Evenings were the worst. Or the best. Depending on how you looked at it.
We’d cook dinner together—Samuel was surprisingly competent in the kitchen—and then settle on the couch with Purrsephone between us. Sometimes we watched movies on my laptop. Sometimes we talked. Then we’d just sit in comfortable silence while the fire crackled and the snow continued to fall outside.
And then we’d go to bed.
Together.
Because the couch had been deemed “too cold” after that first night, and somehow we’d never revisited the sleeping arrangement. Samuel just... came to bed with me. Like it was normal. Like we’d been doing it for years.
And every morning, I woke up wrapped around him.
We hadn’t kissed since that first day. We hadn’t done anything more than hold hands and sleep tangled together and exist in each other’s space like two planets caught in the same orbit. But it was there—the tension, the wanting, the unspoken question of what are we doing?
I was contemplating all of this while pretending to read a manuscript when I heard it: the distant rumble of an engine. Not a car engine—something bigger.
Samuel looked up from his phone—he’d finally gotten a consistent signal again, though he’d been pointedly ignoring most of his notifications. “What’s that?”
“Sounds like...” I went to the window. “A snowplow.”
Sure enough, a large plow was making its way up the mountain road, pushing aside the accumulated snow from the past few days. And driving it, bundled in what appeared to be seventeen layers of clothing, was Gladys Pritchard.
“Is that Gladys?” Samuel appeared at my shoulder. “On a snowplow?”
“Apparently she contains multitudes.”
The plow rumbled past my cabin, heading up toward Samuel’s destroyed one. We watched as Gladys brought it to a stop, climbed down with surprising agility for someone her age, and stared at the wreckage.
Even from this distance, I could see her shoulders slump.
“We should go talk to her,” Samuel said.
“We should.”
Neither of us moved.
“She’s going to have questions,” I said.
“Probably.”
“About why you’re not dead in there.”
“Also probable.”
“And about where you’ve been staying.”
Samuel turned to look at me, a small smile playing at the corner of his mouth. “Are you embarrassed to tell Gladys I’ve been sleeping in your bed?”
“I’m not embarrassed. I’m just... aware that she’s going to draw conclusions.”
“Would those conclusions be wrong?”
I didn’t have an answer to that.
We bundled up and trudged through the snow to where Gladys was standing in front of Samuel’s cabin, her hands on her hips, her expression somewhere between devastated and furious.
“Look at this,” she said when she saw us approaching. “Just look at it.”
The cabin looked worse in daylight than it had during the storm. The tree had gone straight through the front corner, taking out the picture window, part of the roof, and a significant portion of the wall. Snow had accumulated inside, covering everything in a thick white blanket.
