Before He Was Gone: Starstruck Book 2 by Becky Wicks

eyes when we talked the other morning, out on the rocks. 
    He watched three of his friends take a bullet. He lost his wife to another man when he went home, and when shit gets really bad he still wakes up at night screaming. I was kind of surprised he said all that to me in front of the camera guy, floating round us on the kayak. I’d never spill my demons like that, will never… but I guess he has his strategy.  Mike didn’t say it, but I also know he doesn’t care so much about the prize money as he does about proving to himself that he can come out of something a survivor. Now this is just one more thing that’s going to haunt him.
    ‘I think we should cut the negativity, people,’ Stephanie says, twizzling her blond hair. Jaxx takes a seat beside her in the sand and hands her the coconut. ‘Let’s all share something fun about ourselves,’ she says, ‘a secret.’
    ‘What if we don’t have any secrets?’ Alyssa says, without looking up. She’s had three beers, all predictably zoomed in on from the company sponsoring the show - I’ve been counting. She’s not slurring her words like Stephanie is now, but there’s a reason Mia wouldn’t let any of them loose with the machete. She’s wrapping shreds of palm leaves around sticks. She’s got ash on her face and tribal paint still on her forehead. Her blue bikini makes her breasts look even better than the bra did – though it’s not as see-through. I tear my eyes away.
    ‘Why don’t you start with the secrets and tell us what you’re doing over there,’ Punk says to her from two meters away, picking up the machete Jaxx just abandoned. His shoulders slump instantly in his sweater vest but he starts hacking feebly at another coconut. He’ll take all night, hitting it like he’s putting a damn golf ball with a club, but we’re letting him try. We’re all going to need to learn that.
    ‘I’m making a voodoo spell,’ Alyssa grins.
    Stephanie’s eyes widen. ‘Seriously?’
    ‘No. I’m making us all toothbrushes.’ She tears a leaf and knots it round another. ‘I just remembered, Bear Grylls did it I think. We use the wood ash to make a paste.’
    Damn, she’s right. I should’ve known that.
    Jaxx turns up his nose. ‘I’m not putting that shit in my mouth. The leaves on their own are working out fine.’
    ‘Speak for yourself, dragon breath,’ Stephanie says and he wrestles her down in the sand. They’ve been flirting all afternoon and I think Stephanie getting drunk has made her less resistant to his charms. I watch them laughing as she threatens to pour her beer over his head and I get a pang of missing something.
    What do I miss, though? I’ve never let myself get like that – well, not in a long time, anyway. It’s been so long I don’t even remember it; the flirting, the laughing; the carelessness, the danger of pouring drinks down my neck and letting go. My stomach twists. ‘We need eucalyptus, first thing tomorrow,’ I hear myself saying. Alyssa looks up at me.
    ‘Eucalyptus?’
    ‘I forgot,’ I admit. ‘It’s a deodorizer. It’s also good for brushing teeth. There’re more than five hundred kinds. It has to be here somewhere in some form, like the peppercorns. We’ll find it. If not, the ashes will have to do.’
    She nods thoughtfully, goes back to work making ten toothbrushes and my eyes stay on her hands. She’s made one for Mike, in spite of his outburst; in spite of her looking like she wanted to murder him, too, back there. She can go from sunshine to thunder in a second, like me. From summer to winter, as Harri would say.
    ‘So, Joshua,’ Stephanie chirps. ‘Got a secret you’d like to share?’
    ‘Not really,’ I say as Shan walks from the bathroom station behind the tree line and sits down next to Alyssa. He crosses his legs and wraps an arm around her briefly.
    ‘What’s happening campers? Ooh, is it story time?’ he says, looking at me suddenly. ‘What are we all doing with the prize money?