“I know I put a son in you, so what the fuck is this? She’ll grow up to be just like her momma, a waste of space.”
“Just a fucking addict. No self-control. No sense.”
There’s no end to the traumas she suffered with that man. Even years later, she can’t fully shake him. Sometimes, she thinks she’s moved on, and then something will jolt her back, proving he’s still got a hand around her ankle, dragging her down into the abyss.
“Tell me what you’re feeling.” Theo tries when it becomes clear she isn’t going to relax any time soon, and her shaking has only gotten worse.
“Heavy. Everything feels heavy.”
“Stick this in your mouth.”
“What?”
It’s too dark to see more than a few inches in front of her face, but then he moves the small ball of snow in his hand closer.
“I don’t want—”
“It’ll help. Try it. Please?”
At this point, she’ll try anything, so she takes the snow he must have grabbed off the ground and shoves it in her mouth. The shock to her already cold system is like an ice bucket poured over her head.
“Shit. Fuck. Why did you…that’s cold,” she curses, stating the obvious. “Why did I even agree to that? It tastes like dirt, too.”
She’s running off at the mouth with her irritation over the pile of snow that’s finally melting enough to swallow. Her face screws up in a wince, brows furrowed in anger that he told her to eat it, and she actually did.
She isn’t sure who she’s more upset with, him or herself.
“How do you feel now? Other than mad at me?”
She pauses, surprised to find that her breathing has tapered off toward the somewhat normal range and she’s not on the brink of collapse. “I guess….better? A little.”
“Figured you’d be too cold and ticked off to think about anything else.”
“That’s kind of brilliant, ‘cause I am definitely ticked off. There could be bugs in that snow I just ate. What if I get worms?”
“Then I’ll eat some too and we’ll both have worms?” he offers.
“That might be going too far in solidarity.”
“Didn’t know for sure if it would work. I saw it on a TV show once. Someone sucked on an ice cube when they had a panic attack.”
“So it’s possible I would have passed out anyway and choked on snow?”
She can feel him shrug. “Nah. I knew it would work. For sure. One hundred percent certain.”
“Bullshit,” she huffs in amusement.
She isn’t relaxed by any means, but the level of terror has tapered off into the usual stress that comes with being in a dark cave in the wilderness. The extra warmth of being pressed against him does a decent job of clearing her fractured mind of all those hallucinations she’d been on the brink of while the temperatures screwed with her brain. Neither of them have moved away yet. The urgency of the situation must have blown them past any initial awkwardness. That’s one thing she can be grateful for, because if they resisted this contact much longer, they wouldn’t survive.
“Are your toes cold, too?” she asks, quietly.
“Yeah.”
“Let’s take our shoes off and push our feet together under the blankets?”
It sounds silly, and speaking it aloud feels weird, but she’s not about to risk losing toes just because it’s odd to wrap herself around this man she hardly knows.
Well, maybe that’s not entirely true. She knows him better today than she did yesterday.
