Chapter Two
Adrienne found it surprisingly hard to relax, which was concerning since this entire weekend with her brother and two of their mutual friends was supposed to be relaxing.
She was currently draped across a Frette towel on a massive ivory sun pad that stretched across most of the aft deck.
Kyle and Wade were inside somewhere setting up the PlayStation, and beside her was her longtime friend Nicki.
“Take a photo of me,” Nicki said, pushing her phone with its fuchsia pink leopard print case toward Adrienne. “I want to post it to Instagram.”
Adrienne could think of nothing worse than peeling her shoulder blades off the warm towel to play Instagram influencer assistant.
But Nicki had spent all of last week following Adrienne through boutiques in Milan, crouching on cobblestone sidewalks in Bergamo to get the right angle.
She’d even nearly gotten clipped by a Vespa when retaking photos outside a café because Adrienne’s espresso cup had a smudge on the side.
It was only right that she returned the favor.
“Suck in your stomach,” Adrienne teased, though it was a total lie.
Nicki’s stomach was flatter than a calm sea, and she had lovely defined obliques, which Adrienne knew were from the twenty minutes of side planks she did every day.
She was wearing a matching crochet bikini in a shade of neon tangerine that made her legs look incredibly bronze.
At the comment, Nicki pulled in her gut and thrust out her chest before she stared stoically at Costa Smeralda’s jagged, sun-bleached cliffs.
She rarely smiled in photos because she didn’t like how much gum she showed.
And when she did, she refused to show her teeth.
“Your photo’s already got a million likes,” Nicki muttered, snatching her phone back. “You probably got like a thousand new followers just from that one photo.”
This was a slight exaggeration. The last time Adrienne checked, it was hovering around fifty thousand.
She’d captured her glistening, oil-slicked legs stretched out toward the horizon where the cliffs met the sea in a blue so impossibly turquoise it looked like someone had dropped a bath bomb into the water.
Then she’d posted the photo to her Instagram with the caption Sardinian Soul.
Within three minutes, the likes had crested to ten thousand.
Her followers were already flooding the comments with heart-eye emojis.
Adrienne would take pleasure in the attention if a strange prickly sensation wasn’t stuck under her skin.
She flipped her oversized Celine shades down over her eyes and watched the world turn sepia. Did the strange feeling have something to do with that woman she’d saved earlier? Was that why she couldn’t relax?
“Have you seen her before?” Adrienne asked, taking a sip of her chilled hibiscus spritz. The tartness bloomed on her tongue.
“Who?” Nicki asked, not looking up from her phone screen. She was no doubt agonizing over which photo made her look the best. All of them. But Adrienne knew her well enough that after ten minutes of self-flagellation, she’d delete them all.
“The woman who works on our yacht,” Adrienne said. “The one who nearly ate the deck. Can you remember what her name is?”
Nicki shook her head.
“She just looks so familiar. Like I’ve seen her before.” Adrienne tapped her finger against her chin as if it would somehow jog a memory. But she could tap it raw, and she still wouldn’t remember.
Nicki huffed and placed her phone screen-down on the cushion.
Then she cradled her knees with her arms, and Adrienne knew without a shadow of a doubt that Nicki’s self-esteem was currently lower than The Valentine’s anchor.
“Why does it matter?” Nicki snapped. “It’s not like you’re going to become friends with her; she’s the help. ”
Adrienne felt compelled to correct Nicki, who seemed to think anyone without a trust fund was essentially unimportant. But wasn’t she right? Did it really matter who she was?
“Besides,” Nicki said, stretching back onto her towel. She reached for a tub of bronzer and started smearing the cream over her chest. “Shouldn’t you be preparing? Don’t you have to know how to start fires with a stick so you don’t get voted off?”
Adrienne wasn’t supposed to tell a soul, and yet the secret had slipped out after three martinis at the Bulgari Hotel bar in Milan.
She had let the news slip right after she’d received the congratulatory email from the casting director of Outlast Her.
This season was supposed to be the biggest one yet. Sinners vs. Saints.
Wait... she remembered where she had seen the dark-haired woman before.
It wasn’t a memory from The Valentine; it was from a screen.
A reality TV series she’d watched aboard Singapore Airlines while a flight attendant had silently refreshed her glass of Dom Pérignon.
It had been the first season she’d ever watched and a catalyst for the obsessive binge-watch that had followed.
Adrienne shot up so fast she knocked over the hibiscus spritz, sending a wash of pink liquid and half-melted ice skidding toward Nicki.
When it soaked her towel, Nicki yelped and called for Adrienne, but Adrienne wasn’t there to help her.
She’d already vaulted off the sun pad and was heading toward the salon.
Where was she going? She had no idea. Just like she had no idea what she was going to do with the new information whizzing around in her head.
“Can I help you?” a woman with fiery red hair asked as Adrienne slipped into the galley.
Adrienne remembered the woman from earlier when they’d all lined up to greet them.
Was her name Stacy? She had assumed she was responsible for those delicious golden risotto balls she’d devoured earlier.
“Are you looking for something to eat because lunch will be ready in an hour?”
“Umm...” Adrienne started. For the first time ever, she felt the cold prickle of self-consciousness.
The sarong she had donned earlier was lying in a peach-colored heap, quite possibly soaked with hibiscus, and her bikini was more of a suggestion than an actual garment.
It didn’t help that the chef’s eyes had traveled down to her chest, and not in a flirty way at all.
It felt more like intense judgment. The chef was looking at her like she’d gone crazy, and maybe she had.
“That woman with the dark hair, the one who nearly tripped. What’s her name? ”
“You mean Valerie?” the chef asked, frowning. “Valerie Lang.”
Ding. Ding. Ding.
Valerie Lang. It was her. It was the woman from Season Seven of Outlast Her. The woman who had stepped down wordlessly during that brutal balance challenge. She was the woman who had given up her and Margaret’s shot at winning the title of Ultimate Outlast Her.
“Yes,” Adrienne said, nodding so vigorously she felt her glossy waves bounce against her shoulders.
Then she wondered what she would do with this information and regretted bursting into the kitchen.
This wasn’t like her. At all. But then again, she hadn’t been acting like herself for the last two weeks.
Her nerves were shattered.
In less than a month she’d be forced to accept the consequences of her own actions.
She’d be sleeping on a bed of damp leaves and battling mosquitoes the size of small birds.
She’d be eating only rice and beans and competing against women who would no doubt find her existence an offensive joke.
Surely they would judge her as a walking, talking billboard for privilege.
Was it too late to pull out? Or would word get out that Adrienne Vale was too prissy to handle a bit of mud?
That the billionaire heiress, who had spent her life being waited on hand and foot, had folded the second she realized there was no La Mer moisturizer chilling in a mini fridge.
“She’s the engineer,” the chef said as she lined a baking sheet with tinfoil, seemingly oblivious to Adrienne’s turmoil. “If you need help fixing something, then she’s your girl. You can probably find her in the garage.”
Adrienne nodded her thanks and reversed awkwardly out of the galley.
When she got back to the aft deck, she considered crawling back onto the sun pad, but the thought of Nicki inevitably asking her to take more photos for her mere two million followers and that sticky hibiscus mess was even less appetizing than rice and beans for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.
Just as she was about to turn toward the stairs, she spotted a flash of dark hair and navy cotton disappearing down a narrow stairway that led toward the waterline.
Adrienne knew enough about superyachts to know that the garage was where the jet skis and whatever other water toys her parents owned were housed.
Whatever Valerie was doing there was probably boring and off-limits to the guests, but that didn’t stop Adrienne from following.
When she reached the cavernous space, Adrienne nearly held her nose. She found the smell of diesel nauseating and imagined the poison seeping into her perfect pores. But instead of getting out of there, she crossed the space to Valerie, who was hunched over some sort of engine.
“You’re Valerie Lang,” Adrienne said. Her voice bounced off the metal walls.
She stole a quick glance around and spotted a row of pristine Sea-Doo Sparks strapped down, several carbon-fiber paddleboards leaning against the bulkhead, and a rack of wetsuits.
Then she rested her gaze on the back of Valerie’s neck.
“I couldn’t put my finger on it at first, but then Nicki mentioned Outlast Her, and I can’t believe I didn’t recognize you. ”
Valerie’s shoulders tensed.
Adrienne, who expected Valerie to turn around and greet her with a smile, was deeply disappointed when Valerie simply said, “Do you need something?”
Did she need something? Did inside knowledge of a game that she was determined to win count as something?
“I just,” Adrienne started, wondering how to go about this sensibly.
She couldn’t just go out and ask Valerie directly for survival tips.
Besides, the public wasn’t supposed to know that she was starring in Season Ten as a Sinner.
Nicki didn’t count as the public. When they were trapped in a snowstorm in Austria two winters ago, Nicki had given Adrienne a Brazilian wax before her impending date with actress Lush Greer.
Clearly, this made Nicki feel as close as family.
Valerie was not. “I think it’s kind of a coincidence meeting you here... on my family’s yacht.”
Valerie stood up and dropped a wrench into the open tool bag at her feet with a clank. “Why would it be a coincidence?” she asked, turning toward Adrienne. She was quite a bit shorter than Adrienne. Adrienne felt like a giraffe.
“Well,” Adrienne started, just a bit taken aback by Valerie’s eyes.
They were the palest green she’d ever seen.
They looked like sea glass left too long beneath cold water.
For a second she wondered if they were actually grey.
But no. When Valerie shifted beneath the fluorescent lights, the color caught properly.
“If you must know, I’ve been cast on the new Outlast Her series. ”
Valerie let out a sound between choking and gasping. “What?” she stammered, sounding so flabbergasted that Adrienne found it completely offensive. What did she mean by what?
“Why do you look so surprised?”
“I don’t,” Valerie muttered, which would’ve been more believable had she not been staring at Adrienne as if she’d just grown a unicorn horn between her eyes.
“You do,” Adrienne said, planting her hands on her hips.
Then she immediately dropped them because it felt alarmingly similar to the posture her mother used on the rare occasion she disciplined them as children, and Adrienne was not Elisabet Vale.
“You’re looking at me like you don’t think I’d last a day in the game, like I’d quit before the sun even sets. ”
“You said it, not me.”
Adrienne blinked. She felt bizarrely irritated. What did it matter what Valerie thought? It didn’t. It shouldn’t. But then why was Adrienne seeing red? “You’re one to talk,” she snapped. “You quit that last challenge. You’re a quitter.” Geez, she sounded like she was in kindergarten.
“Thanks for reminding me,” Valerie grumbled.
She swung the leather strap of her tool bag over her skinny shoulder and walked right past Adrienne as if they weren’t having a conversation.
Out of Adrienne’s fifteen million followers, there were at least three million who would give their left kidney if she asked, and yet this woman was treating her like she was an annoying mosquito.
Adrienne hurried after her. “Why did you do it?”
No answer. Just the clink, clink of tools shifting inside the bag.
“Just tell me,” Adrienne pressed, unable to let it go. Or maybe she was just pissed that Valerie wasn’t offering up information the way people usually immediately handed Adrienne things. “Why did you do it?”
Valerie stopped short of the door and turned toward her. “I got a cramp in my leg,” she said impatiently. “Are you happy?”
“You’re lying,” Adrienne said. She once had a cramp in her calf after a sweaty reformer class in Ubud two summers ago, and she’d spasmed out on the floor, writhing in pain.
Sally Richards, an Australian socialite, whom Adrienne was trying to outdo in the star exercise, had come to her rescue and massaged Adrienne’s calf with lavender-scented jojoba oil.
There was no way Valerie had stepped off that platform with such grace if she had a muscle cramp. No way. “Just tell me the truth.”
But it seemed Valerie wasn’t going to tell her anything. Or speak to her at all. She pulled open the door, then walked right through it and up the same stairwell they’d descended earlier.
“You know, I was rooting for you. I wanted you to win!” Adrienne called after her, despite the door swinging closed in front of her with a click.
She wouldn’t admit it to Nicki, and especially not Kyle, but the image of Valerie working off her debt in that humid hotel kitchen had pricked so incessantly at Adrienne’s consciousness that by the time the final challenge had aired, the only contestant Adrienne had wanted to see win was Valerie.
She exhaled hard, smoothed her palms over her naked arms, and huffed at the closed door. “Fine,” she muttered. “I’ll just win Outlast Her without your help.”