Page 30 of Fate Fiction

I promise you won’t remember me six months from now, Evan McLeod.

I couldn’t hold any weight to this action. He was capturing his experience, his week shadowing a painfully average woman, who happened to be the only one around to show him the sights.

He’d probably host some avant-garde gallery event next year where he could showcase his whole experience being off the grid and on the fringes of society.

I was really trying to hate him. I was grasping at straws for reasons to swear him off as an actor for good. I wanted to end this week hating both Evan McLeod and Sir Erwyn entirely.

He was doing a horrible job of it.

Even when he briefly got frustrated earlier it was because he wanted me to like him. Either I was entirely the problem, or he was using his acting skills impeccably well.

The sun was growing higher in the sky. Rays of heat beamed down and sweat was starting to form on my forehead.

“I wouldn’t mind going for a dip now,” Evan called to me after using half his roll on photos of the falls, the trees, and anything else.

“Sure thing,” I hopped off the rock and grabbed my backpack.

A wave of nausea hit me.

Swimming. I’d have to strip down to my swimsuit again in front of Evan.

I became overly aware of the way my stomach sagged over the waistband of my shorts, and how the folds of my back would look once I was only in my bikini.

My body hadn’t felt so foreign since middle school.

Somehow these juvenile thoughts that my mother had implanted years prior were sneaking back in. It took years to undo the snide remarks about my body and her voice trilling in my head. “Danielle, I just don’t know if a girl with hips like yours should be wearing skinny jeans.”

In adulthood, I’d felt decidedly neutral about my body, even great about it on some days. A built actor who only dated superstars was a…different audience. An audience that I feared had similar opinions as my mother.

It was ridiculous, he’d already seen me in a bikini. And a towel.

And why did it matter what he thought?

Insecurities shook themselves out quickly, for now.

We walked back up to the split and took the steep trail down to the bottom of the falls.

The bottom of the falls were even more impressive than the top. The rocks towered above us, spraying mist as the water tumbled over them. The swimming hole was deep, but the water was so clear you could see straight to the bottom. Between the sun rays and the strenuous hike, it would be a welcome reprieve.

Evan was in his awestruck state again, so I whipped my phone out to snap a photo of the falls and take a quick selfie.

Proof of life if things went badly.

I tucked it away before Evan would notice. God forbid he thinks I was trying to sneak a creepshot of him in the background.

Under different circumstances it would be payback for the photo he took of me on the rock earlier. A little inside joke that could manifest between us two.

Evan dug through his backpack to pull out a pair of swim trunks and waved them above his head, “I’m gonna change real quick, don’t feel like you need to wait for me!”

This was my out, the second he disappeared into the woods I threw off my clothes, took out my claw clip, and dove headfirst into the swimming hole.

My body turned into ice once I broke the surface. The unseasonably warm early summer was misleading, this water was very much still holding onto the vestiges of winter.

I popped up, gasping for air. I brushed away my hair from my eyes and shivered as I attempted to get used to the cold. The hot sun was doing me no favors now.

Evan came jogging out of the woods, a veritable Adonis. Absurdly muscular, but not in the dehydrated, coated in oil way. His broad shoulders somehow looked less real in person than they did on the show, and I caught a glimpse of a small tattoo on his chest.

My inner fangirl was clawing her way to the surface, thinking passive thoughts about how it would feel to run my hands down his torso, how his body would feel pressed against mine.