat upright on my hard, rustling bed. “Where did you get that?”
In the thick darkness, I could just about make out that he was laying it on the ground underneath him and then curled up in it to sleep. “It’s my prize. You know, like the peanut butter is yours. And just like that, it’s not for sharing.”
Bastard. I rubbed my arms, covered in goose bumps. At least he had more than a few pink bikinis to wear, and it was getting chilly. Everything else I had was laying out flat, though, as I tried to dry them off for tomorrow. Shoes, pants, everything still had a damp cast to them. “I don’t need your blanket,” I retorted. “It’s not that cold.”
“Not yet,” he agreed in a too-amiable voice. “Good night.”
Irritated, I flopped back down on my palm leaves and tried to get comfortable.
It was the longest, most miserable night of my life. Dean was right—it did get cold. Extremely cold, to the point that I’d put back on all my damp clothing in the hopes that it would help protect me from the elements—not so much. It got even worse somewhere in the middle of the night when the weather broke and it began to sprinkle. My teeth chattered as I shivered on top of the palm leaves.
At least Dean wasn’t much better. All night, I could hear him rustling and itching, and I knew that the sand fleas and the crabs and other creepy-crawly things were driving him insane. I doubted he slept much either. Of course, I wasn’t about to invite him up on my bed. Screw him. There wasn’t enough room anyhow, and I wasn’t about to hug my enemy close all night, even if he did have a lot of body heat.
Morning crawled around an infinite amount of hours later, and with it there was a slight warming to the air. Just enough that my teeth stopped chattering, but not enough to revive me. I felt wrung out and exhausted, and dirty. I glanced over at Dean on the far side of our small camp, and his short hair stuck up at weird angles, and he looked equally as drained as I was.
Good. At least I wasn’t alone in my misery. He nodded over at something in the distance. “What’s that?”
I looked behind me to where he was pointing. Sometime in the middle of the night, someone in the production crew had stolen into our camp. A small red box had shown up on a stump at the edge of camp. I wandered over to it, peeling a damp palm leaf off the back of my leg. “Tribal Summons” the lid read. “Challenge today.”