Stepbrother Made My Wet Dream Real Inside Our Shared Tent novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: Every Tent

Kip offers to edit the clip kindly if she plays along; Huck finds all ten tents live on the monitor wall and Laramie wakes the whole camp, until dawn brings a contract page she never saw.

"Over my dead body," I said.

Kip set the coffee down beside the camera I'd torn off my pole.

"Nobody's dying, Laramie. Let's talk like grown-ups."

"I'm standing here in my underwear. Talk fast."

"Here's the offer. You lean into it. The forbidden stepsister, the long looks, the slow burn. I cut it kind. Soft music. Two lonely people in the dark."

"And if I don't?"

"Then I cut it the way it happened." He tapped the screen. "Hand in the underwear. His name. 'Please.' Your mom works at the middle school, right?"

Behind me, Huck made a sound.

"She does," Kip said, as if Huck had asked. "Front desk. Every parent in Livingston walks past her."

I wanted to put my fist through the monitor.

There were ten screens, not one.

Nine of them were dark.

Kip reached over and tapped a key, and the big one went dark too.

"Show's over," he said. "Go to bed, Laramie. You're on camera at six."

Huck stepped past me to the table.

There was an instant camera there, the boxy kind production used to shoot our tent tags on day one.

He picked it up, turned it over once, and walked around Kip's chair.

"What are you doing?" Kip said.

"Your screens went dark when you touched that key," Huck said. "That's a display mode. The feeds didn't stop."

He leaned over the keyboard and hit the same key.

All ten screens lit up.

Ten tents, green and grainy.

The sisters from Butte, asleep back to back.

The grandmother from Tulsa, snoring with her mouth open, her grandson curled at her feet.

The divorced couple from Spokane, a full foot of pad between them.

The father and son from Boise.

Every tent in the camp, live, at two in the morning.

The camera flashed.

A square of film slid out of its mouth with a whir.

Huck flashed it again, then once more, and tucked all three squares into the chest pocket of his thermal.

"Put that down," Kip said.

"It's your camera," Huck said. "I'm just using it."

Kip stood up.

"Those are safety feeds," he said. "Hypothermia. Bears. Medical."

"Then why is the sound on?" I said.

The speaker under the Butte screen was playing one of the sisters breathing.

Kip didn't answer.

I picked up a cooking pot off the crew's camp stove.

I took a steel ladle off the hook and dumped the cold coffee outside the flap.

I walked out into the rain and started banging.

The pot rang off the mountain.

"Everybody up!" I yelled. "Everybody out of your tents! Now!"

A headlamp clicked on in Tent 3.

Then all of them, one after another.

"What the hell is it?" the Spokane ex-husband shouted. "Is it a bear?"

"Worse," I said. "Look at your center pole."

People crawled out in long johns and rain shells and one pink bathrobe.

"It's past two. They said ten."

"Rip them off," I said. "Bring them to the fire."

The Butte sisters came out first, each holding a little black camera by its strap.

The father from Boise had his son's in one hand and a hatchet in the other.

The ex-wife from Spokane walked straight past her ex-husband to the fire ring and held hers up in the rain.

"Was this on when I changed?"

Nobody answered her.

The grandmother from Tulsa came last.

She was seventy-four, five feet tall, and wore a sweatshirt that said WORLD'S LOUDEST NANA.

Her grandson held the umbrella over her.

She looked at the red light in her hand.

Then she looked at Kip, who'd come out of the production tent with his coffee.

"Young man," she said, "I have had two husbands and a hysterectomy, and none of them saw me sleep with my mouth open."

She tossed the camera into the coals.

It hissed and popped and gave off a stink of burning plastic.

Then the ex-husband threw his in, and then camera after camera went into the fire, until the coals were a heap of black boxes and the smoke smelled like a tire shop.

Kip didn't stop them.

He stood under the production awning with his coffee and watched, and two crew members filmed it on handhelds.

Huck came and stood next to me in the rain.

He'd brought my sweatpants.

I pulled them on with my hands shaking.

"How many photos?" I said.

"Three." He touched his pocket. "Ten screens. Clock in the corner. His chair in the frame."

"Denver."

"Yeah."

"That was the best thing anybody's done for me in three years."

He pushed his wet glasses up his nose and didn't say anything.

But his hand found the back of mine in the dark, just for a second.

Nobody slept after that.

We sat around the stinking fire in our bags and blankets until the sky went gray over the ridge.

At dawn a woman in a clean rain jacket walked out of the production tent with a folder.

She was the network's on-site lawyer.

She crouched beside me at the fire ring, polite as a dentist.

"Ms. Ackley, I understand there's been some confusion about the overnight feeds."

"There's no confusion. My contract says dark at ten."

"Your contract says a few things." She opened the folder and handed me one sheet. "Page thirty-one. Night safety monitoring. Continuous audio and video for contestant welfare."

I read it twice.

At the bottom of the page were two small letters in blue ink.

L.A.

My initials.

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