“I’m not playingStardew Valley,” I say. “I’m compiling the GPS data from—what?”
She’s grinning this reckless grin at me, braid over one shoulder as she rifles through a drawer for the can opener.
“I’m just teasing,” she says. “You don’t have to look so mad.”
“I don’t look mad,” I grumble, shutting the tablet and pushing it to one side because I’m clearly not going to get anything done. “It’s in the drawer next to the sink.”
“Ah,” she says, pulls it out, and shuts the drawer with her hip. It’s not the sort of thing I should notice, but at this point I’ve got a whole goddamn list of things I shouldn’t notice about Andi but do anyway.
Like: the slight gap between her front teeth when she smiles at me, smaller than the gap she had as a kid but still there, like she had braces but they didn’t fix everything.
Like: the way she wears leggings that dig into her waist a little, and thinking about that soft, fleshy bump is why I burned dinner last night.
Like: how she was stronger than I expected when she wrestled me on that bed and how I liked that more than I should have.
“You sure I can’t help?” I ask, because the alternative is to sit here and watch her, and that feels dicey at best.
“If you really want to do something, stick your foot on a chair,” she says without looking up from the soup she’s pouring into a pot. “Rest that ankle because after lunch, we’re going sledding.”
“I’ve got work to finish,” I say, glancing at the iPad even though I also put my foot on a chair. “I’m already a couple of days behind on tagging, and if I want these data sets to mean anything in the spring, I can’t afford to lose more time. I can’t just go sledding in the middle of the day.”
She glances over her shoulder as she puts a slice of cheese into her mouth and smiles around it.
“Suit yourself,” she says, and goes back to making lunch.
* * *
“Almost there,”I say an hour later. I’ve got the sled under one arm and Andi crunching through the snow in front of me, and I don’t want to talk about how this happened.
“There’s still a lot of trees,” Andi is saying, hands in her coat pockets, breath fogging out in front of her, cheeks and nose and lips all pink again.
“It’s a forest.”
“You said there was a good spot!”
I sigh because I’m a sucker with no spine and even less ability to saynoin the face of the way Andi looks when she thinks she’s got a good idea. She had the sled at first, but it’s kind of big and it was awkward for her, so after the fifth time she knocked it into a tree and dropped it I picked it up.
“Here,” I tell her. “Just after that rock.”
“How far from the cabin are we?” she asks, plunging ahead.
“Maybe three-quarters of a mile,” I say, watching her braid swing across her back. “If you check the GPS I handed you before we left, it’ll tell you exactly—”
She stops and her face lights up. Coincidentally, I forget what I was saying.
“This is perfect,” she says, and turns to me, she’s smiling with her eyes crinkled, the kind that threatens to turn into a laugh at any second, and it feels so good I have to look away.
“Should be okay,” I tell her, coming up alongside with the sled. “I’ve never actually been sledding up here, but I know a couple other rangers have. Nice slope, no debris.”
The spot’s open to the sky, maybe twenty feet wide and two hundred long. In the summer it’s a pleasant little meadow with a steep slope, but in the winter it’s a decent place to sled if you don’t want to run into a tree. Or so I’ve heard.
“You should go first,” she’s saying, pushing her hat down a little further onto her head, the ties on either side swaying in the breeze.
“So I can find out if there’s stumps under the snow?”
“Because you carried the sled and found the spot,” she says. “You should have first crack at it.”
“It was your idea.”
