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“You are not touching me with that old ass towel,” I snap, shaking my head, my mouth turned down in disgust. “I found some clean ones in the drawer next to the utensils.” I walk over and pull two of them out, holding them up for Alex to see.
“I’ll be green and you can be white,” Alex says, and I laugh. It’s the first real laugh that has happened since we’ve been here. It’s hard to laugh when it feels like everything is so dire. With the snow still falling, I can’t imagine a rescue crew has been issued. We’ll be lucky if the cabin isn’t buried in snow at this rate.
“What are you laughing at?” Alex asks, walking over and snatching the green dish towel from my hand, swinging it around above his head like a lasso.
“I think it’s funny that you think we need separate towels when we’re sharing the same toothbrush.” I wrinkle up my nose, feeling a little more playful now that my stomach isn’t growling like it’s trying to eat itself.
Even though the cabin is small, we haven’t had a chance to look through everything in here, both of us spending most of the day sleeping and being mad at each other. My head is still aching with a dull pain that has been present ever since the avalanche. I’m sure it’s a concussion, my second in a short time. There’s no way Alex doesn’t have one either with the way we were tossed down the mountain. Even with helmets, we both got rocked by that fall.
I’m still trying to figure out how far off course we are, and judging by the landscape, we have to be near the basin. The trouble is, the base of the Badger Creek mountains are deserted, unlivable and unreachable by regular roads. It’s all snowmobiles and helicopters, old hunting cabins and land that was bought and ignored.
“You want to ransack this place and see what we can find?” I ask, yawning, despite spending the last few hours sleeping. “After our bath, obviously since I think we’re both starting to smell.”
I walk over and dunk my towel into one of the pots near the fire, wringing it out, I press it to my face, feeling the warmth. Despite the lack of soap, I already feel better. I continue wiping myself down as Alex does the same, yet neither of us take off our clothes.
We’ve seen each other naked on numerous occasions, explored each other’s bodies intimately, but here we are suddenly uncomfortable. Maybe it’s the way we left things, everything still unspoken between us, weighing heavy on our conscience. There’s more between us than either of us are willing to admit, but more than that, there’s past trauma in our lives that make us who we are. We’re two people who want so desperately to act like nothing is wrong.
“We probably should,” Alex answers, tossing his towel into one of the pots on the stove. “Don’t worry, I’ll dump that water after you put your towel in there too. Kills the germs,” he adds, shrugging as if either of us have any idea what we’re doing.
Newsflash, we don’t.
“You want to take the kitchen and I’ll do the…” I stall out, looking for the right word to describe this literal one room cabin, “the bedroom?”
Alex nods, not really acknowledging the severity of our situation. Again, my thoughts begin to wander, wondering just how long we’ll be trapped out here. There has to be someone looking for us. We have friends and families and co-workers that know we’re missing. They know an avalanche happened as we were clearing the mountain, but what Alex and I aren’t saying out loud is that we both know the survival rate after a day.
Hell, we know the survival rate after a few hours. It’s basically nothing. Buried alive and suffocating. But our friends also know that we’re trained for this kind of thing. We deployed our airbags, swam with the moving snow, we created air pockets and hung onto each other as long as we could.
But again, they may have given up.
Or maybe they haven’t even started. It’s not safe to start a search and rescue in a storm that is still raging. The cabin is basically covered in snow with Alex constantly clearing a path from the door to keep us from being snowed in.
“Delaney,” Alex says, but his voice sounds distant, and I turn to look at him. “Delaney,” he says again, but this time it’s louder.
“Huh?”
“You okay? You’re just standing there.”
Now it’s me nodding, my head moving in response as if it’s automatic. Just an acknowledgment of what he’s said, but I’m not okay and he knows that.
“Sorry,” I reply, moving toward where the wooden bedframe is squeezed into the corner of the room.
“It’s all good,” he answers back, opening one of the high up cabinets, pushing up on his toes to get a better view.
I hate that as I watch him, humming along as if this is some type of backwoods camping vacation, I’m again thinking that I shouldn’t even be here right now. I wasn’t working. I was doing Elissa a favor and when I saw it was Alex I was helping, I was even more pissed off.
Everything that happened between us before the avalanche is still there, rooted deep in my mind, reminding me of all the shitty things he said to me and how he treated me. Being here with him as he tries to help us get through this situation isn’t helping me forgive him. It should be, but it isn’t.
I don’t want to argue and fight with him, but I also don’t want to act like things aren’t a fucked up mess between us. So instead, I focus on figuring out what this cabin has to offer, something that we’ll need if this snow doesn’t stop soon.
An hour later,Alex and I have found several boxes of dried pasta, a toolbox, more clothes, some blankets, a broom and dustpan, a box of half-melted candles, dish soap, spices, snowshoes and a whole bunch of useless crap, that might come in handy at some point.
It’s hard not to think about food and my stomach growls, reminding me that while I’m not starving, I am hungry. We haven’t been eating regular meals, trying to conserve what food we do have.
Alex is on the mattress near the fire and I’m pacing the room once again. I can’t seem to sit still, and all Alex wants to do is chop wood or lay around. He rolls over, watching me as I go from window to window, the view outside is nothing but an endless sea of white.
My stomach growls again and I curse at it, annoyed that my only source of entertainment is eating when there isn’t really anything available for us to eat.
“I can hear your stomach all the way over here,” Alex says, and I hate that he’s calling out my flaw while he, for some reason, never seems to be hungry.
