She whistles. “Fancy.”
“Yeah, yeah.”
The jerk as they set off forces her grip reflexively tighter. With the wind in her face and a smile on her lips, she tucks her nose in between his shoulder blades to warm it. Maybe she imagined it, but she could swear one of his hands reached up to cover hers in a comforting tap before settling on the handle bar again.
* * *
“That wasn’t on the map,” Theo says.
“Did we go the wrong way?”
“No. We’ve passed all the landmarks they wrote in.”
“Can we go around?” She stares over his shoulder at the base of the mountain they’ve driven up to.
It’s towering and steep, but they could climb it if they have to. That’s besides the point, though, because it wasn’t on the map and they can’t drive a snowmobile up a nearly vertical mountain.
“Maybe. Don’t know how wide it is. I can’t see any end to it.”
This obstacle spans out as far as the eye can see. While she’s certain there has to be an endpoint, with their luck, getting there will eat up all their gas and put them way off course.
“Rough math based on how fast we were going and for how long puts us about a fourth of the way there. Now, we either go over or around.”
“I think we should go over,” she says, confidently. “We can make it the last way on foot, but we can’t if we go too far around and get stuck out there after doubling or tripling the distance again.”
“Are you sure?”
“If you are, too, then yes.” She nods, even though he can’t see her. They’re already so cold that she’s spent most of the journey with her face buried against him, and when he turns his head, she winces at his red, wind-chapped nose. “Your poor nose. Here, take this. You should have said something.”
“I appreciate you trying to protect this pretty face,” he jokes.
She unwraps the one scarf they found at the house from around her neck so he can use it as a mask. “Keep going, and I’ll strangle you with this instead.
“I can’t take that, you need it.”
“You need it more. Go on.”
He doesn’t fight her a second time. Knowing he’s been suffering just so she can stay a little bit warmer only confuses her even further when she’s already been sucked into a clusterfuck of feelings over this man. No one’s ever treated her the way he does. Like she’s important. Like he cares more about her than himself, and that might be weird if they didn’t have the added benefit of all this trauma to shove them together so quickly.
They skipped over months or years of getting to know each other and jumped right into some of the best parts. It sort of feels like cheating in a game she’s never been able to win before.
He ties her plaid scarf around his face, transforming into someone ready for a bank robbery. “Okay, let’s go over. It’s not that high, just steep. We can get it done in thirty minutes, maybe less.”
Abandoning the snowmobile is difficult, but it’s done its job better than they expected and given them a good head start, so they bravely begin the incline one foot after another, side by side through calf-deep snow. He struggles more than her, huffing and puffing with each step. She wonders if he’s a smoker. Hasn’t seemed to be craving it, but maybe he quit long ago and the damage is already done.
Either way, she worries for him the longer it goes on until her own lungs catch up. Then all she can worry about is herself, until he slips at the halfway point and nearly gives her a heart attack. He slides a good twenty feet back down while yelling at her to stay put as he tumbles before coming to a stop just inches away from face-planting into a rock.
“Are you okay? Theo! Talk to me!”
He raises a hand in the air and yells back. “All that’s busted is my pride.”
Her laugh is nervous and full of bundled-up adrenaline and concern. She’s about to ignore his pleas for her to stay before he finally gets his feet under him and reaches her again.
She grabs his arm, curbing the urge to hug him, but doesn’t dare after that slip in the garage. “You’re sure you’re okay?”
“I’m sure.”
Her fear at the possibility of losing him is terrifying in its own right. It’s part of the reason she wanted to protect herself. Slowly but surely, she is growing attached to Theo. If she feels like this now, then she can’t imagine she’d survive it if they got closer, only for fate to snatch him away. It would be an insane thought if they weren’t in exactly the type of situation that offers plenty of opportunity for deadly mistakes. She’s already met her quotawhen it comes to loss. One more might tip the scales beyond her ability to recover.
