“I think you mean I’m a tragic literary figure, and I’ll have you know my Frog Prince raked in a solid pound of Reese’s Cups that year.”
“Your personal favorite?” he asks, his eyes skimming over me. His body has loosened, taking up all the space it needs, and mine responds like a mirror.
“Hers,” I admit, picking up my glass. The second gulp goesdown smoother and seems to bloom up and up, softening edges as it goes. Softening the part of me that should be building barricades, until all I can hear is the low roar of the fire.
“Why doesn’t that surprise me?” he murmurs.
His eyes are on my mouth when he says it, and this time, when I take a sip, the whiskey blooms lower. My legs press together, carefully avoiding his beneath the table.
“You ask a lot of questions for someone who isn’t ‘invested in the situation,’?” I air-quote him from the beginning of our hike.
Slowly, almost casually, he rests his forearms on the table and draws in closer, caging his drink behind his large hands. He raises his eyes to mine right as his now-familiar scent wallops me in the face like a dictionary of romance hero smells. Cedar, whiskey, and bad decisions.
“I guess that was until I had to carry the ‘situation’ down a mountain,” he says, and his gaze feels like a towrope dragging me in.
My pulse is the whole percussion section of an orchestra. At some point, one of us is going to stop this. Stand up and walk away.
I lean forward in my seat, almost closing the distance between us. “So I’m a ‘situation’ now?”
In the leaping firelight, his eyes make me think of deep green pools of water reflecting a wildfire. Steady amid the chaos.
“Nothing I couldn’t handle,” he replies, his deep voice hitting all my most neglected parts like gongs.
It’s been so long since I wasn’t careful. In her letter, Savannah practically named the day I stopped expecting life to pull its punches. But today I climbed a mountain and stood on the windswept summit with fucking eagles and felt like a different person. A brave person. Now the feeling’s back, except I’m inches away from a man who makes all my boundaries feel like terrible ideas. It’s why my uninjured leg is sliding beneath the table, searching until—
“Margot.” He says my name like a warning, but I watch hispupils dilate and feel like I’m being swallowed. My leg rests against his like a trillion volts of electricity aren’t surging through our point of contact. I wait for him to pull back, but he’s stock-still against me. The air between us might as well be flammable.
“I wouldn’t mind seeing how you handle me,” I say, the words striking the empty inches between us like a match.
And then his hand is on my jaw, tilting it up as his thumb strokes where my dimple would be if I smiled. A breath shudders out of him, and all the heat coiling in my body expands at once, sparking in every erogenous zone I possess. My mouth parts, soft and pliant for him, but just when I expect the first brush of his lips, he freezes.
He pulls back a critical inch, and his eyes do one panicked circuit over my features before he closes them hard. “Shit,” he curses hoarsely, turning his head away from me and accidentally brushing my face with his curls. Abruptly, he’s pushing his chair back and standing, leaving me hot, bewildered, embarrassed, and angry, all in quick succession.
“I can’t do this,” Forrest mutters, more to himself than to me. “I never should have—”
“Seriously?” I cry in disbelief, as every mayday signal I’ve been ignoring is cranked up to full blast. “You started it!”
My accusation, which was honed to perfection sometime around the second grade, stops his pacing. He stares at me, eyes wide. “Istarted it? You’re the one playing footsie—”
“That wasn’t footsie! It was an accident!” I lie, my cheeks getting hot. “You’re the one who implied you wanted—”
“I never implied anything—”
“You grabbed my face!”
At this, he stops and runs his hand through his hair for the third time in under a minute. Exhales. “Look. I’m sorry. I’m not interested in getting involved with guests. I never should have—” he starts again, but I cut him off.
“You seemed pretty interested a second ago,” I say sharply, looking pointedly at his crotch. Before he can respond with more than an embarrassed flush and a hasty adjustment of his pants, I push back and stand on my one good foot. Humiliation and defensiveness snake through me, raising my own temperature by a thousand degrees. I don’t need a coat. I’ll melt all the snow in Alaska simply by limping outside.
“Don’t try to walk yet,” he snaps, running a hand through his hair again. It gives him an electrocuted look that shouldn’t be attractive on anyone, but naturally, he pulls it off. “I’ve got a pair of crutches.”
“Why do you have—” I begin asking, then shake my head. “Never mind, it doesn’t matter. I’m going back to my cabin now.”
I grab my letter and photo and begin hobbling pitifully toward his hiking pack to wrestle my smaller one out of it. Forrest curses again and quickly heads to the bedroom. I’ve managed to retrieve my pack and am limping toward the front door when he returns with the crutches.
“Here,” he says, handing them to me after I get my coat on. I grudgingly accept them without a word because I haveneverbeen more upset with myself. I swore I wouldn’t give in to Forrest, and here I am playing footsie with him, even if I’ll claim plausible deniability for the rest of my days.
“I can walk you back,” he says gruffly as I finish getting my boots on.
