It hadn’t been difficult to drift off to sleep for an hour or so with the warmth heating her body, but now it’s dark and cold, and Nora wakes with a start. Panic overwhelms her when she can’t see anything. She calls out for Theo as if he might be miles away.
Her fear of abandonment is a long-term gift from her first husband. A byproduct of being dropped off at random during fits of rage in the car.“Find your own way home if you wanna be such a useless bitch,”he would say, wasted on whatever substance he could get his hands on, before leaving her in a dust cloud kicked up by spinning tires.
She’d be embarrassed at losing her shit if the walls of this cave weren’t closing in, eager to swallow her whole.
“Hey, hey, easy. The fire just went out. It’s alright.” Theo’s reassurance is futile as he gropes for her in the darkness, making contact first with her kneecap before finding her shoulder and giving it a squeeze.
It’s not alright. Not at all. She clings to him without putting much conscious thought into the action. Grips his coat in one strong fist and loops her arm through his, forgetting for the timebeing that she’d rather hug one of those feral wolves than be close to this man.
The cold is almost an afterthought as she tries to clear her head from the delusion of leftover dreams while caught in a pitch black void. At least, until she feels how fucking cold he is and that reminds her she’s freezing, too. Theo’s chin is like ice where it touches her temple, and his body shakes through the stiffness her closeness prompted.
“I can’t breathe. I can’t…” she gasps, heart threatening to burst out of her chest. What little she can see, illuminated by a faint stream of moonlight through the cave entrance, begins spinning.
She made it through the plane crash only to die from a panic-induced heart attack. This can’t be happening. None of it.
They can’t be lost in a frozen tundra with no help or supplies.
They can’t be trapped in this small alcove where anything could come in and eat them whole.
They absolutely cannot be the only people left alive from that fucking crash.
How did a weekend wedding turn into one of the worst experiences of her life? And that’s saying something because she’s had plenty of awful experiences.
At first, being close to Theo seemed the safest place, but the longer this goes on, the more she’s convinced she needs to get outside. If she stays much longer, the whole thing will collapse on top of them, and she can’t let that happen. Making a break for the exit is the most logical choice. She ignores any amount of common sense that might tell her wandering in the dark outside is a path to certain death and breaks away from Theo.
She’ll be able to breathe outside. That’s all that matters.
“No! Stop!” he calls out after her, but she can’t quit. She keeps crawling toward the faint light until something grabs her around the waist and hauls her back.
Her first instinct is to struggle. She kicks out into thin air and screams at him to let her go. Tries to ram an elbow back into his ribs, but the padding of their fluffy coats blocks any damage. Can’t he see she’s dying in here? Can’t he tell that she won’t last long if she stays?
“You can’t go out there. What if you get lost? What if I can’t find you again? You’ll freeze to death,” he says, squeezing her arms to her side and crushing her back against his chest, effectively caging her in. “Please stop, please. I’m not trying to hurt you, but you can’t go out there.”
He’s stronger than her by a long shot. She gives one last token fight, trying her best to shake him before all the energy she had begins to wane and she sags like dead weight in his arms, panting cold puffs of air into the darkened cave.
The moment she stops fighting his hold loosens, but not enough to let her go. It doesn’t matter. The exit is miles away, and she’s coming to accept that she’ll have to lie down and let the whole place consume her once and for all.
What started as a desire to flee turns into a panicked attempt at crawling inside his coat out of desperation. It doesn’t matter that she just met him. Doesn’t matter that keeping people at arm’s length is safer. Absolutely doesn’t matter that he’s a lying cheater and she’s had her fill of those for one lifetime. She needs the comfort he’s offering so badly she’d pay for it, and there’s not an ounce of her strength left to fight it, even if she wanted to. So, she burrows in deep against him and whimpers like a dying animal when it’s still not close enough.
“I gotcha.” The sound of his whisper competes with the unzipping of his coat, confusing her until he reaches for hers, too.
Nora flinches on instinct as some dormant part of her brain comes to life in a warning, an apology loaded up at the ready tokeep the punishment at bay as if she’d never left her past life.“I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”
“It’s too cold. It’s scrambling your brain already. I think you got it worse than I do right now. Get in close so I can warm you up before you start hallucinating.”
Oh, that makes sense, she thinks, scolding herself for letting her thoughts twist up so tightly that she’d forgotten who she was with. Her mind is caught in an endorphin-induced, sub-zero fueled haze as he works her zipper down and coat off her, then she’s being tucked in snug against him, and that same coat is draped over her again while a blanket is tugged up around them both.
Her ear pressed over his heart reveals its frantic cadence. He’s losing it on the inside as much as she’s losing it on the outside. They both shiver and tremble, sparking against each other like live wires ready to ignite.
“I know it’s dark, but we’re safe,” he tells her, softly. “I’m not gonna let anything happen. You have to breathe a little slower, or you’ll pass out.”
He’s not joking. Her vision already swims, and her throat tightens. His ice-cold hands find hers, looking for a better exchange of body heat and she hisses. He got a head start toward frostbite, but she’s not far behind and her own fingers ache at the contact.
Her eyes squeeze shut as she focuses on trying to calm herself while memories she’s been trying to avoid flash in painful detail.
“One day you’ll piss me off so much I’m gonna fucking kill you.”
“No one else will ever want you but me. You’re lucky, you know that? You’d never make it alone, too damn weak.”
