Every. Time.

"You're doing it wrong."

"I'm not doing it wrong." I speak with my eyes screwed shut and deeply exhale after the final word passes my sun-chapped lips. "Just because you do it a different way, doesn't mean my technique won't work."

My eyes open slowly to the task at hand: starting a friction fire with two sticks and some weird grassy stuff I peeled off the bark of a coconut tree. I wouldn't say this was a tried and true, published-in-a-survival-magazine technique, but Tom Hanks did it in Cast Away so it has to work, right? Wrong. After another ten minutes of fireless rubbing and a mother of a blister forming on one of my soft hands, I give up. I turn back to the hardened survivalist I call my boyfriend and sigh. "You're right."

"I know, babe. It's okay. I'm sure I'll be back on my feet in a day or two and I'll be able to get us set up here until someone comes to collect us." His bright blue eyes stare across the open sea from our hopelessly small slice of land and I see his determination to survive burning from them. Maybe his dazzling blue eyes can be a beacon and attract some help. Or maybe he could focus that Clark Kent laser glare on my two sticks and get a signal fire going.

My gaze lowers to his broken foot and I sigh once more. When I woke up yesterday, he was dragging me out of the ocean and onto this beach while he cursed at his injury. I cursed at him for risking his safety for me when I could've been dead. I remember his words then, I'd never give up on you. Never. He isn't usually so sentimental; we blame the broken foot and sun stroke. "I think you need some more palm fronds for shade, this sun is making you think a broken bone will heal overnight. A little less heat might at least cure the crazy talk." I lean over his seat in the sand - a hole I'd dug as soon as I'd woken the day before so he would be sitting in cool sand and not the scalding hot stuff currently burning holes into my Keds - and adjust the palm leaves I'd placed above him.

"Thanks, babe, but I'll be fine. Really. Stop mothering me and build that signal fire the way I showed you when we hiked the PCT." He bats at my restless hands through the palm fronds and gestures at my abandoned work.

"Okay, but don't tell me I'm doing it wrong this time." I push my messy blond mop of hair out of my eyes and look meaningfully at his brooding face.

"No promises, sweetheart."

I give a low growl as I drop to my knees in front of the pile of sticks and pick up the two I'd been working with before. I place the tuft of coconut stuff on one piece and resume my impression of Tom Hanks, this time including the tricks my boyfriend had taught me a year before.

"You're doing it wrong." He chuckles.

Every. Time.