Stepbrother Made My Wet Dream Real Inside Our Shared Tent novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: Say It Again
On night one of the survival show, Laramie wakes from a dream about her stepbrother, asks him to kiss her, then sees the tent camera is live and storms into the production tent to find her ex watching.
I woke up with my stepbrother's name in my mouth.
Not in my head. Out loud.
"Huck."
The tent was pitch black, and rain ticked on the fly.
My sleeping bag was unzipped to my hips.
My hand was inside my underwear, with a man eighteen inches away.
In the dream he'd had me on my back on this same pad, his mouth on my throat and my flannel open, and I'd been begging him not to stop.
I pulled my hand out and went very still.
Maybe he was asleep.
"You said it twice," Huck said.
His voice was right beside my ear, low and wide awake.
I wanted the mountain to fall on me.
"I was dreaming about the gear haul," I said. "You dropped the rope."
"Ackley." The bag rustled as he turned toward me. "You said, 'Huck, please.'"
It was night one of "Pack Out."
Twenty-one days in the Absaroka, ten family teams, one tent per team, and three hundred thousand dollars to the winner.
I needed two hundred and ten thousand of it by December first, or the bank took my dad's lodge.
My mom, Deb, was supposed to be in this tent with me.
She tore her knee nine days before filming, and her husband, Roy, sent his son instead.
So I got Huck Redding.
He was thirty-one, a bridge engineer from Denver, and he couldn't light a fire with a blowtorch.
I was twenty-seven and had been guiding these mountains since I could walk.
Our parents got married at the lodge two summers ago.
Huck and I met for the first time at the rehearsal dinner.
The next night, in the tack room, with the band playing through the wall, he backed me against the saddle rack and stopped an inch from my mouth.
"We can't do that to them," he'd said.
Then he walked out, and we spent two years passing the potatoes at Thanksgiving.
I could keep lying to him in the dark for twenty more nights.
Or I could stop.
I sat up.
"Fine," I said. "I dream about you. Most nights. Since the wedding."
He didn't say anything for so long I heard the creek.
Then, very quietly, he asked, "What was I doing?"
My face burned in the dark.
"You had me on my back. You'd opened my shirt with your teeth because your hands were busy."
"Busy where?"
"Where I just had mine."
I heard him breathe out.
"I take the long way past your cabin at Christmas," he said. "So I don't knock."
"Since when?"
"Since the tack room. I was wrong in there, Ackley. I've known it every day."
I found his shoulder in the dark.
He was warm through his thermal, and his heart was going hard.
"I'm awake," I said. "I'm asking. Kiss me."
"Say it again."
"Kiss me, Huck."
His hand found my jaw, and his mouth found mine.
He didn't kiss like a careful man.
He kissed me.
His stubble scraped my chin.
I bit his lip, and he made a sound low in his chest that I felt between my legs.
I pulled him down on top of me.
His weight pressed me into the pad, all of it, and I wrapped a leg over his hip to keep him there.
My flannel came open under his fingers, one button and then all of them.
His palm slid up my ribs and under my sports bra.
His thumb dragged over my nipple, and I arched off the pad.
"Tell me to stop," he said against my neck.
"Don't you dare."
I shoved my hands up under his thermal.
He was hard everywhere, chest, stomach, and the length of him pressed against me through his sweatpants.
I rolled my hips up into him, and he swore into my hair.
His hand slid down my stomach to the band of my underwear and waited there.
"Yes," I said. "Huck. Yes."
Then I opened my eyes, and I saw it over his shoulder.
A tiny red light on the center pole.
The day cam.
My contract said every tent camera went dark at ten.
It was past two.
"Huck," I said. "Is that light supposed to be on?"
He lifted his head and looked.
He went completely still on top of me.
"No," he said.
I shoved out from under him and buttoned two buttons wrong.
The camera was clipped to the pole with a carabiner and a zip tie.
I yanked until the zip tie snapped and cut my palm.
"Ackley. Wait."
I was already jamming my bare feet into my boots.
I walked out into the rain in my flannel and underwear, holding the camera.
Nine dark tents sat around the fire ring.
Past them, the production tent glowed, and its generator hummed.
I pulled the flap open.
A young crew member jumped up from a folding chair and spilled her trail mix.
A wall of monitors filled the back of the tent.
The biggest one showed Tent 9 in green night vision.
Two sleeping bags. A shoved-back pad. Huck kneeling, pulling his shirt down.
I looked at the camera in my hand.
Then I looked at the screen again.
The picture of my tent was still moving.
The man in front of the monitors turned around in his folding chair.
Network fleece vest. Sandy hair that cost money. A coffee cup he never drank from.
Kip Truitt, the show's executive producer.
Three years ago, he was the man I was going to marry.
I left him the week of my father's funeral, when I found out he'd filmed me crying at the grave to sell a TV show.
This TV show.
"Laramie," he said in the slow, deep voice he saved for cameras.
I slammed the camera down on the table.
"Tent cams go dark at ten. It's in my contract."
He tapped a key.
The big screen jumped back twelve minutes.
There I was, flat on my back with my hand down my underwear, saying my stepbrother's name.
The crew member turned and stared at the wall.
"You always did talk in your sleep," Kip said.
Behind me, the flap rustled, and Huck came in out of the rain with his glasses crooked.
Kip smiled at both of us.
"Stepsiblings in a shared tent on night one. That's the whole season." He raised the coffee and didn't drink. "It streams tomorrow at eight."
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