Total pages in book: 101
Estimated words: 96284 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 481(@200wpm)___ 385(@250wpm)___ 321(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 96284 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 481(@200wpm)___ 385(@250wpm)___ 321(@300wpm)
It wasn’t long before Jake and I were on our own, and my determination to show what I’d studied kicked in.
“You set up the cameras, and I will find firewood,” I said firmly.
“You sure?” He knitted his brows together. “Much of it is buried under three feet of snow.”
I didn’t care. He was the cameraman. That was his job. We needed one camera in here and one outside for our livestream, and he had to make sure the connection worked. I mean, that’d been the stipulation. We obviously needed to be able to stream the footage. But someone did live nearby; someone owned the land, and that someone was getting paid to host us.
“I’m sure. Let’s go—before we freeze our asses off. I don’t think you want me to lose mine.”
“I definitely don’t. It’s one of your best features.”
I laughed.
No, don’t laugh. Don’t fucking flirt. Game face on!
Right.
I put my beanie and face-covering back on, and then it was time to brave the cold. So help me God, I was gonna get a roaring fire going so I could sit down and eat a sandwich, caribou jerky, and inhale coffee with freaking butter from a pot.
Carving mugs wasn’t a priority.
I headed outside with our ax and told myself not to think. Just do. Tomorrow, I was gonna clear the snow somehow so we could walk easier around the cabin, but we didn’t have time for that now.
Our immediate surroundings consisted of a fuck-ton of trees, so I started breaking off twigs on one that’d fallen. This was the stuff that caught on fire easier. I reckoned we’d need time to dry the wood that was wet. Would that even work? No, wait. I read about this. I was supposed to gather as much as possible and find cover for it, so it could dry over time. Okay, okay, that was the plan.
It was a hellish workout, plain and simple. Luckily, we had access to more than one fallen tree, so not all wood was technically buried under snow. The cold wasn’t super-wet either, like we’d been warned.
I went to town with that fucking ax. Over and over, I let it come down on the tree until a seven-or-so-foot-long log thumped into the snow. Phew. Now I had to get the saw.
I was suddenly glad I’d been the one to pick out our cookware. One skillet and two pots, and one of them held two gallons. We were gonna need to wash off somehow. Melt snow, heat it up, get clean. Maybe a little nookie after that. Which reminded me…
I returned to the cabin with an armful of twigs and branches, and I hurriedly shut the door.
Jake looked up from our laptop.
“Did you attach the camera in here yet?” I asked, shuddering.
He pointed to the corner behind him.
I dumped the twigs in front of the fireplace before I trailed over to the corner and looked up. Aw, my man. I could count on him. He’d angled it perfectly.
“So, that corner over there won’t be visible, right?”
He smirked lazily. “I can’t go a month without getting my hands on you.”
I loved him. We had a make-out corner. A fuck corner. A nookie corner.
We were gonna survive.
After six days in the frozen wilderness, I was actually kinda loving life a little extra. It was rough as hell, and nobody liked to shit in the woods, much less in fourteen-degree weather, but I’d gotten a huge boost of confidence. I was ice fishing, chopping wood, carving little bowls and spoons, gutting fish, foraging, building traps, constructing minor bits and pieces of comfort—like a cutting board, a hook to hang a lantern, and a low table we used as a workbench outside.
Something that felt even better?
Jake’s eyes on me.
He behaved in front of the livestream cameras, but I felt him studying my every move here and there, to the point where I was convinced he was changing his view just a bit. I wasn’t the same reckless punk he’d met almost nine years ago.
He took a lot of pictures of me too. He did love his candids. Some of them were for promo later on as well.
Man, were there gonna be a lot of memory cards.
The minute-by-minute footage was gonna be a fucking chore to go through, and a lot would be deleted. One day’s worth of shooting would culminate in half an episode. We had a zone right outside the cabin that I kept cleared of more than a few inches of snow; the livestream camera captured everything we did there. Whenever we moved in and out of the cabin, when we chopped wood, worked on tasks, all of it.
“Jake! Are you back?”
I got down on my knees in front of the makeshift workbench outside the cabin and spread out today’s catch. Not all of it fit on the table, so I settled for a little bit of everything and left the rest on the ground. Get ready to be impressed, love. I’d been gone for a few hours, and I’d used Jake’s second camera to shoot. Hopefully, some of it was all right.