She crossed her arms with a grin.
He hunched. “It had a button in the fireplace in the main room.”
She cackled and scooted next to him. She took out the wood he’d added, then looked around with a grimace. She snapped her fingers and grabbed what he thought was a giant pot from under one counter. When she opened it, he saw a collection of newspapers and twigs.
She arranged them in a triangle and then lit a match from a container of tea and held it to the newspaper. She fed it more and more twigs and eventually put on a log.
He waited and waited, but nothing happened. The fire burned around the log as she had to feed it more and more kindling. “Did we get fireproof firewood?”
“It’s frozen and was probably wet before that. Right now, it’s drying out and defrosting. It’ll light. Physics works.”
He was about to protest that this had nothing to do with physics, but he supposed the conservation of energy did apply. Physicists mostly didn’t have to worry about how wet their source of energy was.
Finally, a cheery little flame no bigger than a candle licked up the log.
“Fire!” Cat said with her arms in the air. He just smiled.
She pulled at his arm.
“What are you doing?”
“Try it!”
“What?”
“Yell fire! We have made fire!”
“The manufacturing company that made that match made a fire.”
She wouldn’t let it go and pulled at both of his hands.
Finally, he let her lift them above his head. “Fire.”
“You would make a terrible caveman.”
He scrubbed at his jaw, now scruffy, and thought of the electric razor with four blades in his ensuite bathroom with a heated towel rack. “You have no idea.”
She grabbed a poker from a hook that he didn’t notice on the side of the stove and poked at the log until it collapsed and then fed one more from their stock.
“No wonder cave people never got anything done if they had to do this all day,” he commented and looked at their log pile, which had seemed like such a big armful.
“Oh hell no, they had it far worse. Do you know how much time that match just saved? Probably another hour, and the wood was already cut.”
He never considered a match an efficiency. Interesting.
“I’m going to get more wood,” he said and went out.
As he tramped through the snow, he thought of her snowshoes. He just needed something to redistribute his weight. He didn’t have to reinvent the wheel. They’d solved this problem a long time ago.
He grabbed the ax and hiked a little further toward the trees, trying to look for a smaller tree with flexible limbs.
It took him longer than he wanted. Everything seemed to in Colorado, but he finally returned to the cabin with an armful of branches.
When he stepped inside, his senses were assaulted not with her gorgeous, earthy smell, but with a spice cabinet unleashed. It smelled like dirt and potpourri, and not in a good way.
“What is that?” he asked, slightly horrified.
“Christmas isn’t for another month, my man,” she said, eyeing the branches.
