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“I guess I walked right into that one,” he says.
He takes off his glove to call Bo and curses when there’s no reception.
“I was afraid of that,” I admit.
“You don’t think they forgot we’re up here, do you?”
“No, they wouldn’t forget us. Bo was doing something for Regg, wasn’t he? But Danny wouldn’t leave us stranded out here…”
“Right, good ole’ Danny,” he says between his teeth.
I frown. “You…have a problem with Danny?”
“No. No problem.” He sighs. “They wouldn’t play a prank on us, would they?”
“They wouldn’t mess around with something like this, especially not when the snow is picking up.”
“I hope you’re right.”
“I am. At least about that,” I add in a softer tone. “I’m sure we’ll start right back up soon…”
He takes his poles back and tries his phone again, attempting a text to Albert this time, but it doesn’t go through either.
We sit there for a few minutes, quiet except for the wind howling, and it starts to set in that we might really be stuck.
I look behind us again, down the steep incline, and run my hands down my arms, faster and faster.Do not panic, do not panic.
He keeps checking his phone every few minutes and the snow is not letting up. We yell for a while, but it just gets lost on the wind.
It’s getting worse up here, and amping up the concern is the fact that we’re off to the side of where skiers are going down the mountain, so with the visibility decreasing as the snow comes down, I don’t think anyone skiing down is going to see us sitting here, stuck.
Ifwe have been forgotten.
And eventually, we’re not seeing any skiers going past.
We go through stretches of quiet, stretches of yelling, stretches of trying to act like we’re not stuck up on a cold mountain.
And then…I get beside myself.
“Okay,” I say somewhat hysterically. “I can’t believe this is happening. I thought we’d be going within like aminute, but this is…what has it been…forty-five minutes? An hour?”
I shake my head wildly and he turns to face me, making us rock.
“Careful,” I shriek, reaching out to hold onto the side. “Steady. Okay, that’s better. We’re slowing down. It’s not that cold out here, right? I can’t believe out of the—has it been hundreds? I think probably so—out of the hundreds of times I’ve skied, this hasneverhappened. Oh my God, what if they did forget us out here? They wouldn’t, right? But it’s snowing and technically, we’re closed. It was so crazy to come out right before closing. That wasn’t smart of either one of us. It is really, really cold…”
My eyes blur from the wind and my face is numb.
“I’m not crying, I’m just cold—”
“Scarlett.” Jamison’s gloved hand reaches out to grip my shoulder. “Breathe, beautiful.”
When I just stare at him, he puts his arm around me and takes a deep breath himself. I try to copy that, inhaling and exhaling slowly until eventually I’m breathing calmly again.
“Sorry,” I whisper. “I didn’t know how much it would bother me to be stuck out here. I love riding the ski lifts…getting stuck, not so much.”
“It’s not my favorite either,” he says. “But I have to admit, if I have to be stuck out here on this mountain, I’m happy to be stuck with you.”
He pauses and looks over at me, our faces much closer now that his arm is around me. My heart rate is picking up for entirely different reasons now.
