Page 12 of Sweet Surrender
“How did you manage to get mud on your pants?” Tilly asked, wading into the breakers where Barra was standing knee-deep washing out the stains on her pants.
Barra looked down at the sodden cotton fabric she’d just twisted into a lopsided ball. “Oh,” she said, thinking of an excuse. She wasn’t going to admit that on her way back from sneaking off into the jungle, she’d tripped over a root and had gone down knees first into something that had squelched. Turned out she’d scuffed her sweatpants with mud.
No excuse came.
“I have no idea, actually,” she lied instead. Last night she’d swapped her sweats for shorts, and this morning no one had been any the wiser. “When I woke up this morning, my pants were out of my backpack and there was mud all over them.”
Tilly, who had just splashed water over her shins before straightening up, flicked her long blonde hair behind her shoulders and gasped. “Seriously?” Her eyes were as wide as dinner plates. “Do you think someone sneaked into camp and went through our bags?” Then she flicked her gaze back to camp, and Barra wished her brain had managed to conjure up a simpler lie, like tripping on the way back to Moon Pit. At least that was easily believable.
Barra wrung out the leg of her pants and heard herself say, “Well, this isn’t exactly empty land, is it? There are stretches of rainforest out here that people have barely mapped. I wouldn’t be surprised if there are indigenous communities out here.”
“And you think one of them could’ve wandered through camp without the camera crew or us seeing them?”
“It’s not impossible.” Though it probably was impossible.
“It’s terrifying to think someone could be watching us as we sleep,” Tilly muttered. Her freckles seemed to tighten with fear. Beneath the thousands of freckles that adorned her body, her skin was already pink.
Wait. Was she really that gullible? Then another thought occurred to Barra. Wasn’t Tilly a marine biologist and therefore had some sense of rationality and logic?
It appeared, yes. And also, no.
Tilly snapped her head back and shouted at Elodie, who at that very moment was walking toward the beach. Elodie’s cotton-candy pink hair glowed in the sun like a strawberry ice cream cone.
“Barra said someone came into our camp last night and went through our stuff.”
“What?” Elodie stammered.
“She woke up with her clothes on the ground,” Tilly said. “They were covered in mud.”
“Are you serious?” Elodie asked, frowning so deeply her thick eyebrows met in the middle.
Barra opened her mouth. Then closed it. This had gone too far. But then she decided she was too tired. The sleep she had managed to get last night had been broken. She’d been hit several times by the hard realization that once upon a time she and Dominique had lain side by side in anOutlast Hershelter.
“What’s going on?” Allie asked, walking toward them from the rocky side of the beach. She was wearing a plum bikini that showed off a table-flat midriff and long, elegant legs that were still dripping seawater. Barra quickly flicked her eyes down to her hands as they wrung out the remainder of the water fromher pants. She didn’t want Allie to catch her staring. And she had been staring. Allie’s top was barely holding in her breasts.
“Did you hear what happened to Barra?” Tilly asked her.
“What happened?” Allie asked.
Barra inwardly groaned. Allie was the last person she wanted privy to this conversation. “Nothing serious,” she muttered, trying her best to seem as unbothered as possible.
Tilly, however, seemed very bothered. “It’s not nothing,” she said with such conviction that even Barra nearly believed her. “Barra thinks someone went through her backpack last night. Her pants were dragged through mud.”
“Mud?” Allie said, frowning.
“Yes, mud,” Barra replied quickly and then shook out her pants before draping them over her shoulder. There was a beat where Barra waited for Allie to out her. Allie hadn’t watched Barra fall, but she did know Barra hadn’t been sleeping.
Allie watched her for a second, then smiled. “Come to think of it, I did hear something last night,” she said, tapping her chin with a finger. “I wasn’t sure what it was, but thinking back now, it could’ve been footsteps.”
“Really?” Tilly and Elodie asked at the same time.
“Yes,” Allie said. “Close to the shelter. I woke up at some point during the night and heard a noise. At first, I couldn’t figure it out, and then I thought, why can I hear a noise at all? Didn’t everyone from Season Five talk about how loud Barra’s snoring was? So loud that you can’t even—”
“I didn’t hear snoring last night either,” Elodie interrupted.
“Me either,” Tilly added. Then she flicked her gaze to Barra. “Did you get some sort of treatment? My brother uses nasal strips, and apparently they’re quite effective.”
Barra snored, but only when she was asleep. “I was lying on my side,” she lied. “And I didn’t hear footsteps at all.” She caught Allie’s gaze and tried to inject as much venom into the look.What the hell was she trying to pull? She wasn’t exactly innocent either. “I think Allie must’ve been dreaming.”
