The cold was an infection, a curse in my marrow, and I hated it as much as I hated who I was sharing it with.
Caiden threw a stick into the blaze, then considered me from across the orange chasm. His face was unreadable, all hard planes in the uncertain light.
I wouldn’t meet his gaze, too busy cataloguing my own failures: the crawling ache in my ribs, the moss still glued to my thighs, the snot leaking from my nose, which I wiped on the back of my sleeve like a child.
My breathing was off, shallow and fast, as if each inhale cost me something I didn’t have to spend.
He leaned back on his elbows, tilting his head to the fractured sky. “You ever stop shaking, or is that a permanent feature now?” he asked, dry as a crypt.
I curled deeper, not dignifying it with an answer. My teeth clicked in reply, the only music the woods cared to provide.
I heard his footsteps crunching across the moss, but I didn’tflinch. I let my teeth chatter, let my body shake and rattle itself to pieces. The only sound was the rasp of my own ragged breathing, a death rattle on repeat.
I wished I could quiet myself, dissolve into the mulch and moss, but I was trapped in my own stupid, useless flesh. I wondered if this was what dying was like: a slow, joyless undoing, every cell mutinying against the next.
Then his shadow blotted out the moonlight. He crouched over me, and for a moment I thought he might smother me with his hands, finish what the river had started.
I almost welcomed it. Better to be murdered by a man than by the indifferent cold.
Instead, he reached down and, with a violence that was almost gentle, hooked his arms under my shoulders and dragged me toward the fire. I wanted to snarl, to sink my nails into his face and scream, but I was too tired, too small.
He settled beside me, his back against a boulder, and pulled me up against his chest, locking my arms under his arms, pinning me to him with the patience of a python.
His body was an oven, every inch coiled with heat that radiated straight to my marrow. It was humiliating, the intimacy of it, the way I molded to the shape of him.
I tried to thrash free, but my limbs wouldn’t obey. I was shivering so hard the world juddered in and out of focus.
“Stop fighting,” he muttered, voice flinty and low. “You’ll warm up faster this way.” I could hear the effort in his throat, the way he ground the tenderness into something cruel. “Don’t flatter yourself, it’s like hugging a stiff, rattling corpse.”
The heat unraveled me, cell by cell, the knots of cold unspooling into aches, then nothing. My breathing slowed. My teeth stuttered, then fell still. I felt the pulse of his heart in my back, a steady thud, and I tried to hate him for the way it steadied mine.
But I couldn’t. All I could do was drift in the space between him and the fire.
THE PAST
AMELIA’S BREAKING POINT
I spent the afternoon curled on the sagging cushions of the old couch, the pages of my novel spread open in my lap.
Outside, the late-afternoon light filtered through dusty curtains, and inside, the hush of the empty house pressed against me.
I clung to each sentence, willing the words to hold off the shadows creeping at the edges of my thoughts. Then a hard, persistent knocking shattered the stillness.
My heart thundered as I shot upright. The couch groaned beneath me, its springs protesting after years of use. Who could possibly be out there?
Everyone who knew this place stayed far away, drawn to gossip about its history of sorrow, afraid of the restless darkness said to swirl behind its cracked wallpaper.
Swallowing hard, I rose and padded toward the front door, every step weighed down by dread and curiosity. The split-second before I opened it stretched into eternity; I felt the air thicken in my lungs.
Then I saw him.
Caiden stumbled into the threshold, the reek of cheap whiskey clinging to him like a second skin. His cheeks were flushed, his eyes wild and bloodshot beneath tangled hair.
The heavy door slammed behind him, and the sound rattled the plaster in the hallway.
He teetered forward, scowling, and I pressed back against the solid oak, my spine finding support in the cool grain.
“You bitch,” he growled, voice ragged. “You’re the reason I just lost my best friend.” Heat radiated from him in pulses. I felt it against my chest, as if I stood too close to a flame.
