Chaos Theory (Nerds of Paradise #2)(60)

“I’m glad we found you,” Sandy went on, moving over to the boulder where Melody and Will had been sitting. “I don’t feel so bad about calling for the helicopter now.”

“You’re giving up?” Melody moved to sit with her.

Sandy huffed an ironic laugh and shook her head. “I was ready to give up yesterday, but Jogi here insisted we wait one more day. He’s been obsessed with taking pictures.”

“If I can’t win one part of the competition, I know I can win the other,” Jogi argued. The others were all shrugging out of their backpacks and making themselves at home in the clearing. “And things did get better. We found these guys.” He gestured to Laura and Ben, who had flopped, exhausted to the ground. “And now you two.”

“True.” Sandy sighed. “I mean, at least it means we have more food to share, if you guys don’t mind.” She glanced to Melody.

Melody couldn’t stop herself from chuckling and shaking her head. “We don’t have much to share. They really cleaned us out.”

“They took all our food and any water containers that we didn’t have with us,” Will said.

“What?” Sandy looked like she was about to pop a vein in her temple. “Oh, you have got to be kidding me.”

“I wonder if Howie knows about all this cheating,” Laura said, now lying flat on her back with her head resting on her backpack.

“Even if he knows, I’m not sure there’s anything he could do about it,” Ben added.

“What have you guys been eating?” Jogi asked.

“We caught a trout yesterday,” Will said. “We’d offer you some, but we just finished it off.”

“How did you catch it?” Jogi stepped over to Will, all eagerness.

“There’s a fishing kit in the backpacks,” Melody said. “At least there is in ours.”

“We have one too,” Sandy said. “But we haven’t been back down to the river since that first day.”

“Why don’t we all pool our food resources for lunch and maybe try catching a few more fish,” Ben said, already searching through his backpack, presumably for the supplies to carry that out.

Melody nearly wept in relief as he started tossing silver-packaged freeze-dried meals onto the grass in front of him. She never thought she’d see the day when dehydrated food made her mouth water.

“I can poke around for more mushrooms and edible plants,” she said, getting up.

For a moment, Sandy looked startled and disgusted, but her expression quickly shifted to understanding. “Oh, right. That Botany degree.” She laughed and shook her head. “You probably didn’t even need that disgusting stuff they packed for us at all.”

“Trust me, I’m happier to see that crap than I’m ready to admit to,” Melody laughed.

Everything seemed to be settled. Jogi and Ben headed down to the lake with fishing equipment, Laura and Sandy set about gathering wood for a fire, and Melody ventured farther into the undergrowth, looking for edible plants. Will followed her.

“As much as I’d love to stay and have a picnic with the neighbors,” he whispered, even though they were out of earshot, “this is still a competition. We need to get moving.”

Melody stood from gathering a handful of wild onions. “They need our help. We need their help too.”

“I know, but this can’t turn into social hour in the woods.”

She straightened and turned to him even further, resting a hand on her hip. “What happened to the Will that was just turning over a new leaf? The one who isn’t a robot set on winning?”

“I’m still here.” His jaw hardened, and the stubbornness she had come to know so well was back in his eyes. “But this isn’t and never was a friendly camping trip.”

“I didn’t say it was. But we’re not going to run out on people who need us.”

He sighed and rubbed a hand over his face. “It would be nice if you could go for a whole day without shoving words in my mouth.”

A small part of her cringed with guilt, but the rest of her was tired and hungry and just wanted to hang out with friends for two seconds. “In case you hadn’t noticed, Clementine, we’re not doing so well here. You may be used to charging off and doing things on your own, but we have a golden opportunity to team up right now. So dial back the competitiveness for two seconds, will ya?”

His jaw hardened even more, and he blew out a breath through his nose. “Melody, I’m not saying—” He stopped himself and threw up his hands. “Fine. We’ll do it your way. Because if you’d stop to listen to what I’m actually saying, you’d see that your way is my way too. Only on a shorter timeline.”

He turned and marched back toward the clearing before she could do more than open her mouth. What she would have said was beyond her, though. She probably owed him an apology. That apology would be easier to formulate once she had some freeze-dried beef stroganoff in her belly and a few stories from her friends to make sense of everything that had happened to her and Will in the last few days.

It was almost cozy to return to the clearing only to find a campfire already crackling away, Jogi and Ben up to their knees in the water with fishing lines hard at work, and Will going through the inventory of everyone’s back packs with Sandy.