Page 42 of Sweet Surrender
No fricken way.
“That’s unfair!” Allie shouted, her mouth watering so fast she could fill up one of the buckets. That felt like torture. She could practically smell the hot, salty fries from where she was standing.
Vivian laughed. “If you’d like a burger, Allie, please feel free to step down.”
Allie was honestly a second away from doing just that. Seriously, this was agony. But then she caught sight of Barra’s face, and well, she refused to give up the chance at theOutlast Hertitle for a Dave’s Single.
Time ticked on. Thirty minutes turned to forty, which then turned to sixty. Tilly and Toph had demolished their burgers all while Allie had salivated until her tongue felt as dry as a prune. Her arms were heading past pain and into a strange, floating numbness. Her legs were shaking. Another wave splashed cold water over her toes, and she felt suddenly, alarmingly lightheaded.
“I can’t do this anymore,” she muttered to Barra, so quietly her words were almost swallowed by the ocean. “I think I might pass out if I carry on.”
Barra turned her head a fraction to look at her. Allie expected disappointment because she was actually disappointed with herself, but there was nothing but a soft smile on Barra’s face. “It’s okay. If you need to quit, I understand,” she said.
“You do?”
Barra nodded. “I support you no matter what.”
Somehow, that made Allie feel worse. Because now Allie wanted to cry. How on earth could she finish this game and go back to LA, go back to her life, while Barra, sweet, kind, understanding Barra, would go back to New York? Staying and fighting would mean she’d spend one more night with Barra, and hell, she was willing to bleed to make that happen.
Valerie stepped off her beam. She didn’t stumble. She didn’t fall. She simply dropped the buckets into the sand before she folded forward with her hands braced on her knees. “Fuck,” she muttered. Margaret stared at her in horror. Everyone did.
And for half a second, nobody moved. Time felt like it was literally standing still.
Then Vivian’s voice exploded across the beach. “ALLIE AND BARRA WIN!”
Margaret dropped her head, while Valerie stood frozen in the sand, breathing hard and staring at the tower as if she could will herself back onto it. Just like that, their shot at the final was gone. They hadn’t been voted out. They hadn’t been blindsided. Their chance at the final had ended the second Valerie stepped down.
Chapter Twenty-One
They were the last two contestants, and just like the last time Barra played, she experienced a strange, unreal lightness that came with making it to the end. It was as if her body were beginning to realize that living in survival mode was almost over, and that in a few days she’d be on a plane, clean as a whistle, returning to a life that would never be the same again.
But somehow, it felt different this time.
Maybe because last time she’d been too focused on winning and too focused on what she couldn’t have to enjoy any of it. Maybe because this time, Allie was here.
Even camp looked different tonight. The firepit where they’d gathered every night talking about nonsense was somehow brighter. Their lean-to shelter, which had nearly collapsed during the storm, looked somehow sturdier. The little tally marks scratched into a palm tree, one for every day they’d survived out here, were painfully clear. Even the path to Moon Pit felt sentimental. And the stack of scallop shells they’d used as bowls gave her a chuckle. The makeshift washing line they’d strung between two trees, fashioned from strips of Juniper’s abandoned T-shirt, was still intact.
In fact, everywhere Barra looked, there was a memory attached to it: Tilly crying over a burnt pot of rice. Connie splitting open a coconut with one hard, impressive whack of a rock like she was She-Hulk. Sutton unknowingly standing two inches away from a crab while everyone placed silent bets on whether it would pinch her big toe or not. It hadn’t, to everyone’sdisappointment. Juniper trying to convince everyone whyBoneswas wildly unrealistic.
And Allie.
The poultice Connie had made for her to smear on her welts. The infection she’d picked up afterward and the antibiotic ointment she had to use. Allie practicing duck diving under the waves while everyone shouted encouragement. Allie, half asleep, curling instinctively into Barra every night with her back pressed to Barra’s front, while Barra nuzzled her nose into Allie’s neck and wished she could somehow freeze the moment.
Now it was quiet. Just waves folding onto the shore, just the fire crackling between them and the soft rustle of a breeze blowing gently through the jungle behind them.
“What’s the first thing you’re doing when you get back home?” Allie asked, inching closer to Barra. They were sitting with their backs against a rock that Toph had dragged from the jungle to the firepit a few days ago. Allie bumped her thigh against Barra’s and Barra pressed back. “What did you do the last time you played?”
Barra picked up a small stick she found in the sand and stuck it between her teeth. “When I got back to New York the last time, I went straight to Café Grumpy in Grand Central Terminal and ordered a double-shot cappuccino.”
Allie frowned at her. “The train station?”
“Yes,” Barra said, rolling the stick to the other side of her mouth with her tongue. She could also tie the stem of a cherry into a knot, and hoped to show the useless skill to Allie one day. “After weeks of sleeping in the dirt, seeing nothing but red gums and blue sky, I needed to look up at something brilliantly man-made.”
“Understandable,” Allie said, smiling.
“And you?”
Allie tilted her head up to the sky. It was a dazzlingly clear night. “I want to book myself into a spa, somewhere like King’s Spa, where a woman named Lucia or Kimberley exfoliates my body like they’re resurfacing a countertop.”
