“Okay, okay.” I swung my leg up and hissed when my hands wrapped around the burning cold metal railing. I shifted to grip the wall, and something soft and impossibly cold pressed my hand into the brick. Jolene grabbed a fistful of my T-shirt and pulled. When I tumbled onto her balcony, I realized the soft, cold thing was her hand.
Breathing hurt, and her hand in mine was almost too frozen to hold. I pushed her toward her door, which she’d left open, so there was no warmth to welcome us when we got inside. Shoving the icy wind out when I closed the door helped, but not enough. I was still in the process of freezing. Jolene stood still as though already frozen. I ripped the thick down comforter from her bed, wrapped it around her back, and pulled her against my chest before cocooning myself in it, too.
Ice had begun forming on the exposed hairs on my arms, and as I looked at Jolene, that ice seemed to stab deep inside me. Her eyelashes had frosted over and glistening tracks of frozen tears trailed down her cheeks.
We both started to melt as we sank to the floor in front of her bed. My teeth were chattering; her lips were gray. I didn’t know what I was saying to her as I started rubbing warmth back into her hands, her arms, her back. She said nothing as I coaxed circulation back into her limbs. I didn’t stop until her teeth were chattering, the sound a sharp clicking that was so fast that it almost sounded like my phone vibrating.
“Are you going to tell me why you were freezing to death outside?”
We were sitting shoulder to shoulder, so she didn’t have to move much to let her head drop to my shoulder. “No.”
Glancing at her face, I saw that the color was returning to her lips, but she didn’t feel all the way thawed out. Little shivering tremors still racked her body, so I wrapped my arm around her waist, sharing my body heat. I forced my tongue to the roof of my mouth so that I wouldn’t say something rash in response to her one-word answer. With gut-twisting panic, I thought back to the look on her face when she’d grabbed the balcony railing. She’d have done it. She’d been that desperate. I hadn’t been that afraid since the night we’d gotten the call about the accident that killed my brother. So I didn’t say anything else. I added another arm, and I held her.
I wanted to make her tell me, to shake her and scream at her and hold her all at once. I wanted her to hold me. I still felt threads of terror stitching through me until I could almost see them under my skin. I’d already known I loved her. But I didn’t know until that moment when she’d started to climb to me that I’d die for her.
“Just so you know,” I said, hearing the way my voice shook, “you’re my favorite person. In every way, you are my favorite.”
After a minute, I leaned forward to flip open the laptop that she’d left on the floor. I turned on the first movie I found, then settled back into the comforter with her as the opening credits ofNapoleon Dynamitestarted to play. Her frozen tears had melted away, but new ones fell silently as we watched the movie.
Jolene
Iwoke up on the floor. With a person for a pillow.
We’d sort of folded into each other. Adam’s head was resting on the crook of his arm, which was draped over my hip; mine was cushioned on his thigh. The comforter that he had wrapped us in was constricted tightly around my arms and pinned under Adam’s weight. When I tried to extract myself, I had to tug hard, which succeeded in freeing my arms but also waking him.
Adam shifted so that I could untangle the rest of myself and sit up. He blinked several times and arched his back, then righted himself, too. Weak sunlight spilled into my room through the glass doors. It lit a path that stretched toward us but didn’t quite reach. There was no real warmth from the early-morning sun.
“You stayed all night.” My voice cracked when I spoke. Not because I was struggling to control my emotions—I felt more numb than anything—but because I’d abused it the night before with laughter that had turned into something else. “Did you mean to?”
“I wasn’t going to leave, so yeah, I meant to.”
I’d let so much cold into my room the night before that the air still felt chilly once we were no longer pressed together. I shivered. “You’re going to get in trouble.” I didn’t want Adam to pay for helping me, but even had I been thinking clearly the night before, I still would have gone to him. I’d needed him more than I’d worried about what his dad would do later.
Adam leaned away, not from me but toward my laptop to wake up the screen and check the time. It was still early. Maybe early enough for him to sneak back home—through the front door this time. If he left right then, if he was quiet...but he didn’t get up.
“Is it too late?” I asked.
Adam shook his head. “Probably not.”
“Then you should go.” But I didn’t push him or in any way urge him to move, apart from my words.
We were back in the same position we’d started in the night before. Sitting on the floor against the foot of my bed, shoulder to shoulder, except we weren’t touching. It had been so easy to lean on him in the dark, but I couldn’t shift even an inch to my left that morning.
“Doesn’t matter anyway.” When I looked at him, Adam plucked at the side of his pants. “I didn’t think to grab my keys.”
When he moved, I was able to see him in a way I hadn’t during the night. Adam was wearing a short-sleeve T-shirt and the same red plaid pajama pants he’d worn on his birthday. And he was barefoot. He’d gone out into a blizzard for me with nothing but thin cotton covering him. He’d crawled across an ice-covered wall to reach me. Because I’d needed him. Because I was stupid, so stupid. I hunched into myself as my stomach clenched.
“Hey, hey. It’s all right.” Adam’s hand slid over to grasp mine, to thread our fingers together. “I’m not complaining.”
The thing that broke me, that thawed my numbness, was that he meant it. He’d gladly get in trouble for me, and we both knew he was going to get in some trouble. He wasn’t agitated or mad or anything like that. He was completely relaxed, holding my hand like he didn’t have a care in the world beyond being there with me.
“What you said last night, about me being your favorite person, did you mean it?”
“You know I did.” The answer came so easily to him. He didn’t even think about it. He wasn’t trying to comfort me, keep me from freaking out and running into a blizzard again. He didn’t have to say it again, but he did. I closed my eyes, because he was so bright.
“Sometimes I just think about you and I feel better. I don’t even have to see you or touch you—” Adam squeezed my hand “—and I feel warm. How do you do that?”
“I’m the physical embodiment of Prozac.”
