Page 24 of Wild About You
I’m convinced he’s already fallen asleep when I hear nothing back, and that’s okay. I can tell him again in the morning.
But then he answers with a quiet but certain, “I’ll do my best.”
It’s the last thing I hear before drifting off.
Chapter Nine
The tent life might’ve made Finn a little too comfortable, because for the first time, I wake up before him.
I don’t expect it, assuming when I blink awake that he’s probably munching on his breakfast already. But when I stretch my arms over my head and sit up slowly, I see the human-sized lump still in a sleeping bag beside me. I check the clock on my sat phone, fearing we’ve both overslept somehow, but find we have almost an hour until our go time. We get to set off for the checkpoint five minutes after Harper and Evan’s go time, with each team ranked below us in the cooking challenge leaving at five-minute intervals after that.
I look back at the guy on his side facing me, his upper torso and head out in the open. Sometime in the night, he appears to have taken off his sweatshirt, and now he clutches it against the side of his face. With the sweatshirt on top and sleeping bag underneath, his head is squeezed in a Finn sandwich. Wonder what that’s all about.
My gaze travels over his features. No trace of Waking Stern Face exists now, with his long, light brown lashes fanned over smooshed cheeks, full lips parted and twitching ever so slightly as if he’s forming words in his dreams. It brings a grin to my face—just for a second, before I realize that I’m watching Finn sleep and smiling at him like a super creep.
As if needing him to sleep in the tent with me last night wasn’t humbling enough. I don’t need him worrying that I’ve actually taken his apology as a confession of love and think we’ll be exchanging promise rings woven out of pine needles.
Hell, I don’t even know if he’ll still be nice to me today—if he was just doing whatever it took to calm down his mess of a partner in her moment of weakness and in the light of day, when I’m not actively breaking down, he’ll resume grumpy business as usual. Nothing I can do but wait and see.
I slip out of my sleeping bag as noiselessly as I can and exit the tent. Finn hasn’t even flinched by the time I’m zipping the flap shut behind me. I make it all the way through my morning routine, clothes on and makeup ready, and am halfway through a protein bar breakfast before I hear a peep from him. And it just about scares the ever-loving shit out of me.
“Did I sleep too late?”
I whirl on him. “Well, damn, good morning to you, too!” I yell, as if my volume can make up for his previous lack thereof.
His head jerks back, eyes still blinking against the bright morning sun. “Uh, morning. What time is it? You’re never up first.”
Even though I thought the exact same thing upon waking, I scoff. “Okay, rude, and we’ve only woken up together on two mornings! That hardly justifies a sweeping claim like ‘never.’ ” His blank expression gives me nothing. “It’s quarter to nine. I can pack up the tent while you get ready.”
When he doesn’t point out that it takes him approximately two minutes to “get ready,” nor argue that he should pack up because he knows how it all gets put away correctly, I wonder if Finn actually meant everything he said last night. If he wasn’t faking for the sake of my fragile mental state. Twenty minutes later, when we hit the trail promptly at our go time—map to the checkpoint we got last night in hand, GoPros rolling, our camp packed up and on our backs once more—I’m almost convinced this change of pace is actually going to last.
Not any change in literal pace—we’re still hoofing it, and I feel a little like a corgi trying to keep up with a greyhound as I follow his lead. But I’m not even mad about sweating my ass off under the hottest sun since we’ve been here, because my teammate is actually talking to me.
“Did I overhear correctly the other night,” Finn asks, “that you were an extra in a movie?”
I press a hand to the stitch in my side as we continue speed-hiking uphill and try to hide the panting in my voice when I reply, “You did.”
“What movie?”
I think about the last time I told someone this, a classmate in Intro to Theater at Oliver, because I thought it was a funny anecdote about my brief stint as a professional child actor. Then I learned I was talking to an actual former professional child actor, who’d played the youngest sibling in a big soap opera family since she was six months old. And who did not find my story funny.
Finn feels like a very different audience. “Uh, it was called Racing Heart? It was based on the true story of the racehorse called Million to One, who won the Triple Crown against all odds—including, if you ask me, a pretty cursed name. I was seven and Granny Star took me to the audition, where she got hired as an extra too. And keep this between you and me, but I even had a line.”
The breath Finn expels sounds almost like amusement, but I can’t see his face to tell for sure. “Why does that have to be kept secret?”
“I just want everyone here to treat me like a normal girl. Not to be swarmed by fans and the media.” I’m totally channeling my soap-opera-child-star classmate.
“Of course.” I smile at his ability to play along, even as a little wariness still lurks at the edges of my mind. Are we really having a friendly conversation like it’s nothing? “So do you remember the line?”
“Of course,” I echo, then clear my throat before delivering it in a small-child voice with the exaggerated Kentucky accent the filmmakers requested. “ ‘That sure is some horse.’ ”
Finn is silent for a moment before he looks at me over his shoulder, as if he was waiting on me to say more. When I don’t, he says, “That’s it?”
I nod. “I’m in the credits. ‘Child at Racetrack Number Two.’ ”
“I hope you were fairly compensated for your hard work.”
“Twenty-five bucks for the day,” I say with a fond smile. “Granny Star took me to Walmart right after, and I spent it all on Polly Pockets.”