Stepbrother Made My Wet Dream Real Inside Our Shared Tent novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: Page Thirty-One

With their fire kit stolen, Laramie and Huck win immunity anyway and decide to take Kip down, until her mother's message from home tells her not to come back.

"I never saw this page," I said.

"Those are your initials," the lawyer said.

"Those are two letters."

I held the sheet up to the gray light.

The rest of my contract had been on heavy cream paper with the network's logo pressed faintly into it.

This page was bright white and thin.

No logo.

I turned it over and felt the back with my fingertips.

"I initial hard," I said. "I tore page twelve with my pen. Ask anybody who's ever watched me sign a guide waiver."

"These letters don't even dent it."

She slid the page back into her folder.

"Your full contract is with legal in Los Angeles. You're welcome to request a copy when filming wraps." She stood. "In the meantime, Mr. Truitt asks me to remind you that destroying production equipment carries a penalty."

"Every family burned theirs."

"Yes," she said. "He's aware."

She walked back to the production tent.

Huck sat down beside me on the log.

"Different paper," he said.

"You saw?"

"I saw your face." He rubbed his eyes under his glasses. "Can you prove it?"

"Not from here."

The penalty was waiting for us at Tent 9.

Our fire kit was gone.

The ferro rod, the waterproof matches, the little tin of cotton balls in petroleum jelly.

Every other team still had theirs.

"Day two challenge," a production assistant read off a laminated card. "Every team boils one liter of water before the gear haul. No boil, no start."

Huck looked at our empty pocket.

"I read about this," he said.

"Oh no."

"A bow drill. Friction fire." He was already cutting a length of paracord. "It's a simple machine, Ackley. Bearing block, spindle, fireboard. Downward pressure and rotation."

I sat back on my heels and let him.

He carved a spindle out of a dead lodgepole limb with neat, even strokes.

He bowed until his glasses fogged and his forearms shook.

Smoke came, thin and gray.

Then nothing.

He bowed again.

The spindle popped out and flew into the creek.

The Spokane ex-husband laughed from two tents over, and the ex-wife told him to shut up, and he told her she'd never liked his laugh, and they were off.

Huck wiped his forehead with his sleeve.

"The math works," he said.

"The wood doesn't." I took the knife from him. "Lodgepole's too wet. You want dead aspen. Standing, not on the ground."

I found it in two minutes.

I cut a new spindle and a fireboard and showed him where to put his knee.

"Your notch is perfect," I said. "Your board's just the wrong tree."

"That's going in my performance review."

"Bow."

He bowed.

I knelt with my hands cupped over the notch, nose almost on the board.

The dust turned black, then smoked, then glowed one tiny orange speck.

I tipped it into a nest of dry grass and blew on it until it caught.

Huck sat back and stared at the flame.

"Do that again," he said, "and I'll propose."

"Get the pot."

We boiled third.

The gear haul was a two-hundred-pound crate of production gear up a forty-foot cutbank, two people per team.

The Boise father and son tried to muscle it straight up and nearly lost it on their feet.

Huck walked the top of the bank once.

He looked at a dead snag, then a boulder, then the rope.

"Give me your carabiners," he said. "All of them."

"Why?"

"Because you can lift two hundred pounds, Ackley, but you shouldn't have to."

He rigged the rope around the snag and back through the carabiners in a pattern I'd never seen.

"Three-to-one," he said. "Pull."

I pulled.

The crate rose up the bank.

We topped out first by four minutes.

The production assistant handed Huck a wooden token on a leather cord.

Immunity, first vote.

He hung it around my neck.

That afternoon we sat on the cutbank with our boots dangling, out of range of the handhelds.

"Why does he hate you?" Huck said. "Kip. Your mom said you two were engaged. She never said why it ended."

I looked at the creek a long time.

"Dad died on the Pine Creek trail," I said. "Heart attack, guiding a family of four. I was the one who carried him down."

Huck didn't say anything.

"At the funeral I sat by the grave after everybody left. I cried until I threw up." I picked at a burn on my thumb. "A month later I found the footage on Kip's laptop. Me at the grave. He'd hidden a camera guy in the trees."

"Jesus."

"He cut it into a reel. Grieving daughter, dead dad's lodge, big sky. He sold this show with it."

Huck took his glasses off and folded them very carefully.

"And he cast you."

"He cast me."

"So we win," Huck said. "We take his three hundred thousand. We save the lodge."

"And?"

"And we take him apart." He put his glasses back on. "On his own show, if we can."

I looked at him.

He meant it.

"Deal," I said.

At eight that night the crew went quiet in the production tent, and we all knew why.

Our clip was streaming.

At nine, a production assistant came out with a tablet in a rubber case.

"Word from home," she said. "Mr. Truitt moved Tent 9 up a week."

She held the tablet out to me.

My mother's face filled the screen, live, in her kitchen in Livingston.

She was white as the wall behind her.

"If you stay on that show," Mom said, "don't come home."

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