Page 20 of Almost Not Quite Engaged

I laugh and she erases everything with her boot and writes one sentence.

I HATE IT HeRe

I take the stick.

S0oO0o MUCH

I hand her the flask. She drinks the gin like she’s been in the desert for a week, it’s only been a day. The sound of her lips on the bottle rim in all this silence is sexual, desert ASMR.

Her fingers drag across my palm when she takes another piece of jerky and a gummy worm.

We’re enemies making the best of a situation, like two people stuck in a DMV line together, perfectly civil, but would never exist in the same zip code by choice.

I take my shot while she can’t speak.

Need A FAVOR

NO.

YoU”LL LIUKE it

Everyone is chanting. We dart a look at each other then Kat bends forward and looks at her boot. She purses her lips as her body shakes with silent laughter. She picks up a small pebble by her heel and skips it across the circle. We watch it bounce up and hit a humming man in the knee.

“Hey,” he yells. We instantly look back down and she braces her arms on her rock and fucking chants.

I join her so I don’t get caught or laugh so loud I get kicked out of here.

She chanting in a monotone voice I’m sure only I can hear. “We have to make a break for it. We have to make a break for it. You are an asshole but you’re not in this cult.”

I counter with, “Or shave our heads. Or shave our heads.”

She wraps her arms around herself and is truly shaking now. “We are fucked. We are fucked.”

Serge puts his hand on her shoulder, and I stop chanting instantly.

“Let it go. Let it all go here.” I’m dead. He thinks she’s crying, then this beguiling and annoying woman begins to fake wail. Serge rubs her back and she’s full on sounding like a walrus trying to move. I jam my thumbnail into the palm of my hand to stop laughing but then I join her.

War buddies. That’s all this is. I wail and keep saying things like, ‘I can’t. I can’t.’

She looks at me not with her usual glare that sits somewhere between competitive and homicidal but as if something is shifting behind her gorgeous eyes. The desert light catches her hair and her highlights look golden playing off the mahogany and auburn base. I put my cap back on, take it off, then put it back on.

She watches the entire thing and looks away quickly.

Everyone is being dismissed by the gurus. Serge is back, puts his hand on my shoulder, and delivers something about leaving our burdens, following our paths, guided by what we have found. The gurus chant as the sounds of twenty five people trying to get off the ground stand up. I hop up and reach my hand down to help her off the rock. She takes it and neither of us says anything.

Somewhere around the halfway point I pick up my pace because I genuinely cannot go this slowly anymore, and she immediately matches it. Then I go a little faster and she goes a little faster. Then I’m jogging and she’s jogging and everybody behind us is huffing and puffing trying to keep up. Serge is somewhere back there yelling about partners but we just keep going.

We hit the compound like it’s the finish line, and I’m slightly out of breath and feeling better than I have in four days. She’s also slightly out of breath, hair everywhere, hat missing and she’s laughing. Actually laughing.

And then I hear myself laugh too.

She stops. Her face does a complicated thing. I watch her work through it like she’s deciding whether to be annoyed or something else. She lands on annoyed. Obviously.

“How the hell did you end up here?”

“The network wants me to expand to adventures.”

“So, they’re going to make you do stupid shit. Jackass meets Bourdain.”