Chapter Nine
Now
Aside from the buzzing mosquitoes and leaves rustling in the trees, they walked in silence. After about five minutes, the
beach dead-ended at a rocky cliff that loomed over the sand like a cresting wave of rock. About as high up as a Ferris wheel,
the rock face had plenty of footholds. Though it wasn’t a sheer drop-off, one wrong step would be treacherous.
No way Piper was climbing up there.
Next to her, Wyatt crawled upward like a bear. He glanced down at Piper. “What’s wrong?”
“I’m not a big fan of heights.”
“That’s right.” A ghost of a smile flickered across his face. “You stay here. I’ll go check it out.”
“How do you know it’s safe?” Piper made a mental list of the lacerations, broken bones, and internal damage that could happen
if he fell. None of which she was equipped to handle. “What if you slip and fall?”
“I have experience with this. Trust me.”
Piper wanted to point out that the last time she’d trusted him he’d crashed a plane, but now didn’t seem like the time. Wyatt hadn’t waited for her permission anyway. Dead set on being reckless, he ascended the jagged cliff like a skilled rock climber. Reaching the top, he swung one leg over the flat surface and pulled himself to safety with ease, then disappeared from her sight. Piper unclenched her fists.
As the minutes ticked by and he didn’t reemerge, Piper paced back and forth while visions of Wyatt hurt, or worse, played
in her head. She shouted his name, but the sound evaporated over the roar of the ocean. Neither of them knew what lurked up
there. Anything could’ve happened to him. Being stuck here alone hadn’t crossed her mind until now. Besides trying to stay
alive, most of her energy had gone into her resentment of Wyatt’s sudden reappearance in her life. But now, confronted with
the possibility of figuring this out on her own, Wyatt’s company was the lesser evil by far.
After longer than she’d have liked, Wyatt’s hunter green shirt caught her eye at the top of the rock. Piper held her breath
while he slowly picked his way down, slipping only once on loose rocks. She didn’t exhale until his feet were back on the
ground. Dirt streaked his legs, and his taut arms glowed with sweat.
“We’re definitely on an island that’s maybe five or six miles long.” He wiped beads of perspiration from his forehead with
the back of his hand. “I could see the ocean on all sides from up there. And I think I saw a clearing in the woods, a short
way from the beach, that we should check out. There could be a pond or waterfall or something. Maybe food.”
Great. Somehow the climb had given Wyatt more energy when all she wanted to do was take a nap after that spike of adrenaline
from worrying about him.
“I don’t know, Wyatt. On those wilderness shows where people get dropped off in the middle of nowhere to see who can last
the longest, the people who don’t move around a lot always win. I think we’ve done enough for one day.”
“Then it’s a good thing we aren’t on reality TV. I think we’ll both feel better if we find something to eat or water, and
that won’t happen if we go back and sit on the beach.”
As if on cue, Piper’s stomach whined. Traitor. She crossed her arms over her chest.
“How about we look for thirty minutes?” Wyatt suggested. “If we find nothing, we’ll head back to our base camp and conserve
our energy.”
A bead of sweat rolled down Piper’s back, and she fanned her face with a hand. Hot air, drenched with humidity, had replaced
yesterday’s light breeze.
The woods behind them beckoned, cool and inviting. It couldn’t hurt to take a quick look.
Piper blew out another breath. “Fine. Lead the way.”
With no clear path to follow, they threaded their way through the dense tangle of trees, stepping over roots and ducking under
limbs. Piper followed in Wyatt’s footsteps, carefully avoiding the iguanas warming themselves in patches of sunlight every
few yards. The large prehistoric creatures only glanced in their direction as they passed by. Instead, it was the birds overhead
that squawked, high-pitched and urgent, alerting flock-mates to the intrusion into their private sanctuary.
Piper had spent many summers traveling the world with her parents, but she’d never wandered the wild land of a foreign place
before. The trees jutting up at odd angles and birds with feathers painted in unexpected colors, looking like she’d stumbled
into a Dr. Seuss book, were just unfamiliar enough to put her on edge.
They were far from home.
Eventually, the sand gave way to dirt, moisture hung in the air, and they stepped into a sun-filled glade. In the center,
light reflected like a mirror off a shallow pond. Jackpot.
Walking over to the pond, Wyatt scooped up a handful of water and sniffed it. “I don’t know if this water is good enough to
drink, but it’s a solid backup if we need it.”
Piper leaned against a wide tree trunk to catch her breath. Beyond the pond, trees grew sparse, interspersed with large green plants dotted with impressive spikes resembling cacti. Each plant was adorned with bright red bulbs like a crown of rubies. Why did this strange plant look so familiar to her? She walked over and inspected one. Avoiding the long, spiny needles, she plucked a red bulb the size of a golf ball and raised it to her nose. A combination of strawberry and orange blossom scents tickled her nostrils—fruity but not too sweet.
“Careful!” Wyatt shouted, coming up behind her. “We shouldn’t eat anything we don’t recognize. They could be poisonous.”
“I think I do recognize this.” She held the berry up to the sunlight. “Ethan was drinking something, a margarita maybe, made
of these when I talked to him before my flight.”
Wyatt raised a doubtful eyebrow. “Ethan was drinking a cactus margarita?”
A few yards away, a small bird with an orange beak and iridescent green throat trilled loudly from its perch on an identical
spiky plant. Another bird joined him, pecking at a red berry’s shell until juice flowed freely.
“Look! If the birds are eating them, it’s safe to say we can, too.” Piper plucked another berry off the cactus plant, proud
of her observation.
Wyatt cocked his head to one side before breaking into a wide grin. “You’re right. Lunchtime!”
Piper smiled smugly. Maybe she wasn’t so bad at this survival thing after all. They picked as many berries as they could carry,
and Wyatt used the Swiss army knife he’d rescued from the plane’s safety kit to cut open the hard rinds to reveal the pulpy
pink meat inside. They celebrated by sitting in the shade in peaceful silence, letting their sweat cool while gorging on the
sweet fruits, which burst like watermelon in their mouths.
A momentary truce.
Before they left, Wyatt pulled his shirt off over his head and used it as a sling to carry more berries back to the beach. Follow ing behind him, Piper tried ignoring the way his back muscles rippled with every step and how perspiration beaded and ran down his spine before disappearing into the waistband of his swim trunks. She swallowed hard, wishing she could follow them all the way down.
This kind of dangerous thinking would only lead to trouble.
To distract herself, she focused on the motions of every bird and lizard, hoping to uncover another hidden food source. Up
ahead, a small gray bird pecked at something shiny in the brush to their left.
“Hey, wait up,” she called out to Wyatt.
She squeezed her way between two trees for a closer look at whatever lay on the ground. The bird tilted its head, then flew
away to watch from a nearby branch. Piper brushed some leaves away and uncovered a navy suit jacket with brass buttons that
glinted in the sun.
“Are you missing a suit?” She held it up for Wyatt to see.
Shading her eyes, she craned her neck upward and searched for more of their belongings among the overhead trees. About seven
feet above her head, she spotted Wyatt’s half-opened suitcase hanging from a limb, its contents spilling onto the ground like
a busted pinata. Waving in the gentle breeze, a pair of blue boxer briefs clung to a nearby small branch. Against her will,
Piper pictured Wyatt wearing them—and nothing else. A new sheen of perspiration dampened her brow, and she used the hem of
her cover-up to wipe it away.
Wyatt grabbed the offending underwear and stuffed them into his back pocket before turning his attention to his suitcase.
He eyed the tree. “I bet I can climb it.”
Piper glanced sideways at him. “Just because you can climb something doesn’t mean you should.” Did he have to solve every
problem by sheer force or manpower?
She picked up the matching suit pants lying nearby and held them toward him. “Can you use this as a lasso or something and shimmy it off the branch?”
His eyes lit up like she’d challenged him to a dare and got to work, holding the pants by the end of one leg and whipping
them upward, until he caught a corner of the suitcase and grabbed hold of the other leg.
While Wyatt finagled his luggage off the tree limb, Piper scanned the treetops. If Wyatt’s suitcase had landed here, maybe
hers had, too. Sure enough, after taking a few more steps to her left, a flash of pink winked into sight above. Closer to
the ground than Wyatt’s had been, her suitcase sat barely out of reach, wedged into a V-shaped crux of a thick branch and
the trunk.
A little higher up, golden orbs hung like crystals of a chandelier from the top of the tree. One of the yellow orbs rested
at Piper’s feet on the forest floor. She picked it up, weighing it in her hand. It was the size of a football but much heavier.
A fruit of some sort?
She drew her arm back and chucked the fruit at her luggage. It connected with a satisfying thunk, but the bag shifted only
slightly.
“Piper?” Wyatt called out. “Where’d you go?”
“Over here!” She scooped up the fruit and tried again, still missing her bag but knocking a few more golden orbs down this
time. They tumbled to the ground, one rolling to a stop in front of Wyatt.
He scooped it up to examine closer. “Hey, I think these are papayas!”
Piper grabbed another papaya and heaved it at her luggage, pushing it forward another inch. Wyatt followed suit, his impressive
swing knocking the suitcase down with a single try. It landed with a crack, the frame bending into more of a triangle than
its original rectangle. Miraculously, it stayed zipped.
“Thanks,” she said, trying to hide her annoyance. She’d had it under control before he jumped in with his big muscles and Energizer Bunny attitude.
“No problem. I can’t believe you found our luggage and more fruit!” He gathered four papayas and zipped them into his suitcase.
“We need to remember where this tree is in case we need to come back. Aren’t you happy we hiked into the woods?”
Piper didn’t bother answering him. Happy didn’t come close to describing her current bug-bitten, hot, and sweaty condition,
but she didn’t hate the idea of something real to eat. And a change of clothes would help, too. She had no intention of needing
to return to this spot, but she took in the shape and size of the trees around them as a reflex.
After she’d wrestled her bag over a protruding root, Wyatt stepped in to help. His large hand covered hers on the suitcase
handle, and a jolt of energy shot through her at his touch.
Piper shook her head at him. “I’ve got it.”
If the wheels still worked, that might have been true. But by the time they reached the sandy shore, her suitcase had doubled
in weight, and her arms were on fire. Relenting, she let Wyatt help her.
“Looks like you never learned to pack light, huh?” he joked, maneuvering both suitcases over the sand. “I guess some things
never change, but I’m surprised you have a pink bag. Didn’t you swear off this color for all time?”
It was a harmless statement, and he’d hit the mark about her hatred of pink. She’d boycotted it in ninth grade as an act of rebellion against her mother, who’d spent years putting Piper in outfits with lace, bows, or anything in the rosy shade. But the casualness of his comment irked her. Wyatt couldn’t just pick right back up where they’d left off like they were close friends who talked all the time. These little details were too personal, more intimate than he deserved. Dropping his knowledge of her into conversation made it hard for her to remember why they weren’t friends anymore. Except she remembered all too well.
And remembering made her want to scream at the sky—like Taylor Swift double-tapping the coffin of her short-lived romance
with Jake Gyllenhaal ten years later.
Wyatt could claim to be a survival expert, but she refused to let him add “Piper expert” to his list. He’d lost that privilege
when he broke her heart and moved on with Kiera the same day—going as far as inviting Kiera to meet him at their sanctuary,
the clubhouse, throwing his treachery in Piper’s face and twisting the sharp knife of betrayal past the point of repair.
“Stop acting like you know me.” The words shot out of her mouth like a rocket. “You don’t anymore.”
Wyatt stopped in his tracks and turned back toward her, his brows knit low and eyes glossy. “I may not know you as well anymore.
But you used to know me better than anyone on this planet, and I’d bet the same was true about me for you. That doesn’t just
disappear.”
“Maybe not, but you did.” She’d delivered a low blow, but Piper was too hot and too hungry to care about being civil.
Wyatt sucked in a sharp breath. “If I recall correctly, you were the one who said you never wanted to see me again. That I shouldn’t speak to you under any circumstances. You were very
clear about that.”
“Yeah, I didn’t want to talk to you after you shattered my heart! That’s what people say during a breakup when they’re hurt.”
Piper glared at him. “I knew we were over as a couple, but I didn’t think you’d let our friendship die, too. I thought you’d
reach out. Apologize for rubbing Kiera in my face, at the very least. Would it have killed you to send a birthday text or
Instagram message?”
“I’m not on Instagram.”
This Piper knew from her many late-night searches on social media, hoping to glean some clues about his life, but she wouldn’t tell him that. And it wasn’t even close to the point. “Look. I may not have a choice, but I don’t have to like that I’m stuck here with you. And I don’t want to pretend we’re friends when we aren’t.”
“Fine.” Wyatt held his hands up in surrender. “But for what it’s worth, I am sorry.”
But Piper didn’t know which he was apologizing for—breaking her heart or acting like he hadn’t.