Page 70 of Wild About You
“Zeke, if you don’t pick up the fucking pace, I swear—”
“Alli, if I keep hearing your voice in my nightmares for the rest of my life, you won’t even get to keep the hundred thousand, ’cause I’m suing you for emotional distress.”
Then we literally round a corner in the trail and I see it in the distance. A flash of orange waving between the trees, the exact shade and size of a Wild Adventures flag.
“Oh my god,” I whisper at the same time Finn says, “Is that…?”
“Oh my god!” Enemi shrieks once again, and I hate that we had the same reaction. “They’re right there, they’re right there, we can overtake them!”
“Does she think we can’t hear her?” I ask Finn, who is noticeably quickening his hop-stepping. I hurry to keep up.
Pounding footsteps get closer and closer, the curses I’m saying in my head get louder and louder.
Enemi zips by us, a witchy cackle echoing in her wake. “Wow, Natalie. Your clumsiness is contagious, huh?”
A menacing growl answers her, and it takes me a moment to register it’s coming from me, not Finn. No, he’s trying to whisper reassuring words in my ear, even as Zeke jogs past us too.
Still, Finn won’t let me just throw in the quick-dry camp towel. He moves from hop-steps to straight-up hopping, these bizarrely energetic, powerful, one-footed leaps, and it’s all I can do to shakily scurry alongside him.
The finish line flag grows more defined, Burke Forrester coming into view along with more crew around him. And when Enemi and Zeke run up to him, arms thrown into the air, we have front-row seats to their victory celebration.
“We were so close,” I say for Finn’s ears only, my voice already more of a whimper. We’re really less than a minute’s walk away. Maybe a little more as we slow to hop-steps again.
Finn presses a kiss to my temple. “I know. I’m so sorry, Nat.”
I want to drop these heavy bags we no longer need, just throw my arms around him and cry into his chest. Let him comfort me in our loss. But I also want to finish this thing with some dignity, and without either of us saying it, I know he wants that too.
When we finally get to the finish line, I expect Zeke and Enemi to step aside, if not to be humble in success then at least to get a better view of Burke telling us we’re losers. But they stay put, and if I’m not mistaken, they don’t look so over the moon just yet. They look antsy, expectant. Like they’re still waiting for the final verdict.
Seems a little weird, but I don’t remember at the moment how the show normally does this. If they always wait for both the final two teams to arrive, stand them together to say what everyone already knows—who got there first and who goes home with nothing. It’s harsh, but I guess I shouldn’t expect anything else.
I make sure Finn is steady, still not putting much weight on his injured ankle, before unclipping our packs and letting them both drop to the ground. That’s a relief, at least. I don’t have to carry one of these big-ass backpacks ever again if I don’t want to. It’s not the massive college scholarship that would change my life, but cold comfort is still comfort, right?
Free to do so, I nestle into Finn’s side. As his arm tugs me close, I wrap one of mine around his back. I reach up and put my other hand on his chest, right over his pure, beautiful, fiercely beating heart.
“Co-EdVenturers,” Burke Forrester begins, that higher-than-on-TV voice doing its best to be low and serious. “You’ve come so far on this journey, on foot and in your hearts…”
He loses me there. I tune out the platitudes, close my eyes, and listen to Finn’s heartbeat. Deep breath in, slow exhale. Think about the positives again.
It works fine enough, but tears still build up behind my shut eyelids and slowly make tracks down my cheeks. We were so. Close.
“What the FUCK?”
The eardrum-shattering scream interrupts my peaceful, almost meditative state. I jump and feel Finn’s whole body tense and stiffen. When I whip my head to the side, Enemi’s face shows nothing but rage. I think her eyes are actually shooting lasers at Burke Forrester. Next to her, Zeke is stunned, a hand frozen in his hair, pushing the strands in all directions.
I look to Burke, seeing if he’ll give me any clues as to what I missed here.
“Zeke, Alli. I’m sorry,” he says. And now I’m hearing my own heartbeat in my ears, my pulse quickly picking up. Is he saying what I think he is? “Per the rules of our competition, it isn’t only about making it here first, but correctly completing all parts of the challenge. When one of the s’more recipients did not eat the entire s’more, Alli threw what remained into the woods, in violation of the challenge’s instructions. As such, your team has not won Wild Co-EdVentures.”
While Enemi sputters like a malfunctioning cassette tape and Zeke gapes at her, apparently learning alongside the rest of us what she did, Burke angles himself toward Finn and me.
“Finn, Natalie,” he begins, a grin spreading across his orange face that I could actually kiss right now, if this is real. “As you successfully completed all parts of the challenge and made it here as a team, on top of an amazing performance throughout the whole season of Wild Co-EdVentures, you are the winners! Congratulations!”
I don’t have time to scream, cry, or even really think before Finn is kissing me. It’s a kiss I feel everywhere, from my fingertips at the nape of his neck down to my toes pressing grooves into the soles of my hiking boots. In every inch of my messy, emotional, beautiful insides.
It’s a kiss that shows everyone else what we already knew—that we won long before we got to the finish line.
Epilogue