“What are you in?”
He told her. She listened and made mental assessments without offering them unless he asked, which he did, twice, and she gave him straight answers both times. He hadn’t gone wrong exactly, but there were adjustments she would make, and she said so.
The sun had dropped by the time they reached the gate, and it was lightly snowing. She reached up and clicked on her headlamp without breaking stride. He did the same a beat later.
The world contracted. That was the thing about headlamps in the wilderness that people who hadn’t done it didn’t understand. It wasn’t just darkness pressing in from the edges. It was the way the light created its own small world, a moving circle of visibility that traveled with you, the two of them inside it together and everything elseoutside it. The road ahead was lit up, but everything beyond ten feet ceased to matter.
She was aware of him in a way she hadn’t quite been in the daylight.
They had found a rhythm, their pace matching without discussion, their footfalls falling into a pattern that was almost synchronized on the packed snow. Their sleds hissed quietly behind them.
“You’re good at this,” he said. It wasn’t a compliment, exactly. More like an observation he hadn’t meant to say out loud.
She didn’t answer right away. The road curved ahead of them, and she tracked it with her lamp, reading the surface.
“I’ve put in the miles,” she said finally.
“It shows.”
She kept moving and didn’t examine why his words made her stomach do that crazy little flip.
The trees on either side of the road were heavy with snow, dark shapes at the edge of the light. The cold had sharpened as the last of the daylight left, the way it always did once the sun was fully down. She felt it on the small, exposed strip of skin between her balaclava and her goggles. She pulled the balaclava up another inch.
Beside her, Jack was quiet, which she didn’t mind. She’d noticed that sometimes he’d start talking and the words just kept tumbling out, but he wasn’t doing that now. He was just there, watching the road ahead with the same attention she gave it.
Steph didn’t hate it.
Not hating something is a long way from liking it. Don’t make more of it than it is.
The road stretched ahead of them into the dark. The sled pulled clean and steady behind her. Her legs werewarm, her breathing was easy, and the cold was the right kind of cold, the kind that reminded you that you were alive and capable and exactly where you chose to be.
“This is a good place to speed up a bit,” she said.
“Let’s do it.”
Jack’s headlamp swept the road beside hers.
She didn’t hate this at all.
Chapter 12
Jack
The hill announced itself gradually, the way the worst ones did.
It started as a gentle increase in grade that Jack’s legs absorbed without complaint, then gradually became something that required attention. The road curved upward into the trees and kept going. He shifted his weight forward, found a shorter stride, and kept moving.
Beside him, Steph adjusted without breaking rhythm. That was the thing he kept noticing about her. There was no wasted motion, no visible effort in the adjustment itself. She simply changed what needed changing and continued.
He focused on his breathing. In through the nose, out through the mouth, keeping it controlled. His legs were working hard, and the sled’s weight had become a different kind of presence on the uphill, pulling back instead of just pulling. He leaned into the waist harness as the realization of why Steph wore a chest harness settled over him. The load distribution had to be better for her.
She’d been right. She was right about most things, which he was finding terribly easy to accept. Becky from the coffee shop had called her a winter warrior, and she hadn’t been exaggerating.
Steph was a half step ahead of him. He could hear her breathing, steady and metered, and the rhythmic sound of her sled behind her. She wasn’t talking, and he wasn’teither, and the hill went on longer than it looked like it would from the bottom.
He thought about cross-country. Hours on skis, climbing grades comparable to this, but usually not as long. He was comfortable in cold and with sustained effort. That much hadn’t changed. But skiing and running used different muscles and pulled at the body differently, and the sled was its own specific challenge. He could feel it in his hips and knew much longer and they’d be screaming.
The top of the hill leveled off, and he came to a stop beside her. The headlamps caught the snowfall, the flakes coming straight down in the still air, small and steady. Below them, the road disappeared into the darkness.
