Page 67 of Wild About You
“Damn,” Finn pants between pulls on our saw. “I think,” pull, push, “you’ve got,” pull, push, “more power left,” pull, push, “in you than I do.”
“C’mon, Markum!” I taunt like I’m a cross between his playground bully and personal trainer. “Use those sexy muscles or lose ’em! Don’t embarrass me! Find that second wind! It’s a hundred grand! I’ll kiss your boo-boos later!”
“I can’t tell…if I’m really…attracted to you…right now or…afraid of you.” The fire in his eyes is giving the former, but I’ll let him pretend it’s a real question.
“Why not both! You can have it allllll!!!” The excessive exclamation points are audible in my frantic yelling.
When we get through the third cut, Finn and I work together to push the sections out and roll them a few feet, but it’s quickly apparent that they need to be about half their current size if we’re to push them more than spitting distance. So we roll and wedge them back into place between the two ends of the tree, as Finn says that’ll be easier than trying to cut each section when it’s out on its own.
It could take hours more or days—I can’t be sure, and I think checking a clock would make me cry—for us to halve the three sections. Finn lets go of his saw handle and collapses to the ground when we finish the last cut, breathing as heavy as I’ve ever seen from him. But I can’t be stopped. Drawing on stores of energy or adrenaline or pure survival instinct, I don’t even know, I move to the first section we cut. I make sure Finn isn’t sprawled in the path of it, then start to push, letting out the roar of a wild beast. The weight of this section is much less a threat to my aging nineteen-year-old back than the first ones we tried rolling, of course, but it’s still a lot for any reasonable person to push alone. Alas, reason has no place in the Wild Adventures finale.
“What the hell, Natalie?” Finn calls as I roll the log piece past him and he scrambles to his feet. “I just needed a break for two seconds, then I would’ve helped you!”
“No time to rest!” my inner she-beast shouts back as I keep shoving the log down the path indicated on our new map. It’s less than a quarter mile, but on a steady incline. “Only push!”
“Yeah, I’ve decided on afraid,” he says before settling in to help me push on.
And on, and on, and on.
Chapter Twenty-Six
“Are we having fun yet?” Finn has the audacity to say an hour or twelve later, the most gorgeous, infuriating smile splitting his glistening face as I feel like I’m near death’s door. Not only have we rolled all six logs to the top of the hill, but, as our next instructions then laid out, we’ve stacked them into a staircase-like structure like the one I made of hay bales at the stables.
In other words, we reassembled the tree we’d just hacked up, just a little differently shaped.
“We’re having a great story to tell in couples therapy one day,” I snipe back. A rather wheezy snipe. I hear the camera operator snort-laugh, and it feeds the shameless attention-seeker within.
Then Finn lifts the hem of his T-shirt to wipe at his sweaty face, and it’s my turn to collapse. Unfortunately for me, the guy even perspires attractively.
Maybe all this exertion was worth it, I think to myself, in my exhausted, mildly disgruntled daze. Hundred thousand dollars or not. I have a hot partner, with arms that flex beautifully and a back that strained the confines of his T-shirt as he stacked the hell out of some logs, and isn’t that the real prize of it all?
Finn waves a hand in front of my face, looking at me like he’s worried I’ve come down with heatstroke.
“What?” I ask breathlessly.
“I asked if you’re ready for this,” he replies.
“Yes.”
A pause, in which I watch a drop of sweat travel down his neck. A nice neck. A—
“For climbing to the platform?” The impatience in his voice snaps me out of my stupor.
“Oh. Yes, that too.”
With Finn right behind me, I carefully work my way up our wobbly log stairs to the platform they lead to, affixed to a tree about ten feet off the ground. Waiting there is a tray of graham crackers, marshmallows, chocolate bars, and an orange envelope, all held by an official-looking person I don’t recognize.
“How are those hands doing right about now?” Finn asks once he’s torn open the next envelope, his eyes darting across the page of instructions. I look down at my palms, still bearing signs of the rope burn from a few days ago, but they’re more dirty than anything.
“Depends,” I answer warily. “Are they about to have to haul a log down this zip line?”
Fortunately, we get to leave the logs behind us from here on out. The long, scarily skinny wire looming like a specter behind the official stranger only needs to carry me and a small plate of s’mores on a relatively gentle but still terrifying descent to a platform farther down the trail. My hands’ job is to hold the plate steady enough to get to the other end with my s’mores completely intact, a task made much more difficult by the fact that we have no way to toast the marshmallows first. The three stacks—graham cracker on the bottom, chocolate bar, marshmallow, and graham cracker on top—are precarious enough without any sticky melted sugar goo holding them together.
In a way, I decide as the stranger who turns out to be the zip line attendant gets me all harnessed up and clipped to the wire, I find these uncooked s’mores relatable. What am I, if not a stack of shaky ingredients, barely holding it together, but made a little stronger every time I face the fiery intensity of my anxiety and fears, or every time Finn melts my insides a little by reminding me how great he thinks I am?
It’s possible I’m coming down with heatstroke after all.
When there’s nothing left for me to do but step off the platform, I take the—exceedingly careful and balanced—leap. It’s not as terrifying as I expected, flying over treetops with nothing but a flimsy metal string keeping me from becoming a splat on the forest floor. It’s not the fastest zip line, nor the steepest, only angled down enough to keep propelling me forward. And I’m too focused on keeping the plate still to feel anything but a nervous exhilaration, the wind whipping the sweaty wisps of hair at my temples into my eyes, chilling my skin all the way through my harness and damp tank top.