Chapter Six
Talia watched Shakira and Amy drop their plump goose-feather pillows on the bamboo mat.
They both looked incredibly smug, and frankly, they’d earned it.
The pair were the first Outlast Her challenge winners.
Even Talia had to admit she was a bit jealous.
Not because of their winnings, but because of the title they’d each gained.
The two of them would always be the first-ever win on the first-ever episode of Outlast Her.
The last time Talia had been first at anything, she’d still had a fully intact rotator cuff and could sleep on her left side without pain. That seemed like a different lifetime.
“I think it looks pretty good,” Isla said, nodding at the shelter they’d all worked surprisingly well together to construct. “At least the roof isn’t sagging.”
“For now,” Connie said, chewing on her bottom lip.
Connie worked in construction. It had become crystal clear that she was a perfectionist. She’d spent at least thirty minutes re-lashing a few fronds that had drooped too low and had once suggested redoing the entire structure just because a pole was leaning slightly to the left. Everyone else had disagreed.
But the day was coming to an end, and they needed something over their heads for tonight.
The shelter was simple and functional. It was basically a bamboo pole frame that they’d raised a foot off the sand with cross-poles lashed tight, holding a slanted roof of overlapping palm fronds.
The front and sides were open. Any wind or rain would make its way inside without difficulty.
At least the sky was clear tonight, but Talia knew better than to trust it.
Tropical weather could change on a dime.
One minute the sky was clear, the next it was pouring rain.
“Who’s on fire duty?” Charlize asked, glancing at the makeshift pit, which was really just a hopeful circle of logs and rocks that Taye had gathered earlier.
Amy had stacked kindling in the center, and Talia had helped by collecting sticks and splintered pieces of wood they could ultimately burn, but that was as far as they’d gotten.
Who knew getting a spark without flint would basically be impossible?
“I don’t think we’re going to get the fire going tonight,” Shakira said, staring at the pit with her hands on her hips. “Not before it gets dark.”
“How are we going to cook rice?” Marloe asked, frowning, which was hilarious because even Talia, a self-proclaimed optimist, knew they weren’t cooking anything tonight.
“We should forage for food,” Marloe suggested, kicking up a spray of sand out of what seemed like frustration.
Some people didn’t handle hunger well. Clearly, Marloe fell into that category.
She’d complained thrice already about her empty stomach.
A few of the others were getting sick of it already, which Talia assumed was good for her game.
As long as her own name wasn’t coming up in conversation, she was safe.
“We should go in pairs and see what we can find. Does anyone want to volunteer?”
Talia scanned the beach until she spotted Sabine hip-deep in water, wringing out her shirt. Her shoulders were pink. Her forehead too. Talia wondered if she was going to make the next few days without a blistering sunburn. Probably not.
“We’ll go out foraging,” she offered, not because she wanted to, but because she had to.
She needed a quiet moment away from everyone to explain to Sabine what had happened during the challenge.
Her shoulder had bombed out. Though she had a feeling Sabine had already figured it out.
She’d kept looking at Talia’s shoulder, and after the challenge, she’d whispered in her ear, soft enough for the cameras not to hear, “I knew I should’ve taken the board,” which had to mean something.
“Thank you,” Marloe said.
Talia nodded and made her way down to the water.
“Sabine,” she called when she reached the shore.
Gentle waves rolled up the sand and splashed against her ankles.
Sabine snapped her head toward her. Her teal-colored eyes were so light in the sun they pierced deep into Talia’s soul, causing a slight flutter in her stomach.
“Yes,” she said impatiently.
Talia ignored her tone. “We’ve been delegated to foraging duties.
Do you perhaps know which berries are poisonous?
” They’d done a pre-filming survival briefing where a bald man called Jim had explained which plants were edible and which were not.
Talia hadn’t paid much attention. All she could remember was the phrase: when in doubt, don’t eat it.
“Bright colors are bad,” Sabine said, wringing out her shirt some more.
“White sap is bad, and if anything smells like almonds, don’t eat it.
It’s got cyanide.” She draped the shirt over her shoulder and waded up the shore.
Then she walked past Talia and headed toward the trees without so much as a word.
Talia followed. At first, her eyes were on the sand, spotting the various seashells, but then she couldn’t help herself.
Sabine’s bikini bottoms were riding up. Her ass was as smooth and perfect as a peach, and her calves were muscly and they flexed with each step.
Her back moved in clean lines, and her shoulder blades slid beneath her sports bra like a diagram in an anatomy book Talia had skimmed in high school biology.
And she wasn’t going to lie, the other side of Sabine, her pillowy breasts barely held back by the sports bra, and toned stomach, were equally appealing.
And then Talia saw it.
A flash of ink near her shoulder blade, half hidden by the strap.
It was too small to make out, but still Talia felt a stupid little jolt of something she couldn’t quite understand.
Why did seeing that tattoo make her feel anything at all?
Well, because she hadn’t expected it, that was why.
Sabine was the last person she’d thought would sport a tattoo on her back.
The rainforest swallowed them quickly.
One step past the palm trees and everything got cooler and darker.
The air was thicker, the heat damper, and the leaves were the size of serving platters.
They brushed against their arms as they walked.
Vines snaked across tree trunks, insects chirped, birds called, and something rustled and then went quiet.
“What does your tattoo mean?” Talia asked, snapping off a twig she twiddled between two fingers. “The one on your back. What is it exactly?” She squinted and made out what looked like fine black lines. But she wasn’t sure. “Does it have a story?”
Talia was met only by silence.
“I’ve always wanted a tattoo,” Talia went on, unperturbed.
Silence had never been a deterrent; if anything, it was an invitation.
“When I was sixteen, I nearly got a tattoo of a dolphin on my shoulder. But my mom found out about the appointment and took my car keys. Said if I wanted to make adult decisions, I could start by walking.”
More silence.
“Then, when I was twenty, I thought about getting a compass as a symbol that wherever I went, I could always find my way home,” she said, poking a rock with the tip of her trail shoe.
“But I chickened out. It’s a big responsibility, you know.
What if I get sick of the tattoo and can’t stand to look at my own skin? ”
Again. Nothing.
Talia ran her fingers across the shiny surface of a large leaf. The veins stood out like tiny ridges under her fingertips. “Maybe I’ll get a tattoo after this,” she said. “The Outlast Her logo or something. Unless I get voted off first, which I really hope—”
“Wild bananas,” Sabine interrupted, pointing ahead. “I’m guessing there are about six there. Maybe more.”
Talia followed her gaze. A cluster of green bananas hung from a thick, broad-leafed plant.
She frowned. They were shorter than the grocery store kind, with thicker, greener skin.
Talia wasn’t a huge fan of bananas. There was something about the texture she didn’t like.
But if she were hungry enough, she’d eat anything.
“How do we get to it?”
Sabine was already brushing aside a curtain of fern fronds and ducking beneath a low-hanging branch.
Once she reached the banana plant—a squat, sturdy stalk rising from a clump of glossy leaves that fanned out like a natural umbrella—she wrapped her hands around the stem, twisted, and then the fruit dropped to the ground.
“Have you done that before?” Talia asked, impressed. She would’ve picked each banana by hand if it were up to her. “You look like you’ve done that before. Do you go camping often? I’d assume with your work schedule you wouldn’t get much time.”
“No,” Sabine muttered as she stepped back onto the narrow path of flattened leaves. She turned and walked away, and Talia scurried after her.
“No, you haven’t done that before,” Talia asked. “Or you don’t camp often?”
Sabine snapped her head back. “You talk a lot.”
“And you don’t talk enough,” she shot. “There’s nothing wrong with either. Now, can you please just tell me what you’ve got tattooed on your back? I’m dying to know.”
“It’s an ECG line,” Sabine replied without slowing down. “Flatline to pulse.”
“Oh,” Talia said. She’d heard the medical term before on Grey’s Anatomy, but call her stupid because she couldn’t remember what it meant.
Did she dare to ask? Or would that give Sabine even more reason to think Talia was the type of person who flitted from job to job purely because she wasn’t capable of holding onto one?
“It’s a reminder of the first patient I brought back,” Sabine thankfully added before Talia’s brain exploded. “I was a new resident. She arrested in the ambulance bay. I saved her life.”
“Is that why you chose to go into emergency medicine?” she asked, hoping Sabine would take the bait and hold a conversation.
Please just take the bait, Talia thought.
She was getting tired of talking to herself, and besides, the easier the conversation flowed, the easier it would be to bring up the topic of her shoulder injury. “Because of that patient?”
Sabine stopped dead.
Talia, who had been walking close behind her, nearly slammed into Sabine’s backside. Thankfully, she managed to hit the brakes before they collided.
“It’s a long story,” Sabine said.
“We’ve got time.”
They didn’t. Not really. In just the last five minutes, the forest had shifted. There were more shadows now. And the sky filtering through the canopy was more of a purple than a pink.
“We should get back,” Sabine said, scanning the forest. “I don’t want to be out here when it gets completely dark. Do you?”
“No, I don’t,” Talia agreed. Not even with the camera crew following them around.
TALIA HAD ALWAYS BEEN good at sleeping anywhere.
She had once fallen asleep on her best friend Jason’s sofa, which was somehow as hard and uncomfortable as a sidewalk.
She had even fallen into a deep sleep in the backseat of her 1987 Toyota Camry with one window that wouldn’t roll up all the way.
And then there’d been the time she’d even crashed on a yoga mat at her cousin Stacy’s shoebox apartment in New York for an entire summer while auditioning for a role in a Broadway production that never made it past callbacks.
The hard bamboo mat didn’t bother her much. The cold did, though.
Mostly because she hadn’t expected it. Not at all.
She thought the Philippines was supposed to be warm.
Tropical even. The type of place where you only ever complained about the heat and humidity.
Yet the cold crept in slowly, rising through the gaps in the bamboo, blowing in with the sea breeze and settling against her skin until she curled in on herself without fully waking.
She was halfway between sleep and wake when suddenly a weight pressed up against her back, and then something heavy slid around her waist.
Talia jerked. Then her brain immediately fired off the worst-case scenario of a snake slithering up behind her.
Surely it was the kind that with a single venomous bite would have your skin sliding right off the bone before you even had time to scream.
Which she considered doing. But then the weight shifted, and Talia’s brain caught up a second later.
It was an arm. A human arm.
Clearly the arm belonged to whoever was sleeping behind her. Who was sleeping behind her? Talia couldn’t remember anything from before she collapsed into the shelter. Her body was so tired from the day that she could sleep for a week.
Without moving too much, Talia risked a look back and saw Sabine pressed up close behind her. Which, honestly, was as unexpected as the cold. She’d thought Sabine would park herself somewhere far away, or at least closer to Shakira and Amy with their fluffy pillows.
The moon gave just enough light for Talia to trace the shape of her face. Her hair was loose. A few strands lay strewn across her cheek. Her mouth was partly open, and as she breathed, Talia could feel her chest expand against her.
It was fine. Perfectly fine.
Except Talia was suddenly unreasonably warm.
And claustrophobic. It had been months since she’d been spooned by another woman.
Eleven exactly, when she’d hooked up with her ex, Rebecca Lang, who’d decided to spend the night.
They’d spooned till the next morning, said their goodbyes, and last Talia had heard, Rebecca was living in Thailand with her new hot yoga instructor girlfriend.
This felt just as weird as that last cuddle with Rebecca.
If Talia could just wriggle out of it, inch by inch, she would be free.
Another breeze suddenly cut through the shelter, and Talia shivered.
Sabine shifted in her sleep. Her arm tightened around Talia’s waist. Her breath blew against the back of Talia’s neck.
Neither was unpleasant. The opposite, actually.
Talia couldn’t help herself; she felt her body sinking against Sabine’s, and then found Sabine’s body doing the same.
The cold from earlier was gone. Talia closed her eyes, just for a second.
She’d move out of Sabine’s embrace in a minute. .. but she never did.