He continues to work, almost like he didn’t hear me. “This might hurt,” he warns before finally working the loosened boot off my ankle.
I groan and fall back in the chair, biting my lips together as all compression disappears and my ankle becomes an angry, throbbing bowling ball. Forrest’s warm hands begin to gently test mymobility, and almost immediately, a sharp stab of pain makes me sit up straight again with a gasp. He nods to himself and mutters something I barely catch. Letting go of me, he stands, turning on a lamp and shucking his own coat and boots before going to the kitchen. There, he pulls out a large pot and begins filling it with water from the sink.
“What does ‘vertical aversion’ mean?” I ask while he grabs two ice cube trays from his freezer.
To my surprise, there’s a ghost of a smile on his lips when he says, “I guess that works, too, but I said ‘lateral inversion.’ It’s the type of sprain you most likely have.”
My palms go sweaty on the leather armrests. “That sounds serious. Is it serious? Will I need an X-ray? Surgery?” I say, my voice getting higher with each new alarming possibility.
He shakes his head, popping all the ice into the water and shutting the tap off. He walks back to me with the sloshing, clinking pot, looking far more relieved than I feel. “It’s the most common kind of sprain. You’ll be fine in a few days,” he says, kneeling down and placing the pot at my feet, “but you need to ice it to prevent more swelling.”
I lean forward to look into the pot and then back up at him. “That looks really fucking cold.”
“It’s really fucking cold,” he confirms, pulling off his hat. The coarse dark cowlicks around his face are damp with sweat, and he looks exhausted. Not regular exhausted but I-just-carried-a-person-down-a-mountain exhausted.
“Alright,” he says. “Sock off.”
Swallowing hard, I carefully begin peeling off my sock and try not to cry again. While I’d never admit this to him, I feel like the world’s biggest idiot. For a moment at the summit, I thought I’d proved myself wrong. That Icando these excursions that have somehow become, after Savannah’s letter, inextricably linked withmy ability to pull off my career reinvention. But after injuring myself and being carried like a baby for hours, my self-confidence has never been lower.
When my toes are free, I wiggle them experimentally and see Forrest’s eyebrows pull up at the sight of my bright yellow gel pedicure. For the first time in hours, something like a smile pulls at my lips because it’s so like him to disapprove of anything whimsical. I cross my arms over my sweater. “Is there a problem with my nail polish that you’d like to share with the rest of the class?”
He’s still kneeling and sticks a hand in the pot to swirl the ice around. “Having a problem would suggest having an opinion about nail polish.” He pulls his hand out and rubs it over his neck, massaging overworked muscles. “Which I don’t.”
I blink away from his wet skin, suddenly parched. “Tell that to your left eyebrow, if it ever comes down from the stratosphere.”
“That’s my ‘surprised but not enough to care’ eyebrow,” he says, lowering it.
“And it’s surprised by what? That colors exist outside of the flannel spectrum?” I ask, looking around his painfully tidy cabin.
“Maybe it’s surprised anyone would consciously choose to paint their nails the color of stomach bile.”
“Ormaybeyour operating system is simply unable to process all things fun and adorable.”
I wiggle my toes again to further illustrate my point, and he looks away from them, faint color rising above the line of his beard. If I were flirting, I’d tease him for it and definitely bring up foot fetishes. But I’m not flirting, and there will be no flirting. My flirt broke years ago, and I have no interest in repairing it—especially not with men who have a disturbing knack for making me feel cared for. I remind myself firmly that Forrest is the excursion leader: helping me up the mountain—and then carrying me down it—was just his job.
“I’ve got no problem with your toes,” he says flatly, “but I do have a problem with stalling. Get them in the water.”
“Fine,” I say nonchalantly. Like stalling isn’t exactly what I’ve been doing this whole time. Like I stick my feet in ice baths all the time to relax. Locking eyes with him, I plunge my foot into the icy water. A second passes, and then—
“Shit!” I yelp as the pain in my ankle rockets from ten to a thousand. I start pulling my foot out of the pot.
“Nope,” Forrest says, leaning in close and putting a heavy hand on my leg to keep it in place. He squeezes my thigh, and my eyes jerk up to his. Apparently, even excruciating pain can’t keep my body from lighting up at his touch. “You need to keep it submerged. You’ll get used to it in a few minutes.”
“A few minutes?” I cry. “How many, exactly?”
“Fifteen to twenty,” he says, and I can’t stop my whimper. His grip on my thigh tightens, and all my nerve endings do a stadium wave. “You can do this,” he promises.
There isnodimension in which this is true.
“No, Ican’t,” I force out, scrunching my eyes shut. “I won’thavea foot if I keep it in here for twenty minutes.”
“Margot, look at me.” Reluctantly, I open my watering eyes to meet his steady ones. “When we started our hike today, I fully expected to turn back early with you. I never thought we’d actually reach the summit.”
My chest constricts with hurt, despite how low my own expectations were. His lack of faith in me seems like confirmation that I don’t have what it takes to live up to my sister’s belief in me. I lower my pricking eyes, telling myself the tears are from the searing pain in my ankle. But then his thumb starts circling against my inner thigh, like he knows his touch is the only thing that could possibly get my attention through the radiating pain. My gaze stutters up to his, and his eyes are startlingly dark in the dim lamplight.
“I don’t like being proven wrong,” he admits in a low voice. “Can’t fucking stand it.” He takes a breath. “Except for today. You proved me wrong on that summit, and I—”
He looks like he wants to say more but stops himself and looks down at where his hand rests on my thigh. I blink at him, unsure how to respond, until I remember what he said on the walk down.
