Isla huffed out a laugh that wasn’t funny. “There was this enormous gift box in the spare bedroom I was staying in. I didn’t see it earlier, but I thought you know, her friends are all ridiculously wealthy, anyone could’ve given her a human-sized Hermes Birkin bag.”
Tamsyn already didn’t like where this was going.
“Turned out the box was a hollow cutout and Mallory was hiding inside. When I walked into the room, she burst out like some unhinged jack-in-the-box. She filmed the whole thing and put it on social media. I can’t imagine it didn’t show up on your newsfeed. It seems everyone saw it. It had like over two million views.”
Tamsyn’s feed involved hiking videos and golden retrievers with bow ties around their necks. “No, I didn’t see it.”
“Well, it turned out she’s put a lot of videos of her scaring me on social media over the years. They’re all under #mallorywinsagain,” Isla said, looking down at her feet.
Tamsyn couldn’t wrap her head around this conversation. After that first season ofOutlast Her, she’d genuinely thought Isla was invincible, confident to the point of untouchable. She got the impression Isla was someone who never second-guessed herself. But she wasn’t. She had soft spots. Thin places. Old bruises that hadn’t quite faded.
“You know, the more I get to know you, the more I realize you were never carved from a block of ice,” Tamsyn said softly, surprised at how calm the air had suddenly become.
Isla snorted out a laugh. “What? You thought I was some sort of ice queen?”
“Yes,” Tamsyn answered truthfully. “You had that whole Regina George thing going on. Even in Season One’s confessionals you were bitchy. You literally called Talia a ‘two-faced beer-pouring hex merchant.’”
Isla laughed again, this time from her belly. “She betrayed me.”
Tamsyn laughed too. She didn’t even care if their laughter carried back to camp and rose above Barra and Aggie’s industrial-level snoring. It was just so good to be speaking again, laughing again, and acting like themselves. “Sabine betrayed you,” she corrected. “Talia was innocent.”
Isla huffed, though she was smiling widely. Tamsyn could just make out her perfectly straight teeth. “I’m not bitchy.”
“I know,” Tamsyn said, moving forward a step.
“I’m just misunderstood.”
“That, and many other things.”
“Like what?” Isla asked, frowning softly.
Tamsyn took a second to collect all the thoughts she had about Isla in her head. Then she smiled and said, “You’re beautiful, and you know it, but somehow you’re modest about it. Which is surprising when people meet you at first.”
“Go on,” Isla said with a lilt in her voice.
And Tamsyn did, because she had a lot to say about Isla Stone. Some good. Some bad. Some she couldn’t categorize or box up.
“You’re surprisingly funny, or maybe I just find you funny,” Tamsyn went on. “You’re competitive in a way that makes people nervous. You pretend like things don’t bother you, butthey do. For some reason, you let your sister loom over you like a thundercloud.” Again, she stepped closer. One more step and their bodies would be touching. “When really, you’re the light, Isla. You don’t sit under clouds; you burn straight through them.”
Isla exhaled softly.
“And you’re also painfully indecisive,” Tamsyn added before the moment got too heavy. Although, honestly, the moment already felt like there was a weighted blanket over them. “Now, please just make up your mind. Do you want to ignore me or—”
Isla caught Tamsyn’s mouth mid-sentence. Her lips landed hard and sure against Tamsyn’s. One hand slid around Tamsyn’s waist, to her lower back, slipping beneath the fabric of her hoodie before she pulled her flush against her. The other fanned across her cheek, tilting her head just slightly to deepen the kiss.
“I want to kiss you,” she muttered against Tamsyn’s mouth. “I don’t want to be friends, and I wasn’t ignoring you. I was just keeping my distance.”
“Why?” Tamsyn asked, though she knew why. And that very reason was the reason her stomach felt weightless, like she’d stepped off something high and hadn’t hit the ground yet. In fact, she was fairly certain her flip-flops were no longer in full contact with the dirt.
But Isla didn’t answer. And she didn’t have to.
She just kissed Tamsyn again, harder, yet slower, like the explanation was already there in the way her fingers tightened against Tamsyn’s back, and the way her tongue slipped into her mouth. Like the distance had never been about indifference. Rather, the distance had been about restraint.
Chapter Fifteen
The mud had started drying on Isla’s calves before they’d even left the challenge field. By the time they made the long, sun-blasted trek back to camp, her legs were covered in a dried brown sludge that pulled at her leg hair as they walked.
Vivian had called the reward challenge ‘a true test of grit’ when in reality it was just an obstacle course through knee-deep mud. A very challenging, somewhat torturous obstacle course. In pairs, they’d been tasked with dragging weighted sleds from one end of a churned-up trench to the other, then hauling the sandbags onto a raised platform before crawling under a low cargo net. The final stretch had required them to scale a narrow ramp and land four heavy sandbags onto hanging hooks before racing to a wooden tower where they had to untangle a knotted rope and raise their pair flag.
