Chapter Fifteen
Finn and I are so close to a challenge win, we can taste it.
It tastes an awful lot like my own salty sweat dripping down my face as we haul ass through the forest toward the next checkpoint.
“Come on, Hart. Run like there are front-row tickets to Hamilton in it for you,” Finn calls from where he jogs a few yards ahead of me. We left with the earliest go time today, but not by much, and it’s impossible to tell how close anyone else has come to catching up in the three miles since then.
Before Burke came around to rank our shelters this morning, I scoped out the competition’s shelters, a confusing combination of feelings swelling inside me as I saw that Daniel and Luis’s was basically a pile of sticks scattered over their sleeping bags, and neither Meena and Cammie’s nor Karim and Max’s had weathered the breezy night much better. Those teams made up Burke’s bottom three, and he took his sweet time “deliberating” before declaring Harper and Evan third place, Enemi and Zeke second, and Finn and me first. We could barely bask in the glory, with only five minutes until our go time and another five minutes until the next team’s. Finn made it clear right away that even though we got the earliest start, he doesn’t want us to get comfortable.
Boy, am I not getting comfortable.
“It’s not 2015, Finn! Without the original cast, and when there’s a filmed version I can watch whenever I want?” I yell back, pressing a hand to the cramp in my side, just over my pack’s waist strap. “You’re gonna have to do better than that.”
“Okay, uhhh…” I’m selfishly glad to hear he’s winded too. “Mamma Mia! onstage with the movie cast performing it?”
The groan I release is obscene, the words that follow slipping out against my better judgment. “It is so hot when you pay attention to me.”
Do Finn’s steps falter, or am I seeing things? “It’s, uh, what now?”
“I said it’s so hot out!” I call back a little cheekily.
He heard me the first time, though, and throws a pink-cheeked, gorgeously stern look over his shoulder. “You should know by now, I’m always paying attention to you.”
For the remaining couple miles, we don’t see Zeke and Enemi nor anyone else in the competition on our path down the main AT, so unless they’ve cracked teleportation, we might actually have a shot at this one. When we finally see Burke Forrester and an orange flag appear between brush and tree trunks ahead of us, it’s nearly as exciting as a Meryl Streep stage performance would be.
“Tell us something good, Burke,” I pant as we stumble to a stop before him, throwing my arms out wide. Even though none of the other teams are here, we never know when a fake-out or surprise twist is coming.
The host flashes his shiny veneers at us. “You’ve gotta give me something good to tell you, Natalie!”
I give him a snarky, raised-brow look. Just hand us our fate already, buddy.
“All right, all right.” Burke waves a hand like we can quit begging him. “Finn and Natalie, after a near miss at victory in the ‘Horsing Around’ challenge, you built the top-ranking shelter. As you have now arrived first to the checkpoint—”
Unexpectedly, a weight comes down on my shoulders. I flinch before Finn pulls me into his side, then can’t hide the smile that comes to my face.
“—Finn and Natalie, you have won this challenge!”
My pterodactyl screech could be heard where the trail begins up in Maine. Burke even jumps back, but I barely register it as strong arms wrap around my waist from behind and lift me into the air.
“We did it, Nature Nat,” Finn says on a wild laugh, his barely stubbled cheek pressed to mine. My stomach swoops and I laugh too, clutching at his forearms in a chaotic attempt at hugging while being manhandled.
“Hell yeah, we did! Eat our trail dust!”
Finn is still chuckling as he sets me down and I turn to put my hands on his shoulders, smiling at him as I bounce up and down on my toes. I can’t imagine being much happier than this if we won the whole thing.
Burke interrupts our celebration with his sound effect machine laugh. “Congratulations, you two. Want to hear your prize?”
I tear my eyes from Finn’s and whirl around, having almost forgotten anyone else was here. Let alone that we get a prize beyond winning the challenge. I clap my hands. “Oh, do tell!”
“Your team has won a night’s stay at the Blue Smoke Lodge, where you’ll get to enjoy a five-course dinner at their Michelin-starred restaurant, accommodations in a deluxe suite, and amenities such as a full-service spa, outdoor hot springs pools, cinema, bowling lanes, mini golf—”
“MINI GOLF?” I bellow, and Finn startles at my back. Much quieter, I glance guiltily between him and an alarmed Burke Forrester and add, “Sorry. Big mini golf fan.”
The host nods slowly, still eyeing me like I’m foaming at the mouth rather than simply expressing my excitement for miniature sport. “Well, whenever you’re ready, you can load up and the crew will take you over.”
I am not exaggerating when I announce to everyone in the vicinity that I was, in fact, born ready.
“Thank god wehave easy access to a bathroom tonight. With this many beverages, I’m gonna have to pee so many times. My pack couldn’t hold all that TP.”
Across the white linen–covered table from me, Finn chokes on his sip of water. When he regains his composure, he shakes his head mournfully, but there’s humor in his eyes. “Shame your time on the trail has come at the cost of your capacity for civilized dinner conversation.”
I tip my glass of sparkling cider—a bottle of which our dutiful waiter, Jamie, set up in an ice bucket beside our table, a champagne substitute for the underaged—at him. “Bold of you to assume I had that capacity to begin with.”
His mouth curves up in a smile that I feel like a zap of electricity. I look down into my bowl of risotto, pretending to focus hard on scooping up a bite when I’m really just trying to hide whatever ridiculously giddy thing my face is surely doing.
The few hours since we arrived at Blue Smoke Lodge have been a kind of culture shock, with the culture being that of rich people. As soon as Finn and I stepped out of the van, cameraman Hugh started filming our reactions for the little segment they show of the winners enjoying their prize after a challenge, which doubles as an ad for sponsors like Blue Smoke Lodge. A bellhop escorted us—along with a couple Wild Adventures crew members staying in a suite next door—around the grounds, as we oohed and aahed over the views and hot springs pools and generally luxurious surroundings. My responses were mostly genuine, but I had to hold in my laughter as Finn robotically delivered the line a producer fed to him about how our victory was sweet, but the swim-up ice cream sundae bar looks even sweeter.
Then we were led to our suite, where more performances of amazement ensued. It has two bedrooms with a king-size bed in each, divided by a living room that could fit twenty of our closest friends for a movie night—if we weren’t using the hotel’s private cinema, that is—and twenty more at a long dining table with an adjacent kitchenette. Hugh and his camera left for the day while the producers left for their suite next door, giving Finn and me the chance to clean up in our own bathrooms. They also gave us, much to both of our surprise, our phones for the night. Finn instantly proposed that we not look through them for at least the next few hours, to just “enjoy this experience.” I agreed, which says a lot about how much has changed since I’ve been here.
Except for the small exception of accessing my music. I turned the phone on and navigated to the app I wanted through narrowed eyes, goofily trying to keep myself from reading any of the missed messages and notifications that popped up. I picked a playlist, then relished in the ability to hear something other than the great outdoors and my own thoughts under the ginormitude of the waterfall showerhead. I become a very happy Eeyore dancing under my hot and soapy personal rain cloud to the musical stylings of The Chicks.
Things only got more ridiculous when I emerged, wearing a fluffy white hotel robe and running a comb through blissfully clean hair, to find a selection of clothes from the hotel’s boutique had been dropped off with a note telling me to take my pick for my dinner attire.
Upon entering La Villers sur Mer, Finn and I could immediately see that our trail gear would’ve caused us to stick out like a couple of sore forest gremlin thumbs. The waitstaff are all in pristine white coats with gold buttons down the front, each carrying a white napkin over one forearm and giving a little bow each time they leave our table. I think I cleaned up pretty well in the dress I landed on, a gorgeous lilac-colored number with a fitted bodice and flowy chiffon skirt that hits just above my knees. It felt very Cinderella’s-glass-slipper-ish, the fact that a producer found such a perfect dress for me in a perfect fit and my favorite color.
And damn if Finn doesn’t look like a painfully perfect Prince Charming. Upon seeing him for the first time, leaning against the suite’s couch as he waited for me to head down to dinner, I made another noise that probably should’ve been embarrassing. Something along the lines of urrrgggffhh. He’s in a blazer that has no right to fit as well as it does off the rack, over a light blue button-down and—because, even fancied up, the man has a brand—khaki pants. Much nicer, skinnier khakis than his hiking ones, and with only the standard amount of pockets. He’s also shaved again, showing off that sharp jawline to perfection.
Needless to say, I’m doing great at keeping this crush under wraps.
“Need a top-up?” Mr. Business Casually Wrecking Me asks, eyes twinkling as he reaches for the cider bottle.
“Fillah up, bah-tendah.” Apparently my new act-natural coping mechanism is bizarre accents. Finn laughs, though, so that’s worth plenty of unhinged behavior. The whole dinner has been full of laughs.
It’s also been full of me asking when we can play mini golf.
“All right,” he says over dessert, bringing his napkin up to swipe away some of the berry compote topping from our crème br?lée. I definitely had not been picturing myself licking it off. “What’s the deal with you and mini golf?”
I sit up straighter in my seat, savoring the last of the sweet, custardy cream treat on my spoon. When I look his way again, his eyes are on my mouth around my spoon. Very interesting. I give it one last slow, indulgent lick…in the name of science. He clears his throat abruptly, eyes darting away as he reaches up to tuck a finger into his shirt collar and tug it around, and I finally register his question.
“Oh. Uh, I don’t know, I just really enjoy playing it? And I guess it’s kind of sentimental.” I set my spoon down and start straightening all the remaining dishes and utensils around me. “My family didn’t take a lot of vacations growing up. It’s just my parents and me, and their jobs never allowed for much time off, nor could we swing any fancy getaways on our budget. I spent most summers with Granny Star in Pigeon Forge anyway, which was all the getaway I needed. But Mom and Dad always managed, for one weekend in the summer, to come down to the mountains and visit with us. Gatlinburg, Pigeon Forge, that whole area in the Tennessee Smokies, some of it’s touristy as all get-out, but it was my Disneyland. And you can’t go more than a block or two without seeing a mini golf course. My parents enjoyed it, so it became our thing on their mountain weekends, trying out all the different courses—pirate golf, hillbilly golf, volcanic island golf, whatever we could find.”
I smile into my cider glass as I take a sip. The bubbles tickle my throat as I drink them down, then I shrug before continuing. “I’ve told you already that I don’t have a great relationship with my parents, but even as I got older, when my grandma was gone and things at home kind of worsened, those trips were still special. We still went for a weekend every summer when we could. And mini golf was still our best family time, when we laughed together and could joke around and just play. I’m grateful for that.”
I pause before looking up at Finn with an awkward grin. I imagine he was expecting more of an “I was on the golf team in high school” rather than “Let’s revisit my childhood trauma,” but that’s the Natalie Hart Special, I suppose. And maybe he’s come to expect that after all, because he’s just watching me with that intense, warm brown gaze, taking it in.
“So what I’m hearing is you’re about to destroy me in mini golf,” he finally says, dry as can be.
My head falls back on a laugh. It’s the response I didn’t know I wanted at the moment—not dwelling on the Daddy-and-Mommy Issues, just bringing things back to the light on this night when I want to celebrate and have fun.
“One weekend per year of playing lots of mini golf doesn’t make you a pro,” I answer.
His eyes narrow, but they also glint with humor. “Yeah, and that is not a denial of the fact that you, specifically, are really good.”
I wink. “Guess you’ll have to find out for yourself.”
We’ve completely lost our bearings since the initial tour of the lodge, so we get directions from the restaurant’s ma?tre d’ to the mini golf course right beside the main building, mutually deciding not to change from our fancy getups yet. I haven’t felt this pretty in a while, and I plan to get some mileage out of it. I’m also just too eager to let anything slow me down.
But then something does. The Closed sign hanging on the gate to the mini golf course.
“Noooo!”I wail. I would sink to my knees in despair, but I have enough sense left to not want to ruin my dress. “This is like expecting Leslie Odom Jr. to host the Tonys, but they replace him at the last minute with James Corden.”
Finn is genuinely distraught as he looks from the sign to me, rubbing a hand over his head and bringing the other to rest on my shoulder. “I don’t know what that means, but it must be bad.”
“The worst!” I cry.
He sighs as he looks back to the Gate of Letdowns. Then his hand leaves my shoulder and he takes a step toward the course, expression turning more determined than defeated. He walks a few feet in one direction down the tall fence that lines the perimeter, then pivots to walk a few feet the other way. He eyes the fence and cranes his neck to peer into the space beyond it, where the course presumably stretches out under a dusky sky.
“You know what?” He turns to me, hands on hips. I meet his eyes warily. “I bet we can hop the fence.”
My head tips sideways as I try to determine if I heard him correctly. “I’m sorry, I thought you just suggested hopping the fence.”
“Yeah,” he says back.
“Breaking into the closed mini golf course.”
“Uh-huh.”
“You, Finn Markum, Mr. Leave No Trace, so rigid I’ve wondered once or twice if your spine could be used as a yardstick.”
His mouth forms a thoughtful sort of frown. “One could argue this is the best time to put the leave-no-trace principle to use.”
I find that I can’t disagree.