He hides his face behind his paws.
Humiliated, I touch my mouth. It's still warm and humming, still very much under the impression that good things are happening.
The poor naive idiot. My lips have not yet received the memo from upper management.
Whatever just happened…
… will never, ever happen again.
If there were a Nobel Prize for Sustained Interpersonal Quiet, Afon Satyrin would be flying to Stockholm right now. He comes back inside after forty-five minutes—long enough to make a point, not long enough to actually freeze—and proceeds to spend the rest of the evening performing every chore that has ever existed.
He restacks the firewood by the stove. The firewood that was already stacked. He takes inventory of the duffel, lining cans up on the shelf with their labels facing out. He sharpens his folding knife on a whetstone with a slowshick, shickthat sets my teeth on edge. At one point, he produces a length of paracord from somewhere and starts tying endless knots, only to retie them and start all over once he's reached the end of his literal rope.
The whole time, I sit on the bed with the wool blanket around my shoulders and watch this one-man production ofA Streetcar Named Avoidance.I find it best to say nothing. One of my better ideas, I must say.
Wolf keeps looking between us like a child of divorce. He'll rest his chin on his paws and stare at Afon for a while. Then he'll sigh moodily like the angsty teenager he is and swing his head over to stare at me. Then back to Afon.
I can practically hear him thinking,Are you guys going to talk about it, or am I going to have to spend Christmas at two separate houses?
"Don't come complaining to me," I mutter under my breath. "I tried."
Afon's shoulders twitch at the sound of my voice, but he doesn't turn around. His hand just keeps doing unspeakable things to that paracord.
So this is where we've landed. He kissed me—hekissedme,let the record reflect, Your Honor—like the world was ending, like I was the last source of oxygen in the Catskills, and now, we're back to a communication protocol consisting entirely of grunts and weighty silences.
My mouth remains stupidly fixated in the past. It's humming like a gong that Afon banged—no pun intended; okay, a little bit of a pun intended—and then ran from while screaming bloody murder. Those lingering vibrations seem to say,Remember when his hands were on your jaw?Yes, thank you, mouth.Remember how he tilted your—YES. THANK YOU. The committee has received your input and will be ignoring it.
The hours crawl by, but the wind doesn't. It claws at the metal roof and shoves itself under the door, through every nook and cranny in this poorly built, glorified excuse for a lean-to. I suffer in noble, stubborn silence as the temperature inside the hut drop in real time, like a stock I've invested my entire life savings in. The fire fights valiantly, but all it has is one small stove to wage war against an entire mountain. The odds not in the stove's favor.
By the time the window goes fully black, I've put on every layer I own and I'm still clenching every muscle in my body like that'll keep me from turning into a Caro-cicle.
Afon finally runs out of chores around what I estimate to be nine o'clock, although time has stopped meaning anything to me. There are no clocks here. There is only Before Kiss and After Kiss.
He stands in the middle of the hut, surveys his kingdom of stacked cans and sharpened implements, and then looks at me for the first time since we locked lips and ruined whatever fragile understanding we'd had going.
"Bed," he says.
"I beg your pardon?" I ask, offended that he thinks he can order me to bed like I'm a bratty toddler.
"You take the bed. Elevate the ankle." He tugs the spare blanket out of the duffel, and the canvas tarp along with it. "I'll take the floor."
I look at the floor, then back at him. "This is stone," I inform him, in case he hadn't noticed. "I think even a morgue attendant would reject this as being too bleak and miserable for the corpses."
"I've slept on worse."
"That's not the flex you think it is."
As per usual, he just grunts in response and does what he was going to do anyway.
God help me—if my hands were big enough to fit around this irritating man's neck, I swear I'd strangle him. Since they aren't, I'll have to make do with huffing and puffing at his many annoying qualities.
Afon spreads the tarp out parallel to the bed, folds the spare blanket once, and lies down on top of the arrangement flat on his back with his hands crossed over his chest. It's like watching a man climb into his own casket. All that's missing is a lily and an organist.
"Comfortable?" I ask sweetly.
Grunt.
"You look like you're lying in state. Should I file past and pay my respects?"
