by Julia London
As Yin and Yang settled into their tent for the weekend, a steady stream of people began to arrive. A camera crew showed up, and the rumor that spread like fire through the little camp was that the crew was filming a reality TV show—The Making of a Movie. Needless to say, it didn’t matter who the cameras belonged to—there was a lot of preening for them regardless, and in fact, according to Jamie, there was a little scuffle near the mess tent, when a couple of the Starlets tried to get the same close-up.
In addition to camera men (“You mean they are going to film us rafting?” Leah asked, horrified at the thought of anyone filming her drowning), there were various caterers, men with rafts and oars, and other official-looking persons who showed up, too. As the day slid into late afternoon, a party atmosphere had definitely invaded the campsite.
Fortunately for the soccer moms, a couple of the Starlets had discovered a booze locker near the cabin where rumor had it the T.A. guys would be sleeping. Apparently they’d dipped into it with a supersized ladle, judging by the shrieks of laughter coming from the banks of the river. Leah, who had taken it upon herself to do a reconnaissance mission for Trudy, Michele, and Jamie, detected a familiar scent in the air and traced it back to the tent of a couple of Serious Actresses.
“Pot?” Michele asked, her eyes lighting up. “How much fun would it be to go rafting stoned?” she asked, delighted, and toddled off to join in the fun by becoming a close, personal friend of a Serious Actress.
In the meantime, Trudy had pulled a silver flask from her bag. “Rick will never notice it’s gone,” she said confidently, and she and Jamie made up a concoction of vodka and diet sodas for the three of them. Red plastic cups in hand, the three women strolled around the campsite, taking it all in.
The cameras were everywhere, filming women with their arms wrapped around each other’s shoulders, hamming it up for their big shot at reality television. Men with cameras walked around, filming candid shots of the soccer moms. The caterers were busy laying out what looked like a feast, and a bunch of guys, who Jamie instantly termed River Rats, were preparing the boats for the next day’s rafting trip, but their eyes were definitely on the actresses.
When they were joined later by a slightly stoned Michele, the four women were comfortably buzzed, and set up camp chairs in front of the two tents they’d snagged, sipping more vodka drinks, remarking on how much of a vacation the whole thing felt like. Michele was reciting a list of clothes she had brought with her when a sleek Cadillac Escalade slid to a stop next to the campsite, and from its very plush interior, four men who looked like wannabe rock stars stepped out.
“Oooh, look at the eye candy,” Jamie said.
Michael was the last to step out, looking so damn sporting in his hiking pants and boots, an all-weather shirt, and a baseball hat on backward.
“Oh my,” Trudy drawled, checking him out over the rim of her strap-on sunglasses. “Look what the cat dragged in,” she said, wearing a wolfish smile, as Michael, who had been intercepted by Ariel, smiled charmingly at her as he took whatever it was she handed him. “He’s so pretty,” she sighed.
Leah looked away. She wasn’t really sure what she thought at the moment—other than she had the potential to be a total, locked-up whack job—and thought maybe that was better left unsaid. But she glanced back again, dying to know what he was doing—and Michael chose that precise moment to look up and around the camp, his gaze catching Leah’s before she could look away. The pinprick of heat was suddenly a rash, spreading all over her skin.
But then Ariel returned to the scene. “Her again,” Trudy said. “She never lets anyone else near him.”
“Great,” Leah muttered, and watched Michael and Ariel walk away, disappearing behind the cabin.
“Probably going for a quickie,” Michele said with a dreamy smile. “You know how these co-ed trips can be.”
“I’m going to get another drink,” Leah said, standing up. “Anyone else?”
When she had drink orders, she wandered off in the opposite direction of Michael and Ariel and whatever they were doing. If they were doing anything. Part of her actually believed Michael. Another part of her wondered why, if he was not a big fan of Ariel’s, he had to wander off with her at all. And then a third part of her—the chunk made up of equal parts bad judgment and just general idiocy—wondered if he would even seek her out, or whether she’d taken care of that by declaring she intended to date other people.
Later, after the food was served—and what a zoo that was, with half the actresses complaining about the cuisine—Trudy, Michele, Jamie, and Leah nabbed a fire ring before the Serious Actresses took them over and turned an otherwise pleasant evening into a long boring discussion of craft, which they’d heard them doing earlier.
Leah stuck close to Trudy, which turned out to be a huge mistake, because Trudy wanted desperately to keep an eye on Jack, because she hadn’t quite given up on him yet. But when Jack wandered through the camp, he was waylaid by some Starlets who were wearing very skimpy little camisole numbers under their baby-doll jean jackets—seriously, the jackets were so small they looked like they’d been made for baby dolls. “Oh hell no, they are not going to win by dressing like sluts,” Trudy avowed, and went after them in tight velour pants.
With Trudy gone, Michele in a post-high funk, and Jamie telling her entire life story to one of the Serious Actresses, Leah kept her gaze steady on the fire, nursing yet another vodka drink. She had a better than average buzz, and frankly, in that slightly weakened state, she feared that if she looked at him, wherever he was, she’d find a reason to talk to him. And if she talked to him . . . Well. She just couldn’t, not until she’d figured some stuff out for herself.
But she was so certain she was going to make eye contact or somehow unwittingly invite him back into her life that she left Jamie in the middle of her big crescendo on the life story (which was, apparently, getting this job), and turned in.
MICHAEL was thinking he was going to kick some serious Jack Price ass when this whole thing was over with, because he could not shake Ariel to save his life. He walked out of the T.A. cabin, and she was there. He got in line at the mess hall, and she was there. He walked around the camp looking for Leah, and who should he literally bump into, as in collide with when she darted out from behind a tent, but Ariel.
He finally resigned himself to it and let her lead him to a fire ring where Cooper was sitting between two very pretty Starlets, looking like a Greek god. He did, however, manage to lose Ariel when he at last managed to push her off on one of the camera guys that was ogling her, and stepped away, retreating to his cabin before she could discover he was missing.
It had to be a first, Michael thought as he crawled into a sleeping bag. A campsite full of beautiful women, and he could not have been less interested. He’d had enough of beautiful women to last a lifetime. For the first time in his adult memory, he really was just tired of having women hang around for the sake of hanging around. He wanted something more meaningful. He still wanted Leah.
HE and Eli were the first ones up the next morning, along with the caterers they’d hired, standing around in the chill of the morning, sipping coffee while most everyone else slept.
“This is going to be a long day,” Michael said. “Never thought I’d be herding a bunch of women down white water.”
Eli laughed a little and gave Michael a friendly clap on the back. “Cheer up. This might just be the ride of your life.”
Two hours later, as Michael looked around at twenty women stuffed into life preservers, he began to believe Eli was right. They were chattering like they always did, everyone talking at once, but miraculously hearing each other. Cooper and one of the four river guides were trying to talk, and while the women appeared to be listening, they were moving and whispering and looking around to see what each other was wearing. At least that was the way it seemed to the guys.
Michael swore not one of them understood what they were supposed to do if they fell in the water.
He was certain none of them understood their left from their right. And as he exchanged a look with one worried river guide, he tried to smile. “Hey,” he said, “we taught them how to wage war. They’ll be all right.”
The guide did not look convinced.
When it came time to split the women up into four groups—each of the T.A. guys taking a raft—Cooper made them all count one through four, then assigned the ones to a raft, then the twos, and so on. It turned out that Leah was assigned to Michael’s raft—go figure—and he got a withering look for it, as if he had somehow managed to conspire with Cooper to get Leah to count off as a three. He held up his hands as she went marching by. “It was pure dumb luck.”
“More like the luck of . . .” She frowned, trying to think of a comeback. “Whatever,” she said with a toss of her head and followed their river guide, looking like a giant orange marshmallow in her life jacket.
The women climbed into the rafts with a lot of laughing and splashing, which was, Jack opined, the result of having too many cameras around. The four rafts—plus a fifth one holding a camera crew—were set. The guides and the T.A. guys pushed off, then scrambled onto the rafts. When Michael was seated, he glanced to his left and smiled a little. Once again, the guy gods were messing with him, because Michael was sitting next to Jill and directly behind Leah, who sat with her back ramrod straight, and oh goody, there was Ariel, too, sitting up front and grinning like a goon at him from the front of the boat. “This is so much fun!” she shouted at him.
How in God’s name had this happened? So much for Guy Universe smiling down on him. This was karma all right—the bad variety.
Leah blasted an icy glare over her shoulder.
Michael smirked at her back until he felt someone staring at him and turned to his left. Jill was smiling, one brow cocked high above the other. “Trouble?” she asked sweetly.
“Eyes front,” he said sternly, and she laughed and inadvertently dropped her oar in the water.
The ride of his life? More like the ride from hell.
The water was smooth where they put in, the day beautiful, and it wasn’t long before the two front rafts—with Cooper and Jack leading the charge—began to splash and make various attempts to ram each other. And, as undoubtedly every river guide in the country knows, once the seed of hijinks is planted in the minds of novices, everyone is in on the act. In Michael’s raft, Ariel was the first to fling water, and the game was on. The women were all screeching and laughing . . . all of them but Leah, whose paddle was dragging in the water.
He tapped her paddle with his. Leah jerked around. “Your paddle,” he said. “Stay in the rhythm.” That seemed to wake her up, and she grabbed her paddle and began to row, clashing with Ariel’s oar in front of her. “Hey!” she shouted at Leah.
“Sorry,” Leah said, and shot another glare at Michael over her shoulder for good measure.
They reached the first small rapid run, and they could see the first couple of rafts bobbing through, their shrieks of laughter echoing up the canyon walls. One paddle went flying out of the second boat, and a cameraman tried to stand to capture the mayhem just as their boat began to go through. He almost tumbled in, but some quick-thinking companion pulled him down.
“Forward!” the guide shouted at everyone in his raft, and the women began to row, their paddles clashing with one another in a riot of disorganization and lack of rhythm.
Michael groaned, and while the guide paddled on Jill’s side of the raft—Jill was too intent on seeing the next raft go through to paddle—Michael began to paddle on his side and kept hitting Leah’s paddle, which was constantly a moment behind everyone else. But they sailed through, soaring over rocks and water and screaming at the huge splash that soaked them in the end.
Jill laughed the loudest and turned toward Michael, her eyes and smile shining, and reached to wipe the water from his shades. He grinned at her and then inadvertently looked at Leah, who was looking at him as if he’d just grabbed Jill and laid one on her.
“What?” he asked, as Jill leaned forward to say something to the other women in the raft.
“Nothing!”
“Why are you staring at me?”
“I am not staring at you,” she said, just as her paddle bounced off a rock and rattled her.
“Hey, Blondie, let’s keep our eye on the river, okay?” the guide said to Leah. She snorted and began paddling again, almost knocking Michael’s paddle out of his hands.
They hit calmer water, and the four rafts began to battle again, splashing each other with full frontal paddle assaults and ramming each other when they could. One of the soccer moms went over the edge of her raft, much to the delight of everyone else. Cooper caught her paddle first, then her, and pulled her back in like a man who had saved a million women before.
They hit a couple more fast runs before lunch, but nothing too spectacular. Nevertheless, the women seemed to think that they had seen some real white water when they stopped for lunch and were already trading war stories about who had almost gone over on what shoot.
Michael looked at the guide from his raft. “When does it get good?” he asked.
“Oh man, about an hour after the lunch break, we hit some sweet water,” he said with a bob of his head. “You won’t be sorry.”
Easy for him to say.
The kid was right—an hour after lunch (during which Leah studiously managed to avoid him), they hit some great white water, which definitely made it worth the trip. Michael loved riding the water, loved taking the edge. His guide was down with it, and the women were inconsequential to the maneuvering of the boat.
The water was sufficiently fast enough that Leah didn’t have the time or inclination to stare at him over her shoulder. Michael was pushing it, too—the thrill of the ride was helping him let go of some of the pent-up frustration he’d been feeling. The last good shoot of the day, aptly named Bones Canyon, was awesome. It looked like a drop of about forty feet overall, flowing hard through the shoot. The guide shouted at the women to ready their oars, and on his command, to go forward as hard as they could.
Everything was going great—they were flying—but then they hit a rock, and that slammed them up against the canyon wall. Leah went flying off the side, her paddle long gone. Michael grabbed her arm with one hand and maneuvered his paddle into the boat with his other hand. Her eyes were wide with terror as he manhandled her back into the raft while the guide shouted at the rest of the boat to Move right! Move right! Move right!
They managed to get off the rock and move on, everyone in the boat, their oars accounted for, save Leah’s, and downstream, Michael could see Eli holding it up. Leah’s knuckles were white; she gripped the rope on the raft tightly as if she was afraid she’d fall in again. But she looked back at Michael with gratitude in her eyes, and that one look, that single look of crystal blue eyes, pulled at his heart like nothing else.
The rest of the trip was uneventful. They were bussed back to camp, and after showers, several of them went into the little hamlet to dine on Italian food.
Leah went, Michael knew, because he watched her board the bus with Trudy. He and the rest of TA stayed behind. Tomorrow they were doing a harder arm of the river, and they wanted to chill out and get a good night’s sleep. Eli had some excellent bourbon and cigars to put them down.
When Michael did drift off to sleep, it was Leah’s wide-eyed look of terror that filled his mind’s eye.
Chapter Twenty-Two
THE two restaurants in town were definitely hopping with what looked to be hungry campers from all over the Cascades. Fortunately for the ten actresses who had opted to come out tonight, the Italian restaurant had a little bar where they could all just barely squeeze in, much to the delight of all the men in the area.
And just so that no stone of this adventure was left unturned, the camera crew came along, too, squeezing in right behind the women. Trudy, who as of tonight had decided that Jack was beyond her ability to reach—“There are just too
many chicks around,” she complained—had her eye on someone new. One of the camera crew. “He’s more attainable,” she said to Leah as they sat at the back of the bar, sandwiched between the cigarette machine and waiter’s station, sipping wine. “Plus, he’s got a camera. That can’t hurt.”
“I’m not sure how it can help, but, whatever. What about Rick?”
“Thanks for reminding me,” Trudy said with a snort. “I keep trying to forget him, and every time I do, you remind me.”
“Sorry. It just doesn’t seem fair,” Leah said. “You already have a boyfriend and are trawling for one of the very few eligible bachelors in this group.”
“You’re one to talk,” Trudy reminded her. “You have the bachelor wanting to make babies with you.”
“Not really,” Leah said, and turned her gaze in a new direction, hoping to nip the conversation in the bud. “But that’s another story.”
“So is Rick,” Trudy said. “Here—” She shoved her wineglass at Leah. “Hold on to that for a moment, will you?”
Leah obliged her, and Trudy sat up, adjusted the teensy-tiny little halter top she was wearing, then brushed her black hair back from her face.
“How do I look?” she asked, pursing her lips for Leah’s benefit.
Leah looked her up and down and nodded approvingly. “I’d do you.”
Trudy smiled, took her glass from Leah. “See? That’s why we’re such great friends. Okay, wish me luck,” she said, and narrowed her gaze on the cameraman, who was filming a couple of the actresses as they talked with a couple of guys in trucker hats and shirts with the arms cut out.
With a wink, Trudy left Leah sitting alone and sauntered forward, swinging her hips in her best slut fashion.
She would, no doubt, be victorious, Leah thought, and sipped her wine, watching as the little happy hour gained momentum.
The white-water rafting had been fun—except, of course, for the moment she almost drowned—but it also had been emotionally draining. Between Jill pawing Michael under the guise of wiping water off his shades, and Ariel practically screaming watch me, watch me, Leah had felt a sharp pang of jealousy she did not want to feel.