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“Nope, no such luck.”
He rolls me onto my back, slides his body over mine. I try to keep my eyes open, but they flutter shut, the firm weight of him sucking the air from my lungs.
“I take exception with the fool part,” he says, his lips on my neck this time, moving lower. He bites down gently on my shoulder. “But besotted? Yeah, that sounds about right.”
Chapter Thirteen
The strangers arrive with the first winter storm. Ice fell most of the night, tapping against the sides of the house, and even with a fire in our bedroom fireplace and Bishop wrapped around me under our pile of blankets, I wake up shivering. Bishop gets up first, stokes the fire, and ventures downstairs to bring me a warm cup of tea. The rest of the house is quiet, and I suspect Caleb and Ash are taking advantage of the weather to stay snug in their beds as well.
When Bishop returns with my tea, I sit up in bed to drink it, still shrouded in blankets. I’m dreading the moment my feet will hit the frigid floorboards, cold seeping through my socks and numbing my toes in seconds.
“Your nose is pink,” Bishop tells me with a smile.
I press a palm to my nose, the tip of it icy against my skin. “I need to put the blankets over my head, I guess.”
Bishop laughs, his own cheeks flushed from the morning cold. He pulls back the thick curtain over our bedroom window and peers out. “It’s changed over to snow now,” he says.
“Coming down hard?”
“Pretty hard.”
I sigh. Caleb was right about winter hitting brutal and fast this year. I try to ignore the little bubble of fear in my stomach, the voice in my head that is constantly calculating how much food we have, how many months the cold will last, wondering which will run out first. Winters were bad in Westfall, too, but there I wasn’t responsible for feeding myself. There were plenty of winters where food was scarce, where we ate oatmeal or jerky for meal after meal. But somehow I always took for granted that there would be something to eat. Now, beyond the fence, with the wind howling around the eaves of the house and snow piling up against its sides, starvation feels like a very real possibility two or three months in the future.
“Hey,” Bishop says softly, drawing me out of my own head. “It’s going to be okay.” He crosses the room and sits down beside me on the bed, wraps his hands around mine on my mug. “We’re going to be okay. Caleb and Ash know what they’re doing. This isn’t their first winter out here.”
I nod. And he’s right; I trust Caleb and Ash with my life. But I’ve already caught Caleb twice running his hands over the packets of jerky, counting the jars of pickled vegetables in the kitchen cabinets. “But maybe when this storm clears we can set some more snares,” I say. “Just to be safe.”
Bishop smiles. “Definitely.” He takes the mug of tea from my hands and sets it on our bedside table. “But right now, it’s too cold to get out of this bed.” He lifts the covers and slides in next to me, pulls me down to lie beside him.
I tuck my face into the warmth of his neck, his stubble scratching against my cheek. “What did you have in mind?” I ask, already short of breath. I keep waiting for the day he doesn’t have this instant effect on me, my stomach rolling over, my heart racing, my limbs gone limp and languid.
His hands skim down my sides, work their way back up. “Something warm,” he says.
“Yes,” I breathe out. “Warm sounds good.”
Bishop laughs against my neck, causing a whole different kind of shivering. “Ivy?” he whispers.
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“Hmmm?”
“Are you happy?”
It takes me a long time to answer. I find I’m reluctant to say the word out loud. Happiness is an emotion I don’t fully trust yet. Like love, it’s something I have to learn. Feeling it isn’t enough. I nod finally, say “yes” in a voice that’s lower than a whisper, and even then I feel like I’m tempting fate.
I should have known it could never last.
The day passes in the way I suspect many of our winter days will, the four of us sticking close to the big fireplace in the living room, trying to keep busy with card games and small chores. Things we can accomplish with blankets wrapped around our legs. With the shutters pulled tight against the cold and snow, it’s impossible to tell what time of day it is or even to gauge how long we’ve been awake. I understand now why Caleb is always the first to volunteer to head out into the swirling snow. Too many hours inside this room and I’ll go crazy. Only a few days in, and already it’s hard to imagine passing an entire winter this way. Frostbitten fingers sounds like the lesser of two evils when the other alternative is insanity.
“We should probably get some more wood for the fire,” Ash says, eyeing the dying flames.
“I’ll go,” I say, before anyone else can speak.
“I’ll come with you,” Bishop says.
“You don’t have to, if you want to stay warm,” I tell him.
“No, it’s okay,” he says. “I need the air.” Obviously, I’m not the only one starting to feel the walls closing in.
