We start to move again, and he stops me. “No. You need to move your legs as if you’re sliding through the air on your knees.”
How am I supposed to know what that feels like? “Okay.”
I can tell on the third attempt my movements still aren’t right, but Ziv is so strong that he molds them into however they’re supposed to look. After five seconds of this, Lord Forchan tells us we can stop.
“The next challenge is to create a picnic table using your bodies and eat this plate of fruit from it.” Dumb holds out a small tablecloth, while Dumber glides the plate in front of our faces like the world’s most obnoxious server. They show us how to hold the pose, which again, looks fairly simple, before Lord Forchan shouts, “Begin!”
Ziv plops down, then, planting his hands in the sand beneath his shoulders, he lifts his hips off the ground until his stomach is completely level. I straddle his waist, resting my weight on his thighs. I lean my upper body back, tucking each foot into each of his back armpits so that the tops of my toes press against his upper back.
“Lean back as far as you can,” he tells me. “But slowly.”
I cross my arms over my chest and lower myself as he lifts one hand off the ground, and then the other. And once that second hand is no longer touching sand, I go flying. I end up with my feet and ass in the air with all my weight pressing into the back of my neck, which is about as comfortable as an IUD insertion sans anesthesia.
Ziv rushes to lift me and plant me back on my feet. “Are you well?”
I rub my neck as I shake the sand out of my shirt. “Fine. Just sore.”
“Let’s go again.” He claps his hands together. “We can do this.”
We try a second time, and a third, and a fourth. As he gets into a position for a fifth try, I throw up my hands. “No. It’s not working. Our sizes are too different. There’s no way to level out.”
He scratches his chin. “What if we switch positions?”
I let out a choked laugh. “You think my micro pits can hold your flippers? We do that and you’re flinging me twenty feet behind you and my back is never the same and I rip your face off.”
“All right! Fine,” he bites out. Then turns to Lord Forchan. “We forfeit this challenge. What’s the next one?”
“The next one is the last one.”
My heart leaps at the prospect of this being over.
“You must take these items and create a stool that will hold the weight of both of you standing on it for a full minute.” He drops the items on the sand. We get down on our knees to examine our supplies, which appear to be this planet’s version of twine, a jar filled with a sticky putty of some kind, and six thick magazines for tourists interested in visiting the island.
“If it collapses with both of you standing on it, you’ve lost the challenge.”
Shit. I’m not worried about throwing something together resembling a stool. But both of us have to stand on it for a minute without it falling apart? That’s where we’re screwed. Even if I weren’t blessed with a belly and fat ass, Ziv is a massive guy. He’s got to be almost seven feet tall and has enough bulky muscle to make him weigh over three hundred pounds. If we can make something that holds him, it’ll probably be sturdy enough to hold both of us.
“Begin any time now, murderer,” Lord Forchan taunts after watching us sit there in the sand staring at the supplies for several minutes.
Ziv and I exchange a panicked look. We have no idea how to do this, and after forfeiting the last challenge, if we don’t nail this, I’m as good as dead.
“Okay,” I say, clapping my hands together in an attempt to shake off the anxiety. “We can do this.”
He nods and starts pulling the twine apart. I dig out a large glob of the putty and start rolling the magazines into hollow tubes. A strangled grunt escapes him a while later, and I look up to find him staring at the sand, shaking his head.
“The time we wasted,” he mutters, looking irritated. “We played it all wrong.”
“What do you mean?”
“Akkal called you tetra.” He shrugs. “What of it? We let that one word pull us apart to the point where we didn’t even touch each other. Idiocy.”
I don’t disagree with him, but why bring this up now? We’re fighting for my life here, and our focus needs to be on building the stool, not rehashing the mistakes we made. What is he thinking? “It was your idea.”
His hands still, the twine tangled around his fingers. “Excuse me?” He’s glaring at me now. “I seem to remember you suggesting we dissuade him from calling you that.”
“And I stand by it,” I tell him. “He shouldn’t get attached to me when there’s a possibility I’ll be taken away. What I meant,” I continue, clearing my throat, “is it was your idea to eliminate physical intimacy from this arrangement we have.”
He huffs in protest. “I tried to kiss you yesterday, and you pulled away.”
