“You didn’t see me setting up the generator or running gas cans down behind the cabin, I promise you it was a few trips.”
He bats me off before dropping the pile of wood by the fire with several loud clunks as the logs hit the floor. Then he takes the reusable grocery bags and drops them on the kitchen counter.
I don’t wait for him to tell me not to help and dive right in removing our supplies from the bags. There’s a ton of canned and easy to make packet foods, flashlights, batteries, a crank radio, first aid kit, a few board games nicked from the hotel lobby, tons of bottled water, and what looks like a walkie-talkie.
“Who has the other one?” I ask, picking up the bulky two-way radio.
“It’s at Ted’s. Lerana uses it when the phones go on the fritz in case something happens with her son. I guess her mother’s anxiety is our gain.” He grabs the black rectangle out of my hands and switches it on. “This is mountain to diner, repeating mountain to diner, over,” he says like he’s some army commando.
The radio buzzes and clicks before a gruff voice answers.
“Ted here, what’s going on up there? Over.” My new boss sounds grumpy, yet interested.
“Setting up to weather the storm, how about you? Over.”
“Same, I’ve got Lerana and hers, plus the mayor and a few day-trippers planning to crash here until the roads are passable. I’m just glad my food shipment came in today, otherwise I might be headed up that damn mountain to come loot your kitchen. Over.” He laughs, unsurprisingly, as I’ve gotten to know him. That bigfoot always laughs at his own jokes.
“No looting required, mi kitchen es su kitchen, my brother. Besides it’s just Daphne and me up here, so we’ve got food to spare. Over.”
“Noted. Well, I’ve got to go drop some chicken nuggets for Lerana’s boy, stay safe—radio if anything gets dicey and we’ll do the same. Over and out.”
“Will do, stay safe out there! Over and out.” There’s something about how his face lights up after his little walkie-talkie conversation that has me seeing him as a gleeful little snowboy, and I want to bottle up that sparkle and keep it forever.
There’s two more bags I grab for on the far side of the counter, but he snags them out of my reach.
“Those are surprise bags,” he tells me, clutching them to his chest.
“What kind of surprise?” I jump up against him, trying to pull whatever secrets he’s got out of his arm. He only holds it higher, well over his own head.
“Good ones, I promise!” He reaches into one of the bags and pulls out a bottle of champagne and a bar of chocolate. He places those on the counter and stuffs the rest on a wood beam that I have no chance of reaching without a ladder—well that, or I crawl up Andri, using his hair as handholds. But I fear he might enjoy that too much.
“Oh, it’s even milk!” I laugh, eyeing the Hershey’s bar. Andri prefers the dark stuff, but once he found out how much I hate the bitter taste, he brought a whole lot more of my favorite kind of candy into the house. I appreciate the gesture. “I’ve never had champagne though,” I tell him without adding the bit where Gerald didn’t like it if I drank, so I was always toasting with sparkling water.
Andri frowns for a second and turns to snag a few water glasses from his cabinet.
“It’s actually a prosecco, on the sweet side. You’ll love it…I grabbed a bottle in case we needed a toast to pass the time.” He winks as he unwraps the foil from the glass neck. “But a toast to your first drink of bubbly is as good a reason as any, right?”
Andri pops the cork out, and it dings all the way across the large room until it lands squarely in the fireplace. He fumbles a bit as the liquid fizzes up and out of the bottle before he can angle the cup to catch the overspray. Pouring out just enough to fill a fourth of the glass, he hands it to me and then pours a little more for himself.
I hold my glass up in the air at the same time he does.
“To new friends, a future with unlimited possibilities, and not only surviving the storm—but thriving!” he bellows as if he’s in some kind of event hall.
“And to my luck, that I met someone as wonderful as you exactly when I needed to.” I lock eyes with him, and the love he has for me pours off him like heat.
“And to that, and to you,” he says quietly, nodding before throwing back his whole glass.
The sweet and bubbly pale yellow liquid hits my tongue, and I know with one hundred percent of my soul that I’m a champagne, or prosecco, or just bubbly in general kind of person.
“Delicious, you were right, this is very much my thing!”
“And you’re mine.” His voice is so deep it catches me off guard. “Sorry,” he quickly follows, as if he’s surprised that he said that out loud.
“You don’t have to be nervous about your feelings with me.” I refill my cup and walk back to the comfy oversized chair I’ve begun to claim for myself. “Let’s start a fire and relax a little, it’s not like we’ve got anywhere to be, right?”
“Given the chance to be anywhere else in the universe right now, I want you to know that I’d choose right here, right now, with you.”
I just smile, because I know he means it. He sets to work on the fire, setting a few logs around a firestarter. The hearth quickly roars to life, and in no time the room is even warmer than it was before.
