He arches a brow and waits for me to explain.
Moving as fast as my zombie fingers will allow, I grab the spare blanket he abandoned on the tarp, roll it lengthwise into a sad wool snake, and plop it down the middle of the mattress.
Afon looks at it. "What is that?"
"That's the wall. I'm West Berlin, you're East Berlin. You stay in your sector, I stay in mine, and nobody defects."
"You cannot be serious."
"Do you want me to die or not?"
Another exhale. I'm worried he's not taking enough inhales to match the rate at which he's expelling irritated air. But I guess that's his problem, not mine; I have enough of my own to deal with right now anyway. He kills the lamp, then makes his move. The mattress dips so deeply that m whole frame is going to fold like a lawn chair and turn this into a casket for two.
But, miraculously, it holds. And then the deed is done. Sort of.
Afon Satyrin is lying next to me, on his back, gazing up at the ceiling.
Even with the Berlin Blanket, the heat hits me immediately.
The man radiates like a substation. Within ninety seconds, my side of the bed is habitable once more. Within five minutes, the shivering downgrades to occasional aftershocks. My toes wriggle, confirming that they do in fact still exist.
"Better?" he asks the rafters.
"Marginally," I lie.
That's a whopper. It'ssomuch better. It's catastrophically better. My entire nervous system is sending up flares of gratitude, and I'm choosing to interpret them as a thermal response and absolutely nothing else.
We lie there. The wind keeps up its one-woman show against the roof. Wolf, sensing detente, hauls himself up off the floor, turns two circles, and flops down across the foot of the bed, pinning my feet in the best possible way.
"Your dog is on the bed," I report.
"He goes where the warmth is. He's smarter than both of us."
"Speak for yourself. I've made exclusively excellent decisions this week."
A pause. "You hiked into the Catskills with one granola bar."
"It was alargegranola bar."
"You concussed yourself on my lawn."
"That was the tree's fault."
"You called a man with a rifle a coward in a confined space."
"And look how that worked out," I brag, before my brain can intercept the words at the border. "I got kissed."
For the next while, I can feel him deciding whether to pretend he didn't hear that last bit. "Go to sleep, Caroline," he says finally, but it's softer than the last hundred times he's said it. Worn at the edges, like the photograph on his nightstand.
I don't go to sleep.
Neither does he.
Minutes pass. Maybe an hour. The fire in the stove dwindles, and the wind drops, briefly, into one of those eerie lulls where the whole mountain seems to be holding its breath, and that's when he says one more thing.
"You should never have come looking for me."
I go very still. Even my mouth, the eternal traitor, has the sense to stay closed.
