Page 153 of These Tears

The machine climbs over a low drift, and we lift enough to make my lungs forget how to work, then land with a jolt that makes my teeth click. Elias’ body shakes against mine with the impact, solid heat bursts between our layers, and my hands clamp harder around the bars as the machine charges onwards. It carves a line across the open white as I steer in a wide arc around it.

I feel it again, Elias’ chest moving. A rough and unrestrained sound vibrates through his throat and into my back.

Is he…?

Laughing?

My gut is still somewhere behind us, but a laugh of my own presses against the back of my teeth. I try to bite it down, but it comes anyway.

In the short time I’ve been here, Elias has taught me many things about myself. Good and bad.

And the bad, I’ve realised, also comes with its own kind of thrill.

For a while, we circle the open ground. I slow, accelerate, turn wider, then tighter. Between one pass and the next, another laugh escapes me.

And amidst the excitement, I press the throttle too hard.

The snowmobile lunges as if I’ve kicked it. The rear slews sideways, the track breaks loose, catches again and one ski kicks hard across the snow.

A scream tears out of me as the world pitches sideways. The machine bucks beneath us and we are – quite literally – flying.

That one sickening heartbeat is enough to make my life flash behind my eyes.

I slam into a mound of snow with a muffled whump, the powder exploding up my face and down my throat.

Elias hits a beat after, a heavy impact that sends another burst of white over me, and for a second all I can hear is the sudden absence of everything and my own ragged breath as the cold packs into every seam of my clothes.

I drag myself up on one elbow, coughing snow and patting it off myself.

Elias pushes himself upright with a groan, one hand going to his ribs before he catches himself and drops it.

‘Head?’ he asks.

I blink hard. ‘Still attached.’

‘Neck?’

I roll it cautiously, then my shoulders. No bite of pain, nothing wrong enough to silence the adrenaline fizzing within me.

I look at him. His palm is worrying at his side. ‘Are you hurt?’

First the fall yesterday and now this.

‘Day two,’ he mumbles to himself, brushing snow from his coat. ‘And she almost kills me twice.’

‘You kidnapped me,’ I deadpan.

He turns his head slowly, my reflection bouncing off his goggles, and I imagine him giving me his signature flat glare.

‘And no one told you to chase me through the woods!’ I point at his ribs.

He ignores it.

After he gets to his feet, he digs me out of the snow, his gloved hands brushing the powder off my coat as he examines me from head to toe. ‘Are you hurt?’

The question hangs there as I stand – as though we are not in the middle of nowhere, as though he is not my captor, as though he has any right to ask me that.

I look at the snow below me, snow around me, snow in my bloody collar. I glance at the overturned snowmobile, the sky overhead and finally at him. Waiting for my response as if he might be marginally worried.