"Sounds amazing."
For a minute neither of them said anything else. Then Colton reached out to see if he could scrabble for stones in the dark, and found a handful of tiny ones. He started rolling them across the floor, listening for any sudden changes in pitch that suggested they'd found a hole. There weren't any, and he sighed in relief, buried his nose in Jo's shoulder, and after a minute, said, "I'mgonna change into a chimera again and see if I can makesurethere aren't any pits, now that I'm facing what light there is."
"Okay." Jo shivered when he shifted, but said, "I guess this is one way to get out of the weather for the night."
Colton roar-laughed right next to her, and she whistled. "Wow that's a big sound from right up close. Anything?"
He shook his head, knowing she couldn't see it but hoping she might feel it, and stayed a chimera for several minutes, intently studying the space they were in with what little light there was fading away. When he shifted back it was to say, "It looks like a cave of some kind. I can't see behind us at all, but right here it looks like the ground is solid and we've got enough head room to stand up, if we need to. There's a slope where we fell in, although I think it's less slope-y than it was, after me hitting it. How did…whathappened?"
"The ground just gave way," Jo said with a shrug. "You'd think with the winter it would have been frozen solid enough, but I must have hit a patch of permafrost that thawed enough to thin the ground, and my weight was enough to take it out."
"I didn't know there was permafrost this far south."
"It's intermittent. We've had a couple bison get stuck in it, every once in a while." She sounded less calm now, and more normal. "Did I mention this was enough adventure?"
Colton chuckled. "Yeah. So that tent. Are you familiar enough with it to pitch it in total dark?"
"Probably, but we've got the tea lights, too." Now Jo sounded chagrined, and Colton, in sympathetic chagrin himself, put his face in his hand as Jo muttered, "Which would have taken a lot of the drama out of you creeping around, if I'd thought of it. I swear I didn't until you mentioned the tent, though."
"Neither did I," Colton said into his hand. "I was very focused on it beingdarkand beingcareful. I've got my phone, too. It's probably warm enough that I could use the flashlight on it."
Jo snickered. "Well, aren't we Mr and Mrs Dramatic. We had all these modern tools and immediately reverted to cavemen."
"Literally," Colton said, more cheerful now. "Okay, let's find the bag with the lights and set up the tent. I'm sure I can get us out of here in the morning, but there doesn't seem to be much point right now, does there? Like you said, this keeps us out of the weather."
Together they sat up, Jo groaning with stiffness from her fall and Colton trying not to make a big deal of the fact that his shifting back and forth had pretty well taken care of any bruises he'd obtained. It took a few tries to find the right bag, but it was astonishing how much less stressful the cave was once the tiny lights pushed back the dark a little. Jo raised one, looking around, but it didn't give off enough light to even reach the walls, so she put it back on the floor and they pitched the tent with practiced efficiency by now. Within a few minutes, they were able to crawl inside, bringing the lights with them. They seemed brighter with the orange walls to reflect off, and Colton winced he finally noticed a bruise along Jo's cheek. "You sure you're okay?"
She made a face. "I'm sure I'd be a lot less okay if I hadn't had a hat and a scarf and a hood wrapped around my face when I fell. Yeah, honestly, I'm mostly fine. I could sleep for a week, but yeah."
"Food first," Colton said, scrounging through the bags to find the last of the energy bars. "You have them."
"We'll share," Jo said firmly. "I'm sure it takes a lot of energy to shift back and forth, and even if it doesn't, a chimera that size must need a hell of a lot of calories."
We can hunt a buffalo tomorrow,his chimera suggested with enough glee to make Colton chuckle. "No buffalo hunting," he said aloud. "It would be hard to explain, or get blamed on wolves. We'll be back to regular meals tomorrow."
The chimera settled down with a grumpyharumphand Colton found Jo looking at him with a soft, delighted smile. "Were you talking to your chimera right then? Thank you for letting me hear. I'd love to know what he says."
"Mostly how brave and beautiful and clever you are, with a side of complaining about how I won't let him hunt buffalo. Seriously!" Colton said at Jo's dubious expression. "He thinks you're utterly wonderful. He is, of course, right."
She smiled and shook her head, obviously pleased if somewhat skeptical. "I'm not sure about that. I'm tired, banged up, scared, and?—"
"Amazingly calm under pressure, prepared, smart, determined, and incredibly impressive," Colton finished. "I've never heardanybodyas calm as you were when I fell down in here, except maybe you when the plane was going down."
"I would be a huge fan of nobody going down anymore," Jo said, and then even in the limited light of the tea candles, blushed such a furious hot red that it contrasted with her hair.
Colton tried, for a second, not to laugh. Then it burst out of him, a high-pitched snort that escaped mostly through his nose and rendered him absolutely helpless with tears of laughter. He could feel his own face turning nearly as red as Jo's as she buried it in her hands and also began to giggle, if more quietly and with more embarrassment. Eventually she wheezed, "That came out wrong," which for some reason set Colton off all over again.
He finally reached over to pull her into his arms, warm and strong and solid, and, still snickering, kissed her hair. "I know what you meant, although I'd like to voice a strong objection to what you actually said."
"Yes, no, me too, I mean—oh,God." Jo started laughing again and hid her face in his chest. "Oh my God. I think I might be over-tired and over-stressed, Colton. It wasn'tthatfunny."
"It was pretty funny," he said with a grin, but sighed and snuggled her closer as he spoke more quietly. "That said, yeah. It's been a hell of a three days. But it'll all be over tomorrow, and yet also, somehow, amazingly, it'll all start for real tomorrow. I'm coming home to meet the parents," he murmured, now smiling. "If you're okay with that."
"Well, I'm sure not leaving you on the doorstep after all this! And I think it's already started," Jo added thoughtfully. "Us, I mean. I think this is as real as it gets. All of this is…yeah. Very real. It'll be complicated for a while, but we're really already on the path that's going to take us…everywhere, together. Aren't we?"
"We are," Colton whispered. "God, how lucky am I to have found you?"
"Is it luck, or is it fate? I mean, didn't we kind of have to find each other?"
