His body was warm and big over me, engulfing my whole frame. I would have felt claustrophobic if he wasn’t so gentle – bracing himself above me instead of crushing me to the ground. With every gasp of laughter, his chest and my back moved up and down, pressing us closer together. It felt real. It felt alive.
He was right. We’d made it through the avalanche.
“The windows didn’t give?” I asked, at last, finding the oxygen to breathe and actually get a sentence out as our laughter died away.
“No,” Aiden said, and to my disappointment, he began to unwrap himself from around me. It was the closest physical contact I had had with a man in months. I had shied away from all touch – but now having tasted it again, I craved it, wishing he would come back. There was a heavy clinking and then a scraping as he pushed the bed frame back. “Hold on. Let me try and look around.”
“It’s so dark,” I said, lifting my head when his presence was gone from behind me. It didn’t make a difference. Whether I was looking to one side or the other, I couldn’t see a thing.
There was a crashing noise and a shout that had me leaping to my feet. Bad idea. I was even more helpless and lost standing up. “Aiden?” I called out, with no idea whether he was or if he was alright.
“I’m alright,” he replied, his voice wry. “Just tripped. Hold on… here it is!”
As soon as he’d finished speaking there was a flare of light that left me squinting and bringing my hands up to cover my eyes. After a moment of adjustment, I realized it was his cell phone – he must have found it by feeling around on the floor.
Mine was in my pocket, which made me feel pretty stupid for a moment.
He turned on the phone’s flashlight and twisted around to shine it at the windows, where we had been looking only a moment ago.
My breath caught in my throat.
Instead of the view we had been admiring, the only thing visible past the panes was white – pure white. Densely packed snow covered the whole of the window without a single inch of space.
“We’re snowed in,” I said. On some level, I had realized that must be the case, given the fact that it was dark all of a sudden, but seeing it like that was another thing. The snow was all around us. Pressing down on us.
Crushing us.
I slowly sank to the floor, wrapping my arms around myself.
“Hey,” Aiden said, turning towards me. “Hey, no. It’s alright. We’re okay. The cabin saved us. It was strong enough to bear the weight. We’re fine.”
“We’re trapped,” I croaked.
“Right,” Aiden said, sounding reluctant to admit it. “Right, but – Cade, we’re alive and we’re safe, okay? And someone will come to rescue us.”
“What about the door?” I asked. I looked towards it but I was reluctant to go over and actually try it. Maybe there was a slim hope that we were right at the end of the avalanche, and the snow hadn’t covered the door. Maybe we could climb out above whatever slope was there.
Aiden moved towards the door and touched the handle, then hesitated. “Should I open it?”
I didn’t know what to say. I had no idea about what to do when you were under snow from an avalanche.
What if there was snow out there and when he opened the door, it spilled in and filled the whole cabin?
“No!” I blurted out. “No, don’t open it!”
Aiden tore his hand away from the handle as if it had burned him, flashing an expression of alarm my way. After a moment he started shining his light all around the door like he was looking for something. I realized I was leaving myself in the dark and scrambled to get out my phone so I could turn my light on, too.
“It’s fully surrounded by snow,” he said grimly. “I can see in the tiny gap between the door and the frame. I think we’re completely under the avalanche.”
I swallowed hard. I tried not to cry, but I could feel a whiny sob working its way out of my chest. I fumbled and dropped my phone before I even managed to turn the screen on. I was panicking.
“Oh, god,” I gasped out, reaching blindly along the floor for it. My hands were shaking.
We were trapped. We were going to die here.
“It’s alright,” Aiden said, and I realized he was standing near me when the beam of light fell over my hand. I saw my phone and snatched it up gratefully, holding it to my chest. I turned it on and checked the screen.
No service. Of course, there was no service. We were under god knew how many feet of snow.
