Page 34 of Sweet Surrender
Allie nodded, but whatever she was thinking brought a glum look to her face.
“Do you think they’re talking about us? Working on a plan to send us home?”
“Does it matter?” Barra asked, leaning into Allie. “We’ve got the protection bracelet and the double-elimination advantage. I don’t want to get cocky, but I think we’ll be just fine.” The thought made her feel just a little nervous. She’d won Season Five without any advantages. What if this was her undoing?
Again Allie nodded, and again she seemed to ponder this. She reached for a twig on the ground and snapped it between her fingers. “You know, earlier, before we did anything, I had a little fantasy about you,” she said, tossing the two halves into a thicket.
A fantasy, Barra thought. Had she heard correctly? But she didn’t ask, fearing that Allie might not elaborate, and Barra would give up eating for two days just to hear the rest of that sentence.
Allie hesitated, then groaned as if she regretted bringing it up at all. Barra was just about to push when Allie said, “You were wearing a headmistress outfit. Think Gemma Arterton in St.Trinian’s.” She paused, then winced. “You might even have been holding a ruler. Or some kind of whip.”
Barra couldn’t help it, even though she tried, she really did. But she laughed out loud, so loud that even the macaw, which she had no idea was perched on a branch above them, flew off, startled.
Allie’s cheeks flushed crimson immediately. She leaned over and smacked Barra on the knee. “If I knew you were going to make fun of me, I wouldn’t have told you.”
“I’m not making fun of you, I promise,” she said, reaching over to grab Allie’s fingers. “And I’m so glad you told me. I’ve always wanted to wear a headmistress outfit and whip my lover when they didn’t say ‘yes, ma’am’ to my demands.”
“I have no words,” Allie said, smiling. Then she squeezed Barra’s fingers back and added, although a bit softer, “Do you think after this game is done, we’ll see each other again? I mean, I know you live in New York. We’re basically on opposite sides of the country, but...” She let her words trail off just as Barra felt something dip inside of her stomach.
She would be lying if she said she hadn’t considered seeing Allie again. Those scenarios in Huntington Beach, in Central Park, felt more like plans than daydreams. The truth was, Barra couldn’t imagine saying goodbye to Allie—not in this game and not afterward. She wanted to visit Allie in LA, to wander through one of her gallery openings with a plastic cup of mediocre wine, nodding at paintings she didn’t fully get just to hear Allie explain them. She wanted to take Allie to New York, to drag her up the spiral ramp in the Guggenheim, to walk past the glass edges of the Seagram Building at golden hour, to kiss Allie beneath the great brass clock at Grand Central Station.
Which was the problem. The big, glaring problem.
Because hadn’t Barra once upon a time felt the exact way about Dominique? Hadn’t she spent weeks, even months,agonizing over those feelings, wondering if they were real, if they weren’t, and if she would ever feel like herself again?
It was beginning to seem like it had taken coming back intoOutlast Herand spending time with Allie to realize she’d been wrong all along. It seemed that whatever she’d felt back then for Dominique had been blown up like a balloon by the pressure of the game.
But then... what if she was wrong again?
What if what she felt for Allie—though she had to admit it felt different—was just a repeat of the last time she played? Maybe this was just another version shaped by exhaustion, by closeness, by the all-consuming nature of the game.
Barra couldn’t trust herself. She couldn’t trust this. And so, the easiest thing to do would be to say, “No, I don’t think we should see each other after the game.” But the way Allie was looking at her, with those soft brown eyes, those slightly parted lips, that faint, delicate scrunch between her brows... damn it. Barra had to tell her the truth.
With a deep breath in, Barra shuffled a little to the side, away from Allie. “There’s something I need to get off my chest,” Barra began, her stomach turning to liquid. She needed to say this out loud. “The last time I playedOutlast Her, I fell in love with Dominique,” she muttered softly. “I knew she was engaged to Kiara, but I couldn’t help it. We were spending so much time together and before I knew it, I had feelings for her.”
A small gasp escaped Allie’s lips.
Barra expected Allie to gasp, to choke on her shock. Because it was shocking to fall in love with an engaged woman. But she didn’t. Allie simply flicked her eyes to a mound of dirt Barra assumed had once belonged to a colony of ants and muttered, “Do you still have feelings for her? Is that why you’re telling me this?”
“No,” Barra said honestly. “I don’t have feelings for Dominique anymore. To be honest, I don’t know if I ever really did. It’s hard to explain,” Barra admitted. Maybe it was the sugar rush from the brownies or the aftermath of sex in the jungle, but Barra’s brain seemed to be malfunctioning. How could she possibly explain this to Allie?
“Try,” Allie said firmly.
Barra stared at her hands for a second. Then she pulled air into her lungs and exhaled as she said, “You know how everything feels so much bigger out here than it is in the real world. How your emotions are heightened because you’re exhausted and hungry and you miss home, you miss family.” She swallowed down the apple-sized lump in her throat. “Well, I don’t know how much of what I felt for Dominique was actually love, or how much of it was just being here. In this game.”
“So you think—”
“Yes,” Barra interrupted before Allie could ask the question. Barra didn’t have to be a mind reader to know what Allie was thinking. Barra was thinking the exact same thing. “I have feelings for you. But I’m scared that what I’m feeling is the same as what I had for Dominique. That it isn’t real.”
A pause followed, long enough that Barra imagined Allie standing up, walking away, and leaving Barra sitting there with nothing but her own honesty, and absolutely no idea how to take it back. Seriously. Whoever said honesty was the best policy knew nothing about real life.
But then Allie scooted closer to Barra until the sides of their legs were touching again. Allie’s thigh was so warm against her skin, Barra nearly moaned at the contact. “It feels real to me,” she said, then coughed out a laugh. “As crazy as that sounds.”
“It does?” Barra asked so quietly her voice barely made it through the rain.
“Yes,” Allie said, glancing at her like it was obvious, like the question were ridiculous. “You’re the favorite part of my day.”
Barra let out a breath that sounded halfway between a laugh and pure disbelief. “I am?”
