Avery
I can still feel his hands on my skin.
It’s been three days since the cabin. Of avoiding Brennan, throwing myself into every resort activity that doesn't involve snowmobiles, rebuilding my walls with desperate efficiency.
Three days of being absolutely miserable.
"You've been crying," my roommate observes at breakfast. Sophia is a warm woman in her thirties who signed up for the retreat after a divorce.
"I have not."
"Your eyes are puffy, and you've been in the bathroom at three a.m. every night. Plus, you look like someone died."
I push food around my plate. "I'm fine."
"Is this about the snowmobile guide? The hot one who looks like he hasn't slept either?"
"It's not about anyone. I'm just ready to go home."
"Liar."
She's right. I'm a terrible liar.
The truth is, I'm drowning. In feelings I don't know how to process, in desire I can't logic away, in grief for something that didn’t exist but felt more real than anything in my life.
I thought I was being mature. Practical. Recognizing that cabin fever isn't love, that amazing sex doesn't equal compatibility, that Brennan and I want different things.
Except I don't know what I want anymore.
For twenty-five years, I've had a plan: education, career, partnership track, eventual marriage to someone equally ambitious and controlled. A life of achievement and status and safety.
But after the time in a cabin with Brennan, that plan feels hollow. Like I've been living someone else's dream.
At lunch, I see him across the dining hall. He's with other guides, laughing at something, but it doesn't reach his eyes. He looks exhausted. Sad.
"Go talk to him," Sophia says.
"There's nothing to say."
"Bullshit. You're in love with him."
"I'm not—" But the denial dies on my lips.
Because I am. I fell in love somewhere between his patient teaching on the snowmobile and his raw honesty about his breakdown and the way he worshiped my body like I was precious.
And that terrifies me more than any storm.
"I don't know how to do this," I whisper. "I don't know how to be the person who falls in love at a retreat and throws away their entire life plan for a man who calls them Ice Queen."
"Maybe you don't throw away your plan. You revise it. Add spontaneity. Make room for feeling."
"What if I can't? What if I'm too broken?"
Sophia takes my hand. "Honey, you're not broken. You're just scared. And the only way past scared is through."
Later that afternoon, I do something unplanned: I go to the resort's spa and book a massage.
No schedule. No itinerary. Just... seeing what happens.
