Afon slides in across from me, careful with his side, his back to the wall and his eyes on the door. Under the fluorescent lights, away from the snow and the trees, he looks wrong. Too big for the booth. Too still. Like a predator someone shoved into an IHOP. Watching him warily squint at the pie case like it might be concealing unknown enemies, I feel the most absurd surge of tenderness toward him.
Maybe the sat phone is nothing I need to worry about. I'm probably overthinking it. Even if I try, I can't summon the rage, the confusion, the hurt I felt in that lean-to.
It's beyond doubt that this man would do anything, anything at all, to protect me. He's bleeding and frozen stiff, but he is still my protector. He turned his whole quiet, careful life inside out because I stumbled into his clearing and refused to leave.
Did he ask for me? No.
Is he stuck with me? Yes.
Would he go to the ends of the earth to keep me safe and warm and free? Hell. Fucking. Yes.
I don't know what's coming next. But God help me, I want to face it with him.
"You okay?" I ask.
He forces himself to smile. "Thriving."
Barb arrives with two mugs and a full carafe. I immediately guzzle down an entire mug without pausing for breath. It is the single greatest beverage I have ever consumed, including a two-hundred-dollar bottle of Burgundy a federal judge once opened for the clerks.
Burgundy can eat my entire ass. This iscoffee.
"Slow down, you'll hurt yourself," Afon says.
"You don't get to lecture me about hurting myself. You walked seven miles with a hole in you." I pour myself a second mug and tap the menu in front of him. "Order something. You need calories. You lost blood."
He orders when Barb comes back. "Eggs. Toast. Whatever's hot."
I get a cheeseburger, fries, a side of bacon, a short stack of pancakes. When Barb's eyebrows go up, I tell her, "It's been aweek, Barb," and she pats my shoulder and says, "Say no more, sweetheart."
While we wait, I thaw. The feeling comes back into my feet, which is its own special kind of agony, like my toes are being reintroduced to the concept of existence and resent it. The trapper-hat man finally turns around, gives us a long look, andannounces to no one in particular, "Snowmobiles all up and down the county roads today. Damn fools."
Afon's hand goes still around his mug. "That so?" he says.
"Heard 'em myself. Out by the old quarry." The man shakes his head. "Tourists. Or worse." He turns back to his pie.
The food comes, accompanied by a chorus of heavenly angels. Well, that might be my imagination—the angels, not the food. The food is very, very real.
I eat like the universe might snatch it away from me at any second. Afon eats his eggs slowly and methodically, but I notice he doesn't leave a crumb, which tells me he was hungrier than he'd ever admit.
Halfway through the short stack, I am a new woman. I am resurrected. I have feet again and blood sugar and the capacity for joy.
"Barb," I call. "Barb, this is the best meal I've ever had. Are you by chance single? Would you like to get married?"
"Aw, hush, you flirt." She refills my coffee, beaming. She's been hovering near our booth on and off, clearly starved for conversation in an empty diner during a blizzard. I'm more than happy to provide it, because I have missedpeople, I have missedchatter,the simple pleasures of human-to-human connection. I have spent a week with a man who communicates primarily through grunts and a dog who communicates primarily through flatulence. I deserve a little yap.
"You folks staying up at one of the cabins?" she asks. "We don't get many through here this time of year."
"Something like that," I say vaguely. I side-eye Afon, who nods subtly, approving of my lack of specificity.
"Long way to come in the off-season." She tilts her head, eyeing the two of us with the frank, unbothered nosiness of a woman who has run the only diner in a town of four hundred for thirty years and answers to no one. "You two been up there long? Just the two of you?"
"About a week," I reply.
"Well, isn't that romantic?" Barb sighs, a hand pressed to her quilted chest. "A week snowed in together. My Gerald, rest him, wouldn't have lasted a day with me without somebody getting brained with a skillet." She looks between us and grins slyly. "How long have you two been married?"
I wince.
But…
