Never Crossed My Mind

Author's Note: This chapter is a little tricky. I wanted to include some scenes from the documentary in all chapters going forward, so I wanted to set that apart somehow. Going forward, the sections in italics are the documentary scenes, and sections in italics/bold are side interviews. I've read over the chapter and I think it's fairly easy to follow, so hopefully that's the case for readers!

“Our new pal Olivia has been living here for a week during filming, and we haven’t really pranked her yet, so she’s about to get a rude awakening,” Steve-O told the camera quietly before holding up a bullhorn in one hand and an airhorn in the other. The camera panned out to show Bam and Chris Pontius with the same equipment. Johnny opened the door to let them in, showing Olivia sprawled out on the bed still in her clothes from the night before.

“Either she was working late or she had one too many last night,” Bam laughed, trying not to wake their target before the prank could be completed. “I’m going to guess she had one too many.”

“The first prank they pulled on me was exactly one week after I moved into Knoxville’s. We’d been doing the documentary shooting for a few days, and I think they’d already started filming stunts for almost the whole week,” Olivia laughed. “They had taken me out the first night and I swore I wouldn’t drink again, but as it turns out, they’re pretty good drinking buddies.”

Johnny counted them down, then all at once the three men blasted the airhorns into the bullhorns right over Olivia’s body, yelling her name on top of the obnoxious noise. Olivia shot up into a sitting position and flailed about until she was completely tangled in the comforter and promptly fell off the bed with a loud ‘thud.’

The loud laughter of all of the men in the room could be heard as Olivia continued to flail about to get out of the comforter.

“Fuck you guys,” she told them, but her mouth hinted at a smile. “Get a girl wasted and then wake her up like that.”

“You should have seen it, Livvy. I can’t wait for you to see the playback. It was priceless,” Johnny assured her, falling onto the mattress with laughter. “Oh, this bed is comfortable. It’s better than mine.”

“Yeah, well don’t get too comfortable. I want to get dressed and y’all are not staying for that.”

“You’re not as much fun as you think you are,” Bam told her as they all paraded out of the room.

“So that was the first prank they pulled on me. I’ve been planning my revenge ever since.”

“You handled that gracefully,” Johnny told her as she pulled her usual get-up of a tank top and jeans from the drawers. She fished out some clean unmentionables as well and set them on the bed.

“No point in getting pissed,” Olivia shrugged. “Probably not going to be the last prank they pull on me.”

“You’re absolutely right.” He leaned in the doorway and crossed his arms. “Carry on.”
Olivia looked at him questioningly at first, and then caught on, throwing a pillow at him. “You’re not watching me change, get out of here!”

He caught the pillow and brought it to his face, inhaling the scent. “Oh, smells like you. I’m keeping this one.”

“Creeper,” Olivia laughed as he shut the door behind him, indeed taking the pillow from her room. Since their talk the previous week, her relationship with Johnny had gone down pretty much just as they expected. They were quickly becoming close friends, although the entire crew gave them shit on a daily basis about what was really going on when everyone left for the day. Olivia accepted his flirtations happily and consistently offered her own back. Although they didn’t cross any lines like they had in New York, it was hard to miss their longer-than-necessary hugs or the secret looks and quiet conversations they’d had more than enough of just in the last seven days. It was enough to push on Olivia’s attraction, and she had to remind herself that she wasn’t going to fall for him.

"Just give in already," Julie urged her. "You know you're going to eventually."

"Not happening," Olivia answered. "It is just a flirty thing. It's whatever."

“You keep telling yourself that. Maybe one day you’ll be convincing enough for me to believe you.”

Olivia had rolled her eyes and ended the call quickly. She loved her cousin, but between the rest of the crew prodding her and Johnny for information and Julie’s lack of faith in her, it was just getting to be too much.

Once she was dressed and her hair and makeup were once again presentable, Olivia cautiously stepped out in the hallway. Now that filming was going in full force and the prank war on her had started, she was on guard as to what was going to come next. Fortunately, she could hear all of them outside, so she let out a deep breath and headed down to the kitchen for a bottled water before joining them.

Both camera crews were already outside, and Olivia checked in with her lead cameraman. Nick assured her that he was capturing everything, so she joined in with the group.

“Liv, you want to do a stunt?” Dave offered. “I’ve got the perfect one for you.”

Olivia snorted. “You guys are not getting me to do anything even remotely dangerous. That’s not what I signed on for.”

“Dearest,” Chris said, putting an arm around her, “When you signed on with us, you signed on for the whole deal.”

She laughed along with them. “All right, fine. but you’ve got to come up with something really good, or I’m not doing it. If I’m going to be risky, might as well be risky all the way.”
The crowd cheered and immediately began throwing ideas around. Jeff stopped them and decided it was time to start getting some stunts going. While Dave, Pontius and Wee Man set up for their next stunt, which involved a worm hanging from their mouth and a pool full of hungry fish, Johnny stood by and laughed with Olivia about their automatic gag reflex with the slimy worms. They were nearly falling over with laughter, and the camera caught the suspicious look on Bam’s face.

“I’m telling you, those two … I don’t even know, really. They got really close, really, really fast. It was kind of suspicious,” Bam commented.

“Suspicious?” Wee Man repeated. “Uh, how about obvious. They’re so obvious.”

“They probably should have just gotten naked and got it over with,” Dave added.

“But, dude, it was Olivia,” Bam chuckled. “She’s way cool. She’s like a sister to us now. She’s that girl that everyone wishes their girlfriend was like. I can’t even look at her like that though.”

“Well, Knoxville doesn’t have that problem,” Wee Man summed up.

Olivia finally hit the ground laughing as Dave backed away from the pool, sputtering puke everywhere. Bam came up with a fish dangling from the worm in his mouth, let it drop into the pool, and then joined Dave in the puke parade. Wee Man gave up, pointing and laughing at his comrades.

“Dave, what happened?” Olivia asked when he finally stopped puking.

“The fish came up by my face, and I panicked and bit down on the worm. Then I swallowed the piece I bit off,” Dave said, still trying to catch his breath.

“Gross!”

“Hey, at least I caught a fish,” Bam said. “But that was the most disgusting tasting thing I’ve ever had. I’ll never put another worm in my mouth ever again.”

“What about a tequila worm?” Olivia asked.

Bam shook his head. “No, because then I’ll think of that shit and puke before I’m even drunk.”

Johnny and Olivia exchanged mischievous glances and immediately burst out in laughter. Somehow they could tell they were both thinking the same thing -- there was going to be a tequila worm in Bam’s near future.

“Don’t even think about it!” Bam yelled. “I swear to God, I’ll kill both of you.”

“Ah, c’mon. You can’t kill the lovebirds,” Pontius teased.

Everyone else joined in on the teasing then, somewhat excited at having a new thing to bug somebody about. It wasn’t too often one of them developed a crush the way Johnny had on Olivia -- and vice versa.

“Yeah, Olivia,” Johnny sighed, rubbing his forehead. “I don’t know. I, uh, guess I had a little crush on her. You know, when I first met her, I didn’t really want to like her, at all, just based on principle. Thing about Livvy is, she’s the kind of girl who grows on you and you meet her once and you’re just … stuck.”

***

Olivia was at the Dickhouse Offices a few days later working on editing with Nick when Jeff called her into his office. She told Nick to take a break, and headed down the hall.

“What’s up?” she greeted.

“Few things,” Jeff said, looking at the post-it in front of him.

“All righty.”

“First of all,” he said with a chuckle, “are you really going to do a stunt?”

Olivia laughed. “I told them that if they could come up with something good, I’d do it. None of this pussy stuff though. If I’m going to risk getting hurt, I’m going all the way.”

“Wow,” Jeff said. “I honestly never thought we’d find a chick who would fit in so well with this group, but you seem to be doing a good job.”

“I do what I can,” she grinned.

“And you’re doing all right being at Knoxville’s?”

“Yeah, it’s way better than a hotel.”

“Well, that kind of brings me to my next thing. I know you get a lot of bullshit about this --”
Olivia groaned, knowing exactly what was coming next. Would the pestering never end?

“-- but I’m asking you seriously. What’s up with you and Johnny?”

“Nothing,” she answered firmly. “We just get along really well. That’s all.”

“If you say so. I just want you guys to be careful. I’d really like to bring you on for future projects, and obviously we just generally like having you around. If there’s all sorts of shit going around about you and him though, I can’t make that happen.”

“Fair enough. Next?”

Jeff nodded. “I was going to see if you could talk to Bam. He’s having a really hard time doing this filming without seeing Ryan. He says that he forgets Ryan’s not around, will look up to say something to him, and then remember.”

She sighed. “I don’t know if anything I say can really make a difference.”

“I think it might. These guys really love you, and ever since New York, Bam has told me that you get it. I think that if he thinks you get it, maybe he’ll talk to you about it a little more than any of the rest of us, without worrying about his manly pride being hurt.”

“All right, I’ll see what I can do.”

“Thank you. That’s it then. I’ll see you later on.”

“Thanks, Jeff.” Olivia picked up her own notebook and went in search of Bam.

***

Bam sat outside with Olivia, the both of them smoking a cigarette. The weather was nice and sunny, and the breeze made the summer heat tolerable. Olivia tilted her head back and let the sun’s ray soak into her skin.

“You know, Liv, I didn’t know you had the hots for me. You usually take your smoke breaks with Knoxville,” Bam teased.

Olivia rolled her eyes. “First of all, of course I’ve got the hots for you Bam. Who doesn’t love a little Valo in their life, right?”

Bam chuckled at her reference to his Haggard role. “Fuck you.”

“And as for Knoxville,” she said, taking a drag from the cigarette, “everyone can let that go. There’s nothing between me and Johnny.”

“That’s not what he told me.”

“Do what now?”

“He told me about New York. You guys hooked up or almost hooked up or whatever, right?”
Olivia grunted and shook her head. “I didn’t know he’d told anyone about that. We kissed, but he … it just didn’t happen.”

“Well, I don’t think anyone else knows. That first night you were here, he was all somber and sober and told me about it. I think he still likes you, ya know.”

“So, tell me what’s going on,” Olivia prompted, successfully changing the subject but making a mental note to rip Johnny Knoxville a new one later on. How did he expect people to not think something was going on between them if he couldn’t keep his mouth shut about something that almost happened the first time they met?

“What do you mean?” he asked, looking away.

“I think you know what I mean, Bam. Jeff’s pretty concerned that you’re not going to want to finish filming.”

“Just because Ry isn’t here?” Bam scoffed. “Whatever.”

“Not whatever. This is important to you, so it’s important to your friends.”

“Since when are you and I friends?”

Olivia gave him a meaningful look. “Don’t try and be mean to change the subject. You know you love me.”

“Maybe a little.” Bam managed a small smile. “He was my best friend, Liv. There wasn’t much we did apart from each other. Part of the fun of filming was always doing crazy shit with Ry.”

“And now it’s not like that anymore,” Olivia summed up. “Think about it though. Do you really think he’d want you to quit? To just shrivel up and disappear?”

Bam shook his head. “No. It just doesn’t seem that easy all the time.”

“I know. But maybe do it for Ryan. You know? It’s cheesy, I know, but if it’s what gets you through …” She ended her sentence with a shrug.

“Yeah, you’re probably right.” Bam put his arm across her shoulders and hugged her to his chest. “You’re a good friend, Liv.”

“I do what I can,” she replied. “Finish that cigarette. Let’s go brainstorm some stunts for me to do.”

Bam laughed. “Yeah, I’m down with that.”

***

“You know, when Ryan passed away, there was a project I was assigned to start immediately to kind of document how these guys carried on after his death. In the notes for the treatment I came up with, I wanted to push the project back six months, but they were so deep in grief, there was no way we could do the project at all. I guess this documentary we’re doing now kind of has bits and pieces of that, since it’s impossible to film a Jackass movie and not think of Ryan Dunn. I can see it in each of their faces every day, whether it’s at the beginning of the day and Johnny has to take a deep breath before he can start filming, or during a stunt when Bam looks up to joke with his friend and you can see his face fall as he remembers Ryan’s gone. Even Jeff will look around as everyone’s packing up at the end of the day and you can tell he’s sad because someone is missing. Their friend, their brother is missing. It’s been a year but the wound is just as new to them as the day they found out what had happened.”