Adventure to Love (15 page)

She could already feel the rust and grime seeping from the seat onto the ass of her True Religion jean shorts, but it wasn’t like it mattered anymore. All of her clothes were so dirty that their designer labels were hardly recognizable.

She was probably going to have to throw out her whole wardrobe the moment she got home and start from scratch. Which was perfectly fine because as the winner of the competition she’d have more than enough money in the bank to get all the designer clothes she wanted and more.

That thought relaxed her. She gestured to Morgan and Sarah M., who were standing a few feet away, staring skeptically at the vehicle in front of them, to join her.

She decided to crank up the volume.
When in Rome
. . . She looked over to make sure Ky was watching and said, “Come on, girls! This isn’t going to be so bad! Just think of it as a fun little
adventure
.”

She could tell that Ky was impressed. Maybe he’d pegged her for the high-maintenance diva, and she couldn’t blame him, but now he was going to see that she was just as outdoorsy as Brinkley, with all of the glamour of a superstar.
Yes, that was exactly what J.Lo would do in this situation. She’d put her award-winning acting skills to use (so what if they were just MTV Teen Choice awards?) and convince Ky that she really was a shining star worthy of winning the competition.

The rest of the group piled into the Jeep while Brinkley and Ky sat safely up front with the enclosed cab to protect them from the wiles of the jungle. Harper, Morgan, and Sarah M. were totally screwed. As the Jeep made its way slowly down the rocky jungle path, every branch, leaf, and insect slapped her square in the face.

But she continued to hold on to her J.Lo inspiration. She wasn’t going to freak out, no matter how much she wanted to. She glanced at Morgan to her right. Morgan had both of her arms wrapped around her face and had pulled her head down into her lap.

On her left, Sarah M. was whimpering.
Really
. Her lip was quivering, her shoulders were shaking, and her eyes were screwed shut.
What a fucking wuss
.

Harper felt even prouder of herself for taking the conditions like a champ. The girl-next-door Morgan looked like she was having the worst ride of her life. And her paranoid schizophrenic roommate, Sarah M., was on the verge of a mental breakdown.

It couldn’t have turned out better. Now she just had to figure out how to take down the ever-cheerful Brinkley, and she’d come out on top.

Chapter 12

After the tenth unidentified insect smacked her in the face, Harper realized that they’d been driving for at least an hour.
Where the hell were they going, and when were they going to stop?

Not only did she desperately have to pee, but she also wanted to take a good ten minutes to comb all the bugs, bird shit, and branches out of her hair so that she would look presentable for their on-camera group date. Even if she was stuck in the middle of the jungle, she wasn’t going to look like a washed-up scrub when the episode aired on national TV.
No, thank you.

She raised her hand and knocked on the window that separated the bucket seat from the cab of the Jeep. She could see Ky and Brinkley inside laughing about something. Probably some lame-ass anecdote that Brinkley had told Ky about raising cows back in Montana, or wherever she lived, and he was laughing out of pity.
Poor guy.

Because of the noise of the Jeep’s engine and the wild screeching coming from the jungle around them, Ky and Brinkley couldn’t hear her knocking. That, or they were ignoring her on purpose, which was highly unlikely.

She gave a few more halfhearted knocks and then gave up. She was just going to have to sit tight clinging for dear life on the back of the Jeep and hope that the ride would end soon.

After a few more twists and turns, the Jeep rolled to a stop. She looked up, expecting to see a beautiful table with candles, linens, and fine china set for them. Or perhaps a secret hidden lagoon where the group would swim and drink champagne on their date.

But there was nothing around them. The Jeep had stopped right in the middle of the trail with no apparent destination. The engine had gone quiet. She took this opportunity to knock on the window again. This time, Ky and Brinkley turned around to look at her through the dirty glass.

Brinkley waved as Ky turned the key in the engine over and over again. Finally, Ky opened his door and stepped out. Brinkley opened her door and hopped out in one swift motion.

Harper could have smacked her. Her hair was perfect, and she didn’t have a single bug stuck in her teeth. Granted, Brinkley still looked dirty and haggard from her hike earlier in the day. But she didn’t look like she had been drug through a wind tunnel and back for the last hour of the trip.

“Okay, ladies. You’re probably wondering why we stopped.” Ky grinned.

When no one said anything in response, Harper spoke up. “Yes, we are. Is this the destination for our date?”

God, she hoped not. She was really hoping that their circumstances would start to look up in the near future. Her idea of a fun group adventure date definitely was
not
hiking through the jungle with a machete to find food and water.

Ky cleared his throat. “Well.” He paused. “I’m kind of embarrassed to say that the Jeep looks like it broke down. I keep trying to turn the engine, but nothing’s happening.”

Harper couldn’t help herself. “Seriously? Don’t you know anything about cars? You’re a guy. You’re supposed to be able to fix this stuff.”

Dammit
.
There went the diva again.
She needed to reel it in and stay on her best behavior if she didn’t want to get cut prematurely from the competition. Before she could retract what she’d just said, Morgan slid out of the seat next to her.

“It’s cool, guys. I spent a few weeks every summer with my cousins growing up, and they were part-time mechanics. I could probably check out the engine to see if there’s anything we can do to get the Jeep started again.” Morgan shrugged.

She and Sarah M. stayed put. There was no point in getting up and getting her Balenciaga sandals even more coated in mud unless it was absolutely necessary. She listened to Morgan tinker with the engine for what felt like an eternity. What was even more annoying was that she narrated everything she was doing for Ky’s benefit just to impress him.

At one point, Morgan was convinced she had fixed whatever had gone wrong in the ancient engine of the Jeep. But Ky still wasn’t able to get it started. So back Morgan went underneath the hood, up to her elbows in grease.

Her ears perked up when Morgan lowered her voice to a whisper. Morgan was only a few feet away at the front of the Jeep, so it was easy to pick up exactly what she was saying to Ky in a stage whisper.

“Ky, I don’t want to freak anyone out, but I think something is really wrong with the engine. I’ve been working on it for like an hour, but I think a belt must have broken when we hit one of the rocks on the trail. This Jeep is pretty old and it doesn’t look like it’s been tuned up in quite a while. So, unless we can get a belt from somewhere, it looks like we’re walking back to camp.”

“
What?
” Harper couldn’t help herself from shrieking, even though she wasn’t supposed to be eavesdropping. “Are you kidding me? That’s not going to happen. There’s no way we can walk like twenty miles back, especially without any food or water.”

“Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God. What are we going to do?” Sarah M. rocked back and forth in her slumped position on the bucket seat. “I just knew this was going to happen. This is when it’s going to happen. They’re going to come out of nowhere, and there’s nothing we can do about it.”

Ky circled around to the back of the Jeep. “What’s she talking about?”

Harper replied, “Um, don’t worry about her. She just has a hard time dealing with stress. But, seriously. What’s going to happen? What are we going to do?”

She could see the white camera van parked a few feet away in the clearing behind them. But she knew the drill. Unless one person in the group was literally dying, the contract forbade them from talking with the cameramen or attempting to contact the producers. It was reality television, after all, so it had to be “real.”

Besides, the cameramen probably wouldn’t be any help.
It’s not like they had a toolkit or an extra belt for a forty-year-old Jeep just lying around in the back of their van.
So this was it. They were totally screwed. There was no fucking way they were going to make it out of the jungle anytime soon.

Morgan slammed the hood of the Jeep, startling the group. “Oh, sorry.”

She wiped her hands on her thighs.
Gross
.
The girl had
no
class.
“But now that I have your attention, I think we need to figure out exactly what we’re going to do. Maybe this isn’t as bad as it looks.”

Brinkley added, “She’s right, girls. I’m thinking that maybe this is a blessing in disguise. Maybe we’ll have an opportunity to find some shorter route back to camp if we hike on foot? Besides, it’ll be good exercise.”

“You’re both fucking deluded. There’s no way that this is any kind of blessing. We’re spending the night in the jungle. And we don’t have any food or anything to drink. So we’ll be lucky if we make it back to camp alive tomorrow,” Harper groaned.

Sarah M.’s whimpers turned into loud sobs. “This is exactly what I was afraid oooooof!” she wailed.

Morgan’s voice was stern. “Sarah, you have to pull it together. You’re not helping anything by falling apart like this.”

Throughout all the hysteria, Ky remained silent. Harper turned to him and accused, “What about you, hotshot? Aren’t you supposed to be in charge of this whole date? Do you have any brilliant ideas?”

Ky stared back at her for a moment. “Um, I guess I’ll just look around and try to make a shelter. I think that’s the only thing we can do since it’s already dark. Maybe the producers will send out another vehicle for us by morning so we can get back to camp.”

Out of principle, Harper refused to lift a finger through the whole “shelter making” project, or disaster, as it could have been more accurately described. After Ky had promised the group he would return shortly, he set out into the jungle to look for bamboo, dry branches, and some kind of padding for their beds.

When he made it back hours later, the only thing he had to show for his solo hike into the jungle was a nasty gash on his arm and a few palm leaves he had gathered.

Then Brinkley was all over him. She pulled a MacGyver and ripped off a large corner of her shirt to tie it around the wound on Ky’s arm.

She cooed as she dressed his wound, “You poor, poor baby. I can’t even imagine how much it hurts. We really need to keep it clean so that it doesn’t get infected. Did you happen to find any fresh water while you were hiking?”

Ky smiled through his pain as he stared deeply into Brinkley’s eyes. He pushed a lock of filthy hair behind her ear. “You are so sweet. Actually, I didn’t find any water. Maybe you and I should go back out again.”

Harper rolled her eyes. “You’d better find some this time. If we die of dehydration tonight, it’s going to be your fault.”

Morgan cut in, “Hey, he was busy looking for materials to make our shelter. Harper, why don’t you and I hike out a little ways to see if we can find a stream or a river or something?”

Harper shook her head. “Sorry, you’re on your own with that one, sister. You couldn’t pay me to hike into the jungle in the middle of the night.”

“Suit yourself.” Morgan set off alone in the opposite direction of where Ky had just emerged from the thick underbrush.

Even though she didn’t think it was a good idea for Morgan to hike alone, she didn’t have the energy to interject and insist that someone go with her. And she definitely wasn’t going to go herself.

The last thing she needed was to slip and break her leg in the middle of nowhere, miles away from civilization with no way to call an ambulance or a Flight for Life helicopter or anything. If there was one thing that she had decided in the past few hours of the horrible group date, it was that she had to look out for Number One.
No one else was going to do it.

She turned her attention to comforting Sarah M., who was still crying softly on the seat next to her. At least that would give her something to do while Ky and Brinkley built a beautiful little cabin in the jungle made entirely out of palm leaves.

The makeshift shelter proved completely useless. She would have been better off sleeping on the jungle floor for as much coverage as the shelter provided from the midnight rainstorm. Which was nothing.
Zip. Zilch. Nada
.

The rainstorm started just moments after the group had lain down to go to bed.

Morgan had returned from her search for water empty-handed. As soon as the rain started coming down, she jumped up in excitement.

“This is perfect, you guys! Do we have anything to catch the water in?”

Between the five of them, they came up with one measly plastic water bottle that she had brought with her from the campsite. She’d had it in her suitcase for a few weeks and had brought it to drink on the group adventure date. Little did she know that the water bottle would become their only hope in keeping the group hydrated.

Morgan filled the water bottle with the stream of rain that poured through the center of the roof of the shelter.

“We might not have another chance to get water. So drink up,” Morgan encouraged as she passed the water bottle around to each person.

Harper couldn’t argue with that. Even though the water she was drinking had slime and a few floating insects in it. Since the stream of water came through the treetops and dripped down into their palm leaf shelter, it was hardly what one would consider “pure” or “filtered.”

But she had never been thirstier. Drinking that murky, disgusting water was more refreshing than a cold mimosa after a long night of clubbing. With her belly full of questionable rainwater, she finally drifted off into a wet, uncomfortable, restless sleep on a pile of grass that was supposed to be her pillow.

Harper had never in her life had the “pleasure” of waking up at dawn, as Brinkley had so eloquently put it. She tried to keep her eyes closed as long as possible. But since the roof of the shelter was full of holes and the ground was damp and hard, it was impossible to stay asleep.

Not like she had gotten a good night’s rest anyway. She’d woken up intermittently throughout the night, totally freaked out by the strange sounds of the jungle. Howling, crowing, and even some far-off screaming that she hoped was coming from an animal being killed for food.

When she managed to finally get to sleep, wedged between Sarah M. and Morgan, Sarah M. rolled over and elbowed her hard in the ribs. By that point, she was so exhausted that she couldn’t even muster up a kick back in retaliation. She just snuggled closer to Morgan’s sweaty body and hoped that she could fall back asleep for at least an hour.

What felt like fifteen minutes later, Brinkley was up, chattering excitedly to a sleepy Ky. Brinkley was going on and on about how invigorating it was to wake up with the sunrise. She was convinced that if she and Ky hiked a little ways back to the main trail, they could see the sun rise over the jungle treetops. And it would be “like, totally, breathtaking!”

She just wished that she would make up her mind one way or the other and shut up. But by the time that Brinkley finished her enthusiastic monologue about hiking to see the sunrise, everyone in the shelter was up. Looking worse for wear.

Morgan’s hair was matted and creased against the side of her face. She was only wearing a flimsy tank top because she’d slept on top of her shirt crumpled up in a ball. Sarah M. had tear tracks streaked down her dirty face. From the looks of it, she’d been crying all night long, probably because of her extreme paranoia about their surroundings.

Harper rose to a seated position. Her shoulders were so tight that they were pulled up almost to her ears from sleeping in such a cramped spot all night long. “Ugh. I would kill for a massage right now.”

Morgan glared at her.

“Hey, it’s not like I was hinting. I was just saying that my back is totally wrecked. I’m pretty sure I was sleeping on top of a rock,” Harper whined.