Stepbrother Made My Wet Dream Real Inside Our Shared Tent novel · Chapter 12 of 24

Chapter 12: Showmance

Huck sat on the stump with his hands on his knees.

The red light was steady.

The fire popped behind me, and nobody else made a sound.

Two handhelds slid in from the dark to cover him from the sides.

Kip was standing under the production awning with his coffee.

"Hi," Huck said to the lens. "I'm Huck Redding. Tent 9."

He cleared his throat.

"I want to set the record straight about me and Laramie."

My spoon stopped halfway to my mouth.

"It wasn't real," he said.

The words came out flat and careful.

"Night one was real in the sense that it happened. But we knew there were cameras. Everyone knows there are cameras. It's a TV show." He swallowed. "We played it up. For the votes. For the money."

The Tulsa grandmother put her mug down on the ground.

"The lodge needs two hundred and ten thousand dollars," Huck said. "A storyline gets votes. So we gave America a storyline."

I couldn't feel my hands.

"I'm not proud of it," he said. "But it's done. It's over. We're partners, and that's all. I wanted people to know before the finale."

He looked at the lens for one more second.

Then he stood up, and the red light blinked off.

The whole fire ring was looking at me.

I could feel all of them, the Butte sisters, the Spokane exes, the grandson with his braces.

The handhelds had already swung from Huck to my face.

That was the shot.

I set my bowl down on the log.

I didn't cry.

I wouldn't give Kip that.

My father's grave was on his laptop already.

Huck walked back toward the fire.

He stopped three feet from me.

His eyes were wet behind his glasses, and his face was the color of ash.

"Ackley," he said.

"Don't."

"Let me..."

"You had eleven days to say that to me," I said. "You said it to a stump."

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