Chapter 17
In hindsight, Fletcher should have packed sneakers.
The whole outfit was wrong: the poly-blend skirt, the buttoned shirt, the strappy flats.
They were designed for standing near someone more important than her and handing them a stack of neatly stapled documents—ledgers, expense reports, vague threats from Sales about a mutiny.
Not trekking through Rhodes grass so tall it tickled her chin.
She missed the overly air-conditioned skyscraper with the drooping monstera on the sixty-fourth floor that refused to perk up no matter how many times she watered it.
She missed gossiping with Ford over piles of mediocre noodles and new Jet-Setter editions, their talking points ranging from worthless celebrity drama to in-house scandals seeded from the mouth of Molly Bradhampton herself.
At this rate, she even missed the estate.
Sure, they had been surrounded by people who wanted them dead—and the bodies of colleagues already killed—but at least back there, Fletcher could perform basic hygiene tasks.
Flush a toilet. Wash her hands. It had barely been twelve hours since their escape and her scented travel hand sanitizer already wheezed with every squirt.
She and Waylon had walked until the sun burned off the morning dew, but the jungle wasn’t getting any closer. Meanwhile, clouds that yesterday clung to the edge of the horizon now nipped at the island’s shores. Those roiling black thunderheads cast darkness over the plains, threatening rain.
Fletcher didn’t walk any faster despite it. Between her heels blistering and her thighs chafing, she couldn’t.
“What’s that thing people sometimes use to clear paths in the wilderness?” In the midmorning heat, she’d folded up her sleeves, but now her elbows had rug burn from forcing through the grass stalks. A particularly unruly brush smacked the side of her face in retaliation.
“Spence,” Waylon clipped.
“Oh, right. A machete.”
Maybe it was the way exhaustion scratched at the back of her retinas like steel wool or Jackie’s descent into supervillain territory or how she’d been forced to share her breakfast with a monkey, but the fight was picking itself.
Waylon groaned, back to his usual demeanor, floating somewhere between purposefully nettling and naturally on edge. “We’re almost to the jungle.”
“Are we? Because it looks like—” A fringed piece of grass thwacked her, some of its frilly seeds sticking to her lips. She spat it out. Mmm, whole grains. “It looks like we’re lost.”
For the first time in hours, Waylon glanced down at Fletcher.
He’d spent most of the morning plunging deeper into the savanna without ever once asking Fletcher for directions.
Or talking to her. Or acknowledging her existence at all, really, aside from the back of his hand brushing against hers every few steps, close enough to say I’m right here without crossing any uncharted territory after The Hug?.
It riled her up. The Hug? and this, now, whatever it was.
Their physical contact had been limited solely to life-or-death situations, but this was just a hike. And Fletcher hated hiking. No road rules, no structure, no lines to stay inside. Every step unmapped, undefined. Anything could happen.
The sooner they made it to the jungle, the sooner they’d find Carlotta’s key in the staff building, and the sooner she could make it to the marina on the other side of the island and—hopefully—out of here alive.
Before long, she’d get back to the city where everything was gridded streets and dollar pizza and mystery steam wafting from subway grates. The constant hum. The reliable chaos.
Occasionally, Waylon would shake out his arms or flex the muscle of his jaw, a divot forming on his forehead. A few times, he pivoted their direction so dramatically she grew fairly certain they were heading the same way they started.
And every time his touch grazed her hand, she inched closer to an unknown cliff, not fully understanding what mountain she was climbing or why Waylon made her feel like she could jump without crashing.
Now he cast a glance back at her, the wrinkle between his brows relaxing and then fading altogether.
A slow smile spread across his face. Unfiltered and indulgent.
His gaze roved over her, like he enjoyed the pointed crest of her nose, the sun-inflicted freckles on her already-burned cheeks, the irritated slope of her lips.
Reaching, he plucked and discarded a clump of grass from her hair. Then another, tucking a strand of copper behind her ear when he was finished.
His eyes lowered.
A third, he swiped off the corner of her mouth. His thumb lingered there, gentle against her full bottom lip. Fletcher’s blood raced readily through her veins, like it had been crouched at the starting line waiting for the flare to fire.
Her skin thrummed beneath his touch. Some part of her wondered if she’d remembered to drink enough water or if this was a dehydration hallucination and, if it was, she really needed to have a stern talk with her subconscious mind for conjuring Waylon as the protagonist of her fever dreams.
“You can’t see shit, can you?” he asked.
“Nope.”
“Get on.”
Fletcher blinked. “On?”
“Me.”
Again. “What?”
“My shoulders.” Waylon scrubbed his knuckles through his hair. In the sun, it was blonder than usual, coils of molten gold and alabaster white. “Get on my shoulders so you can see.”
She didn’t have time to argue before he ducked down in front of her, hands poised to lock around her calves like a Nebraska state fair carnival ride.
Admittedly, she felt surer of her fate on the Tilt-o-Matic 3000 than she did with skin-to-skin contact.
Her right leg heaved over his shoulder before she could muster a good enough reason not to, and the left leg followed.
Waylon’s palms roughed against her calves, then slid higher. Kneecaps. Higher. His fingers brushed the hem of her skirt, hiked perilously high around her thighs, and she felt the echo of his touch in her hip creases.
She squashed a yelp as he stood without warning, and his shoulders shook with a restrained chuckle, clearly amusing himself. All her indignation subsided as soon as he rose to full height.
“Wow, you live like this?”
Waylon hummed, and the vibrations coursed straight to her bone marrow.
“You can see everything.” Fletcher considered herself firmly of average height, creeping into the upper middle class of the height economy when she wore her work heels. This was the 1 percent.
“Including?” Waylon asked. Bait. Her stubborn lips stayed superglued shut. “The jungle. Right where I said it was.”
Fletcher huffed. Okay, fine. Somehow, he’d navigated them toward the jungle without getting them irrevocably lost. Without thinking, she touched the curve of his finger where a handkerchief hid a jagged red line carving knuckle to knuckle.
“Why’d you fist-fight the map case if you have such an aversion to longitudinal lines?
You clearly know this island inside out. ”
“You wanted it.”
Her cheeks burned. She really should have reapplied her SPF before running for her life. “I didn’t ask you to do that.”
“I know.” Haughty. Arrogant. And yet. “One day you’ll figure out how to ask for what you want.”
A breeze lifted Fletcher’s hair, looser than usual in a haphazard bun, save the few strands around her face.
Here, the sun’s unimpeded glow tested the limits of Fletcher’s ability to avoid a sweaty upper lip, but the breeze hadn’t gotten the memo.
It smelled like petrichor and soot. Like a snuffed candle.
Twisting, Fletcher peeked behind them, following the path they trod away from the cliffs. A storm blotted out the estate fire. The manor’s foreboding walls still stood tall, if a bit charred, but a few petulant embers splashed the gardens orange.
“Have you seen anyone else since we left the manor?” Fletcher asked instead of what she really wanted to know: Did you hear Jackie last night? Is anyone else following us?
Waylon shook his head, and she felt it between her thighs. Which was not a situation she ever expected to be in. Her body was not adequately prepared, limbs turning a little too gooey given the topic at hand. “No. Who’s left?”
She’d obsessed far too much over her mental checklist in the dawn-dim savanna, committing the remaining players to memory. “You and me, obviously. Most of Sales: Opal and Sheila and Asshole Rick.”
“Oh, is that what Rick is short for?” A smile tilted his words.
“Most people assume Richard, but most people are wrong.”
Waylon laughed, and Fletcher lapped up the sound, the honesty of it. No barbed fence, no alligator moat keeping her out. Just laughter: deep and resonating. When he wasn’t too busy playing the spoiled, rich, estranged slash prodigal son, his company wasn’t that bad.
Or maybe her standards for companionship were lowering to anyone who hasn’t actively tried to mutilate me in the last twenty-four hours.
“Who else?” he asked. “The C-suite? Deepti and Jackie and Melv and Bertram.”
“No, Bertram’s dead.”
Waylon’s voice pitched up. “Is he?”
“I…” Shit. “I saw his tie floating down the river this morning. Bloody.”
“And you hate blood.”
“Does anyone really love blood?”
His hand left her leg only long enough to scratch at his jawline. “Phlebotomists. Vampires. Cult leaders.”
“Yes, I’m of the belief that blood objectively belongs inside the body.
” Fletcher ruffled Waylon’s curls. Surprisingly soft.
Did he use a leave-in conditioner? She wouldn’t put it past him.
“So, that leaves eight. Give or take a pride of lions, a well-fed bush baby, and whatever other Jumanji horrors the island wants to throw at us.”
Buried in the brush, something growled.
“Like,” she added with a gulp, “whatever that was.”
“Do you see anything?” he asked.