“Do you think you can get out of here? My house is only about ten minutes’ walk down the hill.”
“I’m not sure I can walk.” Her voice was slurred like she’d been drinking and was well on her way to tipsy. If that wasn’t the case, I needed to get her warmed up and soon.
“Let’s get out of here and we’ll figure something out.” I crawled back out into the snow and turned to reach out to her. She’d barely moved.
It was a slow process, even with Princess nudging her along. When she finally got out, she sat in the snow like she’d run out of steam.
“I can’t walk,” she said dejectedly, looking up at me. “Are you really real? Or am I going to freeze to death here?”
“I’m real. And I can carry you,” I offered. “If you don’t mind being carried.”
To my surprise, she laughed. “There’s no way you can carry me for ten minutes.”
Determination was my best friend. “Try me,” I said.
Chevonne held her hands out.
“Put your weight on your good leg,” I said. “I’ll lift you as soon as you’re standing.”
Taking both her hands in mine, I hauled her to her feet the moment she told me she was ready. But the second she was up,her knees buckled. I caught her behind the knees and lifted her, cradled in my arms.
She looked up at me and smiled. “Brevin Masterson. Carry me over the threshold,” she slurred.
Having been a bachelor for so long, her proposal sent a jolt of hair-raising delight and confusion through me. All of it jumbled up with nostalgia. I shook my head—internally, so she wouldn’t think I was refusing her and planned to drop her and leave her on the side of the hill—and started down what I hoped was the path, following Princess.
It seemed to take forever, but in reality it probably took less than ten minutes to get back down the hill to my house going as fast as I dared. About two minutes into the trip, Chevonne had passed out, even though she was still shivering. From what I remembered about hypothermia, shivering was a good thing. However, I didn’t know everything there was to know about warming a hypothermic patient up, so I was happy to find the power still on at home.
At the front door, I kneeled and draped Chevonne’s unconscious body over my shoulder so I could get my keys out and unlock the door. That done, I carried her firefighter’s style over the threshold—not what I thought she was imagining when she said it—and laid her gently on my couch. I had the heat turned down but not off so the pipes wouldn’t freeze before I’d planned to come back, so it was cool in the house but not cold.
I thought about running a bath, but no. I needed to check what to do first. So I fired up my desktop and Googled “what to do if you have hypothermia.” Checking was a good call—I had to warm her up slowly. I figured turning up the thermostat wouldn’t hurt, so I cranked it to seventy-five degrees and ran to the bedroom to grab some blankets. I checked the bathroom cabinet and breathed a sigh of relative relief when I found a thermometer I’d brought with me once when I was sick.
Taking all that back out to the living room, I knelt beside Chevonne and the dog, who was sitting beside the couch watching over her human. Chevonne was awake and still shivering, her hand buried in Princess’s wet scruff.
“I need to take your temperature and see if I should try to get an ambulance out here,” I told her, holding out the thermometer. “It goes under your arm.”
“Good thing,” she said, her teeth clattering together. “I’d have broken a mouth one.” She reached for the zipper on her jacket, but she had her gloves on and she couldn’t grab the tab.
“Can I do that for you?” I asked.
Chevonne looked into my eyes, searching them. “It really is you, isn’t it?”
“One and the same. Beast to your Belle.”
She snorted. “Go ahead. You can’t do any worse than you’ve already done.”
I winced and drew the zipper down, careful not to touch anything I shouldn’t. She only had a thin hoodie underneath her jacket—no wonder she was so cold. I wanted to berate her for going out for a walk with inadequate clothing, but I was sure she’d learned her lesson already.
Between the two of us, we got her wet jacket off and her hoodie out of the way enough to place the thermometer. Teenaged me would have been delighted to have anything at all to do with undressing Chevonne—I’d had a huge crush on her by the time the musical ended, but despite that, I was a guy with a lot of friends and too self-involved. Right up until I asked her out on the date that never happened.
“Do you remember Roland? The guy who played Cogsworth in the play?” I asked as I covered her in two of the blankets I’d brought in, eager to connect with her now in some way. Wanting to take her mind off the situation as well.
“I remember you and Roland getting so drunk before rehearsal once, you both ended up passed out backstage.”
I dropped my head in shame, though I was happy to hear Chevonne wasn’t slurring her words anymore. Her shivering was more intermittent, but when her teeth chattered it was still just as bad. “I’m afraid I didn’t take a lot of things seriously back then,” I said.
“No kidding,” she said with a smirk.
“It was fun, though. Doing the musical.” We looked into each other’s eyes, and I saw her as she was back then. She hadn’t changed much if at all in the decade and a half since.
