No such luck. When I returned, Kip was laid out on the beach, soaking up the sun and enjoying himself. Nothing had been done at camp.
Gritting my teeth, I set to work. First, fire. Then, I could boil water. After that, I’d have to look for shelter of some kind. It was abundantly clear to me that one of us thought he was going to get by on charm alone. Come to think of it, he’d pulled the same stunt last time we’d played and I’d been too besotted to notice. Gullible, gullible Annabelle. Someday, you’d think I’d learn.
So I gathered brush for tinder and dug a fire pit in the sand and lined it with rocks. I gathered wood. By the time I had a decent stack of firewood, the sun was going down and I was too tired to work on the fire itself. We had no flint, so I’d have to make a fire by rubbing sticks together - good ol’ friction. That required a lot more energy than I had at the moment.
With the last of my strength, I went to the edge of the beach and picked up a coconut. They were everywhere, luckily, but I knew that they wouldn’t last. Still, it’d do for today. I’d gotten pretty good at cracking coconuts the last time I played, and I had it open with two well-placed swings. Coconut juice began to dribble onto the sand and I grabbed it and tipped it back to drink the sweet liquid.
“Hey, you going to save some of that for me?” Kip asked.
I paused in my drinking long enough to respond. “Nope.” And I tipped the coconut back to get even more of the juice.
“Bitch.”
I ignored him. I drank all of the coconut’s juice - and it was a full one - and then cracked it open to eat the meat. I ate as Kip picked a coconut for himself and then proceeded to nearly chop his hand off trying to open it. I watched him, thinking that I should probably help him.
Instead, I ate another piece of coconut.
When I was done eating, I got up, rinsed my sticky hands in the ocean water, grabbed some palm leaves that were lying on the ground, found the box top, curled up, and tried to sleep.
My first night on Endurance Island. No shelter, no water, no fire, and no Pandora’s Box. Kip as a partner.
Yep, things were going great.
Chapter Six
“Maybe I should have left her alone, but…I don’t know. I saw that, and my head just about exploded. What kind of ass**le does that to someone? I had to fix it. So much for my ‘No More Nice Guy’ or even ‘No Impulsive Moves to Endanger Your Game’ strategies.” — Jendan Abercrombie, Day 3, Endurance Island: Power Players
“We’ve been summoned,” Kip said, waving a bamboo card in the air. There was a red box tucked under his arm that I didn’t recognize.
“What’s that?” I asked, throwing another log on the fire. Our canteens were dry and water needed to be boiled, and I couldn’t count on Kip to lift a finger around camp.
“Tribal summons,” he told me, giving me a dismissive look, as if I were stupid for asking. “It says ‘Challenge today, don’t be last place. Don’t worry about speed, this isn’t a race. You’ll play for points, be the first team to three. You’ll avoid Judgment…at least for another three.’” Kip wrinkled his nose. “I think they rhymed three with three.”
“A challenge? What kind of challenge do you suppose it is?” I forgot about the fire and got to my feet, wincing as I did. Every inch of my skin was covered with a deep red sunburn. It really, really sucked, and it was painful every time anything touched it. Sand, a stiff breeze, water, you name it, it hurt like the dickens. The only thing that made my misery somewhat bearable was that Kip was worse off than me. His bu**ocks and groin were a flaming red that seemed brighter every time I saw it and he moaned about it constantly.
Which made him help me even less around camp, but my expectations were pretty much nil at this point.
“I wish this was a reward challenge,” Kip said glumly. “For sunblock.”
“Or shorts?”
“Yeah, that would be good, too.” He studied me. “Your tits look like tomatoes.”
Did the man think about anything other than my br**sts? This wasn’t the first time I’d heard him comment on them, and it irritated me more each time. “Your dick looks like a peanut and your balls look like a pair of meatballs. Should we hit up any other food groups while we’re at it?”
He looked shocked. “Not a banana?”
“Definitely not a banana,” I said coolly, getting a tiny bit of pleasure at his scowl. Honestly, what had I ever seen in that man? I shook my head and pointed at my back. “Just grease pencil my name on me, will you? The boat’s going to be here soon to take us to the challenge.”
I put my hands on my h*ps and stood as Kip wrote on my back, taking an excessively long time and swirling the pencil around on my skin. We’d been chastised by production yesterday for not writing names big enough and bold enough, so now we just wrote on each other’s backs. When Kip was done writing, he held the grease pencil out to me. I turned and obligingly wrote his name in big, bold letters across his back and then put the pencil back in the crate. In the distance, a boat motor roared. Since we were all stuck on different beaches, a boat would swing by to pick us up and take us to the challenge area. Kip and I headed toward the beach.
“So how come you’re not as red as me on your snatch?”
I ignored him. First of all, I didn’t want to talk about my ‘snatch’ with Kip, nor did I want to discuss it with a cameraman five feet away. More than that, I had a bit of a secret that I didn’t intend on sharing. I’d found a small aloe vera plant a short distance away from the water and I’d been giddily putting it on my most sensitive areas that were causing me the most pain.
As in, my groin.
There wasn’t enough to cover the rest of my body, so I was working on a solution — during the endless hours at camp, while Kip swam and whined about his sunburn, I stayed in the shade and worked on weaving fronds together. I’d made myself a rough mat and later I’d make a sun shade. Surprisingly, I wasn’t feeling weird about being na**d anymore, so clothing was lower on the list than shelter.
Still, I was actively trying to stay out of the sun. Kip was like a turkey in a rainstorm — too stupid to come in for his own safety.
The boat pulled up into the water and someone waved us forward. I took off my sneakers and held them in my hand as we waded out to the boat and were helped in.
“Got your canteens?” a production crew member asked us. “You’ll need them. Everyone needs to stay hydrated.”