Caught On Camera

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 current 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.”

The barman delivered Kate’s beer. She drew it close, sucking the foam off the top before picking up the glass, gazing over the rim at Ty with indulgent cruelty. Maybe it was his own maddening hunger, but every time she did that Ty couldn’t help but imagine it was the sort of look she’d give a man right after she tossed the handcuff keys all the way across the room.

She groaned with obscene satisfaction. “Damn, that’s good.”

“I’ll bet.” Ty offered her a smile that said he wasn’t finding her the least bit cute. And that was sort of true. She wasn’t cute. She was dead sexy.

Ty squinted at her as her French fries arrived. People called Kate cute all the time. She was petite, with the clearest, most luminous skin Ty had ever seen, like a face wash model. And shoulder-length dark brown hair, straighter and shinier than even a shampoo ad would dare to promise. Sure, she looked cute. Much the way a rabid kitten might seem adorable, right up until you made the mistake of petting it.

“What are you staring at, Ty? Do I have ketchup on my face?” She wiped a thumb over the corners of her mouth.

Cute… Ty knew better. He saw Kate when no one else was around, at all hours of the day and night, at her best and her worst. In dresses and heels at cocktail parties and in his own boxers and undershirt while her filthy clothes were drying by a bonfire in some godforsaken stretch of remote wilderness. Sexy. Sexy when she chased him down to exact her revenge for a well-aimed snowball to the face, sexy when she greeted him half-asleep, grudging smile framed behind the chain-lock of her motel room door at 3 a.m.

Kate’s burger arrived and she luxuriated in it, a cat in a sunbeam.

“I hate you,” Ty murmured, mouth watering for more than just the burger.

“Oh man, this is amazing. So juicy.”

“I hope you get food poisoning.”

“I suppose I’m overdue,” she said through a bite.

That was true enough. The number of times she’d smoothed Ty’s hair off his forehead and rubbed his back while he suffered through the consequences of an ill-advised meal out in the woods… She’d said she was prepared to do anything as a PA, no matter how unglitzy, but she couldn’t have meant all this. One day she was going to reach her limit, and though it’d kill Ty to lose her, at least he’d finally be able to make good on those threats his body issued whenever he came within two breaths of kissing her. Such as now, for instance.

“Do you want my pickle?” she asked with sickly sweet innocence. “I could toss it out into the snow. That wouldn’t be cheating. You’d still technically be foraging.”

“I’m going to break into your room when you’re showering and flush the toilet on you.”

She grinned, eyes narrowing. “Maybe I should order dessert,” she whispered, and took another bite.

“Evil.” Evil for more than this food flaunting—for flirting back when Ty knew she’d never go there with him as long as they were professional partners. Kate put her job above everything, surely far above any attraction she might feel for him. If they ever got their moment, it’d have to come after the show was canceled. On especially long nights, when he and Kate were the only humans for miles around and he lay awake listening to her steady breathing in a dark tent or the back of the van, Ty prayed for bad ratings.

“What would you have right now, if you could, Ty?” Kate’s eyes darted to the chalkboard menu behind the bar. “Steak?” she guessed, perusing the fare. “Fried chicken and mashed potatoes?”

He offered his best Sean-Connery-as-Bond accent. “Don’t toy with me, Moneypenny.”

“Something not on the menu?” Kate asked with raised eyebrows, a distinct challenge. Get a drink or two in this girl and she turned into a flirting machine.

Ty rose to the dare she was posing, licking his lips. “Such as…?”

She leaned in closer, fixing her eyes on his. “I know exactly what you want,” she said. She was only teasing, but Ty’s body responded nonetheless.

“What do I want, Katie?”

“Ooh, I’m thinking…crab,” she concluded. “Legs. With lots of melted butter and new potatoes.” She did know what he liked. She knew him better than she probably even realized, and that’s what made Ty’s attraction tougher and tougher to write off the longer they worked together. She gave a last wiggle of her eyebrows before she sat up straight again.

“I could fire you, you know.”

“Yeah right, Ty. You’d be lost without me.” She turned to watch the television mounted in the corner. A newscaster was droning about a late-season storm warning, but Ty thought Kate ought to be more concerned with the imminent threat her flirtation was causing. He watched her expression change as she turned to him again.

“You know, you and I are like everything except lovers,” she said.

The statement threw Ty for a momentary loop. Hope and lust jockeyed for his attention, warming him like whiskey, from the inside. “Yeah. Why? You looking to change that?”

She smirked at his tone, shook her head and took another sip of beer. “Nope.”

Ty’s body cooled with disappointment. “Why not?”

“Well, mainly because it’s the worst idea I’ve ever heard.”

Ty rolled his eyes. “Brilliant. Thanks for even bringing it up, then.”

“But I was just thinking how it’s interesting, about you and me.” She wagged a French fry between them. “I mean, we’ve managed to make all this work for three whole seasons now, under the most stressful conditions possible. But we’re both still totally useless with relationships.”

“Oh, cheers. And wait—so, indulge my fragile male ego a moment, but why’s it such a rubbish idea, exactly?”

“Because if, no, when we screwed it all up, we’d both have nothing,” she said. “And I spent a lo-o-ong time having nothing, and it sucks. I don’t plan on going back to it. And definitely not over sex.”

“We’ve survived tropical storms and quicksand and network mergers together,” Ty said. “You don’t think we could survive maybe drinking a bit too much and waking up next to each other?”

“Not a chance I’m willing to take, Ty. Plus I wake up next to you all the time and trust me, it’s grossly overrated.”

He put a hand to his chest, faking a blow to his heart. “You are stone-cold, Katie.”

She shrugged, eyes drifting to the TV above the bar. “It’s Saskatchewan.”

Ty leaned into the bar, mirroring her body. He made sure he kept the flirtation over-the-top, joking, always their way. “What if it was really good sex?”

Kate smirked and shook her head again.

“You don’t know what we might be missing out on.”

“I’ll live. And anyhow, I’d get strung up by tall women everywhere for poaching in their rightful territory.”

Ty switched tracks. “What if we weren’t all those other things? What if the show got canceled tomorrow?”

He saw thoughts forming, gears ticking behind Kate’s unfocused eyes as she chose what bones to throw him, picked whether to tease him or pull him up short. In the end she did both. “I dunno, Ty. And I don’t intend to find out… But if that day does ever come, and we can still stand the sight of each other, you have permission to make a pass at me—a real one. But not a moment before.”

She sat up straight and aimed her attention back at her food. Ten minutes later she slid her half-full second glass of beer back across the counter. Ty watched the barman take it away as if it were his firstborn being wrenched from his arms. Damn, he’d kill for a beer right about now. He let that craving replace the one that had taken up residence between his thighs.

“Bedtime,” Kate said with a satisfied yawn—a postcoital yawn if ever he’d heard one.

They walked side by side back to the motor court, hugging their bodies against the bone-deep cold. They mounted the outside steps to the second level of rooms and bid one another good-night under the yellow glow of the parking lot’s lights. Ty watched Kate’s softly swishing hips carry her a few paces to her door, watched her find her key and disappear into her room with a final smile over her shoulder.

He’d be good tonight. He was tired. He could make it—what, six hours? Ty searched his pockets for his own key and heard Kate’s dead bolt click. He knew already he’d hear it again before long, sliding back open to let him in. Who was he trying to kid, anyhow?

WHEN THE INEVITABLE KNOCK came at her door, Kate rolled over to groggily scan the digital screen of her trusty travel alarm clock. Three twenty-eight…dear God in Heaven. Already knowing what this would be about, she resigned herself to leaving the warm cocoon of the sheets and shuffled to the door.

She squinted into the jaundiced light. “Morning, Ty.”

A frigid breeze seeped in behind him. “Invite me in?”

“Yup. Knock yourself out.”

Kate had long ago learned that having a handsome, strapping man with an exotic accent turn up on her doorstep in the dead of night didn’t necessary mean what one might hope. She’d also learned to sleep with a bra on if Ty was staying in the same motel as her. It just saved a lot of time and modesty not having to scramble for one night after night.

As her guest strolled past in track pants and a bawdy T-shirt he’d purchased with her in Tijuana, Kate flipped the television on. She checked their channel’s Canadian sister just in case their show was on in reruns, but it was mired in infomercials. She heard Ty’s flip-flops land on the carpet and the rustling of the sheets as he made a space for himself on her bed. Those sounds shouldn’t still give her a charge after all this time, but they always did. And actually, why shouldn’t they? Everything she’d said in the bar still stood—she wouldn’t ever complicate what they had by throwing sex into the mix. But that didn’t mean she couldn’t think about it.

She sat on the edge of the bed, setting the remote by Ty’s elbow. He stretched out on his stomach, facing the screen, and Kate ran her hands through his messy hair, trying to establish some kind of order. This was allowed, another extension of their nearly all-encompassing whatevership, but God knew why. Unspoken understanding allowed them to do a lot of things that they both knew they’d better knock off if one of them started seeing someone else. Not inherently incriminating things, but ones no significant other could ever reasonably be expected to put up with.

She sighed. “You couldn’t wait another hour, Ty?”

“Can’t sleep over there. There’s a rattle in the heating vent or something.”

“Sure there is.”

He always had an excuse for turning up. Ty was a terrible sleeper, practically an insomniac, but Kate didn’t fully understand her own role in these predictable intrusions. Experience had taught her that Ty was useless at any activity that required him to remain still for longer than thirty seconds, but why keeping her awake seemed to cure his sleeping disorder remained an inconvenient mystery.

He groaned happily, settling in. That sound… It brought back memories Kate could have done without. It had been two years now since she’d accidentally walked in on him having sex with his then-girlfriend, but the pImages** of it were clear as day. Blissfully, Ty was still none the wiser.

Back in L.A., Ty lived in an apartment Kate had found for him after the first season wrapped, one far more to her taste than his. She suspected he’d be happy in some craphole studio by the freeway, but she’d snagged him what she felt an up-and-coming TV personality should have. He’d hated the wall-to-wall carpeting on sight, but to this day Kate said a little thank-you prayer whenever she laid eyes on it.