by Meg Maguire
He shrugged. “Funny what choices the universe makes for you.”
“Yeah. My cosmic dart didn’t land quite where I’d expected,” Kate added, referring to Ty’s new preferred method of choosing their shoot locations—tossing a dart blindly at a world map until it hit an appropriately forbidding destination. He had a penchant for leaving decisions up to chance, an aversion to caution that bordered on superstition.
He slid a long hunting knife from the sheath on his belt and slapped the handle into Kate’s palm. He pointed to a spruce tree a few yards away and stepped back.
Kate took aim and threw. The knife whipped through the air and the blade found its target, thwacking into the trunk, dead center.
Ty groaned and clapped a hand over his heart as if he were fighting an arousal-induced heart attack. “Goddamn, woman.”
Kate smiled to herself, and hoped the cold breeze would banish the prideful flush warming her cheeks.
Ty slipped the rope from his head and put it away. “And to think, when I met you you’d never even had poison ivy before.”
“That’s not true.”
“Well, you had a manicure. You can’t deny that. What have I done to you?”
“Nothing I didn’t ask for,” Kate said, rising to the flirtation. True, this show was most definitely not the job she’d envisioned when she’d started looking for work as an assistant, fresh off the plane from the East Coast. She’d been desperate and had no experience, and Ty had simply been the first person who’d succumbed to her strong-arming and hired her. Unlikely or not, it had evolved into Kate’s dream job. The travel and new experiences comprised a part of that, but secretly, the real appeal was Ty himself. Kate looked him over again, eyeballing the man who’d easily become her best friend these past couple years. The closest friend she’d ever had…though she’d never told him as much. She took a seat on the log, stretching her achy legs out in front of her.
“You may not be grooming me for a gig as an agent,” Kate said, “but I’ll settle for executive producer.”
“You’re practically that already.” Ty jogged to the tree and retrieved his knife, slid it into its sheath as he trudged back. “I know you thought you’d be choosing my thousand-dollar wristwatches instead of pulling leeches off me, but no one can deny you’re still an ace at running my life.”
Kate smiled with indulgence. “And that’s exactly what I wanted.”
“Control freak.”
“Death wish,” she shot back. “And like it or not, you’ll be in GQ before you know it. The glamour will follow,” she murmured, dreamy, holding her hands out as if envisioning their future rendezvous with stylists and PR agencies.
“So you say.”
“Plus this gig is a fantastic workout.” She flexed her arm. Her figure had certainly benefited from two-plus years of this demanding lifestyle. “And my passport’s got an enviable collection of stamps.”
“Good to know there are some positive side effects to putting up with me,” he said. “And you’re always up to the challenge.”
“I survived three nights in Death Valley, Ty. I think I can handle the likes of you.”
Kate wrapped up their banter with an emphatic slap of her hands on her thighs and stood, refocusing on the task at hand. She grabbed a half-frozen protein bar out of her pack, gnawing on it while Ty stowed the tripod.
“How do we get your shirt off in this episode?” she asked, chewing.
“I’m thinking sweat, hypothermia danger, drying clothes by the fire?”
She frowned. “We do that in like, every single snow scenario.”
“Yeah, and it’s the most legit rationale.” He let slip a hint of rare irritation. “But I’m listening. What’s your brilliant idea this time?”
“You want to fall in an icy river?”
He finished tidying the campsite and stared at her, arms locked over his chest. “I don’t, but I’ll bet it’s top of your list.”
“Use your shirt to rig a makeshift fishing net?”
“Better.” He took a couple steps closer.
“Torn off by a cougar in a fight to the death?”
He stopped right in front of her. “You’re way too young to qualify as a cougar, Katie.”
“Cute,” she drawled disapprovingly, but The Shift had already happened. That’s how Kate described it to herself, this change as Ty went into his shameless playboy shtick. To him this flirtation was a game, a distraction she was certain he only orchestrated to get on her nerves. But its effects ran deeper than she’d ever let him know. Ten thousand women probably had school-girl crushes on Dom Tyler, and Kate didn’t need him knowing she was among them. Still, when he got that gleam in his eye and lowered his voice to that devious hush, he was more than just Kate’s friend and boss. He was the man who set her on fire off camera, no flint or tinder required.
“We need at least another couple hours of footage today,” she said, easing the zipper of his vest halfway down his front. “So get that look out of your eye.” She jerked the zipper back up to his stubbly chin and gave his cheek a couple of light slaps.
“Taskmaster.”
She sighed. “Somebody has to be.”
Still mired deep in The Shift, Ty ran his hands up and over Kate’s shoulders, his calloused thumbs pressing the pulse points of her jugular, as they always did at this moment. A moment that been taunting Kate continually for the past two years and then some. God, two years…
His smirking mouth inched closer as he stooped to eclipse the considerable difference in their heights. The weather-roughened skin of his lips grazed her temple, her cheek, her jaw. His lips neared hers until their noses touched, and then he smiled. This was the point when he always smiled.
“Oh,” he said, pantomime realization furrowing his brow and dampening the growl in his voice.
“What?” Kate prompted, her refrain weary.
He sighed with theatrical regret. “Forgot I just ate those raw eggs.”
“Yes, of course.” She rolled her eyes.
Ty withdrew, just as he’d done in exactly this same fashion a hundred times before. “Can’t risk giving you salmonella.”
“No, obviously not.” But Kate wouldn’t mind giving him blue balls. Was there a female equivalent? If so, she’d had a clinically dangerous case for a long time now.
The first time he’d done that, when they’d been filming the first season’s final episode, she’d fallen for it. That mouth, sliding down past her good ear, those fingers on her throat—hook, line and sinker. Close enough to feel his breath heating her cheek, and then, “Katie?”
And then her breathless, “Yes?”
And then, “I’ve just remembered. We haven’t checked our shoes for scorpions. One of the leading causes of avoidable tragedy in the desert.”
Infuriating. Who flirted like that? Week after week after week? A stunning Australian sociopath with a risk predilection, apparently.
Before the show had come about, Ty had been a fringe celebrity in Australia and in certain sporting circles. He’d gone to school in Sydney for filmmaking then spent several years as a quasi-professional free climber. He was a bit of an anomaly—or a moron, as some asserted—as he’d climbed in remote areas, without a partner or any safety precautions. He’d taped himself as he was climbing, much like the show, one camera capturing the scene, the other recording from his own vantage point as he dangled from cliff faces. Kate had tracked down a bunch of those videos back when she’d been looking into this job. Watching them, she’d known some of what she was getting herself into, dangerwise. Attractionwise she’d been woefully unprepared. Her less professional feelings for Ty had trickled in slowly, grown as their friendship did and as their joint project gained success. Those feelings had eventually snowballed into a full-blown infatuation, but potent or not they were nothing compared to Kate’s fear of rejection. She’d been left by enough people already…her father when she was tiny, her fiancé at twenty-five. Plus her mother, who’d technically always been
around, but had never really ever been there. History had taught Kate that whenever she let herself grow attached to somebody, they ditched her, and she’d left that pattern behind her, along with the rest of her crappy former life on the outskirts of Boston.
Here in the present, Ty flashed her a merciless smile, his eyes lit up in the cold northern sunlight. “God, that was a close one.”
She rolled her eyes again—like hell it was. This exchange was like clockwork in its methodology. Water torture. Drop by drop, month after month. No small wonder Kate sometimes felt as if she were drowning.
“You are so unprofessional,” she sighed. Silly as it was, this little routine always left Kate feeling vulnerable. She tugged reflexively on her bad ear. It still ached sometimes, even twenty-plus years after she’d recovered from the infection that had taken most of her hearing on that side. She kept her eyes trained on the ground, hoping once again that her face wasn’t coloring. Her good mood waned. In its wake she shivered, remembering how tired and cold she was.
“I’m going to get some panoramas,” she grumbled, meaning the sweeping scenery shots they used to fill the air between action sequences. The film editors spliced them in and the music guy added appropriately grand-or diresounding accompaniment for whatever the location was. She suspected most of their female viewers simply tolerated these scenes, impatient for the next shot of Ty.
Kate walked a short distance and began recording. In the finished product they tried to give the illusion that Ty did all the work himself, but anyone with half a brain knew the unsteady camera that was frequently filming him had a person behind it. A disclaimer flashed on the screen just after the show’s opening sequence, designed to render this masquerade acceptable. Do not attempt these survival scenarios. Dom Tyler has a trained crew assisting him. This program is for entertainment only.
Boots crunched on the snow behind Kate to give away her partner’s approach. Even if they hadn’t, she could sense him. Ty had an energy that made everything near him vibrate at the same frequency. Kate liked that about him. It gave her a contact high, a taste of the chaos she worked so hard to keep at bay in her own body and brain.
She kept her eyes on the camera. “What is it, Ty?”
“What are you going to have for dinner tonight when we get back to town?” he asked from just behind her right shoulder.
She shook her head. “Masochist.” Ty never ate what he couldn’t hunt or scavenge from the wild when they were in the middle of making an episode.
“You going to have a beer?” he asked.
She didn’t reply.
“You going to have six beers and finally make a pass at me?”
“Doubtful, Ty. I’d need about a fifth of whiskey and a handsome bribe for that to happen.”
“My PA could arrange that.”
“Oh, could she?” Kate turned to fix him with her best impression of an unamused assistant.
Ty commenced to sing, shamelessly. It was a song off an old cassette by the Puerto Rican boy band Menudo. Though neither Kate nor Ty spoke Spanish beyond the tourist level, she suspected a native speaker would find his rendition damn near fluent—they’d listened to that tape a hell of a lot.
“Doesn’t it take you back, Kate?” Ty asked, interrupting his own vocals. “What was your favorite Torture Tape?”
“As the driver, or the passenger?”
“Driver,” Ty said.
One of Kate’s very first assignments as Ty’s PA was to find them a vehicle big enough to transport the filming and camping gear and safe enough to get them from Honduras to Alaska—since their initial budget hadn’t allowed for air travel—and cheap enough to make Kate’s eyes roll at the ridiculousness of the task. When they were on the road in that ancient death trap, whoever got stuck driving was allowed to torture the passenger by playing the most obnoxious secondhand cassette they could find, ad nauseum.
Kate pondered the question before lowering her eye to the viewfinder once more. “I thought the soundtrack to The Little Mermaid was one of my better efforts.”
“That was pretty rough…although I prefer it over Mariah Carey. At least the way you sing it.”
Kate made herself sound more exasperated than she was. “Can I help you with something, Ty?”
“Don’t you miss the van? I do.”
She sighed. “I don’t know what I miss the most…the Naugahyde ripping the skin off the backs of my thighs in the Mexican heat, the leak above the passenger seat. The way it broke down every five thousand miles so we had to sleep in the back.”
“Don’t forget the mysterious latex smell,” Ty added.
“It’ll still be there when we get back to L.A. For now I’m actually enjoying having a vehicle with a working radio for a change.”
“Well, not me.” Ty fell silent a few moments as Kate resumed filming, then she felt him toying with her short ponytail. “You fancy a snowball fight?” he asked. “I’ll give you first throw.”
“Please go back to work, Ty. Get me twenty more minutes of commentary. We need to pack up in an hour, anyhow. Do your MacGyver challenge.”
He gave her ponytail a final flick before he left her, tromping back toward the campsite, belting out Los Lobos. She shook her head. It was like herding toddlers some days, though to be fair, once the work was done, she was just as bad. All the time she’d spent traveling with Ty had brought out facets of her personality she hadn’t even known were there. He saw her at her stinkiest and bitchiest and least lovable, and he still stuck around, totally unfazed. It was the closest thing to unconditional love she’d ever known.
A few minutes later Kate clicked the camera off and headed back to camp to find Ty crouching a few paces from a tripod, addressing the mic. She checked to make sure her shadow wasn’t about to creep into his shot then tiptoed around him to get to her pack. He was good. When the camera was on, Ty could ignore her presence like she wasn’t even there.
“…and ptarmigans and some larger rodents, although as you’ve noticed, I haven’t been so lucky. Let’s pretend I was, though, for the sake of storytelling—let me show you another way to make a fire. We’ve got some decent sun right now, so I want to try something with that disposable camera the crew included in my little arsenal.” He abandoned the shot to gather a few things, returning to show their future audience how to smash up a cheap point-and-click to get the lens out and use it to ignite the cardboard housing.
Kate walked over as he wrapped the segment. “Very nice. See how fun it is to do your job?”
“Thanks for the disposable.”
“That was an easy one,” she said. “Your MacGyver rating was only about a three.”
“You ought to be challenging me a bit more, then. Time to head to town?”
Kate consulted her waterproof watch. “Yeah. Let’s get packed up.”
The snowmobile team would arrive in short order to bring them back to the one-traffic-light-town they’d based the expedition in. They’d drop their stuff off at the motor court and go in search of dinner, and in just a few short hours the other Ty would come knocking. The thought made Kate shiver inside her more-than-adequately-warm coat.
2
“AH, CIVILIZATION.” Ty slid onto a bar stool beside Kate, relieved for a bit of padding under his frozen, beaten body. He sat on her right as always. She’d never told him exactly what had happened to her left ear, but he didn’t pry. Getting questioned about her childhood snapped Kate up tighter than a bear trap…and besides, Ty didn’t particularly fancy returning the favor. Secrets didn’t bother him. What he had with Kate was better. They lived in the present and took each other at face value.
He studied her in the red-and-blue glow of the beer signs and settled into the warmth, as easily as he settled into his friend’s company. He loved that about Kate—the comfort. Ty hadn’t felt that with anyone else, not girlfriends or drinking buddies or old college mates, not even his family, at least not since he’d been very young. But with Kate…effortless. Set loose in the curren
t of their no-frills rapport, Ty was able to let go and simply drift.
She ordered a pint and a cheeseburger and Ty waved politely but dismissively at the bartender. He watched Kate grab some napkins, already preparing for her feast. Then Ty nudged her shoulder with his. “God, you’re mean.”
She turned to him, resting her elbow on the shiny wooden bar and her chin in her hand. “It’s your rule, Ty. No one told you you’re not allowed to eat.”
He shifted on his stool, trying to twist some of the achiness from his muscles. Saskatchewan was cold and damp and its early darkness made him miss Australia with a rare but tangible pang. Or maybe that was just his empty stomach. He looked at Kate. “Well, you’d think you might want to join me, you know, out of solidarity. Just once.”
“Don’t hold your breath, boss.”
“You know my idea for when we run out of places to film in the wild?” he asked, spinning a coaster around on the bar.
Her eyebrow rose. “That thing where you pose as a homeless person and survive for a week on the streets of Detroit?”
He shrugged. “Or Delhi, or Lagos. What d’you reckon? It’s sounding pretty good right now. At least I could go to a soup kitchen.” He picked up the coaster and balanced it on Kate’s head.
She gave a contemptuous snort. “Nobody’s going to fall for you as a homeless person.” She took the coaster off her head and poked his upper arm with it. “Not with triceps like those. And you can’t do an American accent to save your life. You sound like a South African Rocky Balboa.”
“I could get a voice coach.”
She shook her head. “No way.”
“What about my other idea, then? ‘Dom Tyler: Undercover in San Quentin. Survive This, Law-Abider!’ Prison food’s sounding pretty good right about now. Showers.”
“And shivs and gang wars and dropped soap? Forget it.”
