AllFreeNovel
Share Us
To my right, a large bird rustles and flaps through the undergrowth. I stop and squint after it. “Did you see that?” I ask Cade.
He nods. “I think it’s a type of grouse?”
“Grouse?”
The name is vaguely familiar.
“Yeah, we can eat them. Be a hell of a lot more filling than some berries.”
I lift my eyebrows. “Are we really going to get to the point where we’re going to need to eat the local wildlife?”
“You saw what supplies we’ve got. You might be able to survive on a handful of olives and a cracker, but the rest of us are men. We need our calories.”
I’d had the same thought myself earlier. They are going to struggle harder than I will when it comes to food, though once we’ve demolished the supplies we’ve taken from the plane, I’ll starve just as quickly as any of them.
“We’d need to catch one first.”
He drags his hand over the lower half of his face. “True. But there must be a way, and it’s not like we don’t have the time to figure it out.”
“You keep talking as though you think we’re going to be here for some time.”
He doesn’t look at me.
“I just think it’s better that we’re prepared.”
I understand where he’s coming from, but that doesn’t stop me hoping and praying that I’ll hear the thrum of helicopters approaching, searching for us. Back at the crash site, he’d seemed convinced that people would be out searching for us because of who his brother is, but now it’s as though he’s going the other way.
I think Cade will just say and think whatever the opposite is of everyone else.
“Let’s take these back to the cabin,” I say. “Reed might be back by now.”
Cade stops and stares at me. “You know, my father doesn’t owe you anything, just because he happened to sleep with your mother fourteen years ago. It’s not even as though he got her pregnant. You were already born then.”
I harden my gaze, refusing to let him intimidate me. “He didn’t just sleep with her. He married her. That’s a whole different thing.”
“Is it? Is it really? Why? Because society has told us that if we say certain words at a certain place in front of a certain person then that means something? If we have a piece of paper, it makes that thing legal? It’s all just bullshit. I doubt either of our parents can even remember the actual wedding. They both would have been shitfaced at the time.”
I shake my head. “You don’t know that.”
“I think I know Reed better than you do. He’s our actual father, not some wannabe for some teen with daddy issues.”
Every muscle in my body tenses. “I do not have daddy issues!”
“Yeah, right. I’ve seen how you are with him. You’re getting him wound around your little finger. Reed got our mother pregnant again when I was still a toddler, then ran off to fuckwomen like your mother instead. Your mother was the home breaker, not the perfect wife you seem to think she was.”
I snort at that. “You have no idea. Seriously. That’s the last thing I’d think.”
“But you think he owes you something, just because he and your mother said I do?”
I straighten my shoulders. “He chose to walk away from us. At any point over the past fourteen years, he could have checked in, but he didn’t. Do you have any idea how hard life has been for me?”
He curls up his lip. “Oh, boohoo. Poor little Laney.”
“Fuck you, Cade.”
“I bet you’d like to, wouldn’t you?”
Suddenly, he’s crowding me in with his body. I find myself with a tree trunk at my back and Cade directly in front of me. I’ve still got the berries nested into the hammock of my t-shirt, but a handful spill out and scatter across the forest floor.
