Chapter 25
Chapter Twenty-Five
Cat
B ennett stays quiet for the ride to the site. He’s seated across from me, with his arms folded over his chest and a sour look on his face as he stares into the dimly lit woods. Lost in thought, he doesn’t even notice when I try to play footsie when no one is looking.
Or maybe he’s ignoring me. What shifted in him between our time in his bedroom and boarding the sleigh?
The rails bump over a rock, and I’m sent into Kindra’s shoulder. We both let out a yelp from the impact. I glance at Bennett to see if he noticed, but he doesn’t so much as look at me.
“Are you okay, pet?” Ezra asks Kindra. He feels her shoulder and looks into her eyes. He gives a shit, which is more than I can say for Bennett.
This shouldn’t bother me. After all, I’m the one who’s put so much emphasis on keeping our arrangement well below anyone’s radar. He’s probably just being extra cautious.
Right?
Moments later, the sleigh comes to a stop in front of a pure white blanket of snow. The trees have been removed from the space, creating a wide rectangular clearing. The retreat guests mill about near the center, many of them occasionally looking at the ground.
“You brought us to an empty field?” I ask.
“Stand up and look again,” Ezra says with a smirk.
As I stand, the angle shifts, and I can see what he means. The people in the field aren’t looking at the ground. They’re looking at a narrow strip of water.
“Maybe I’ll just sit this one out,” Bennett says.
Ezra grabs his arm and hoists him to a standing position. “No can do, I’m afraid. This is a partner activity, and you claimed a partner at lunch. You aren’t ruining the fun for Cat.”
“She can partner with that smoke show who offered earlier.” He tries to wiggle out of his brother’s hold, but Ezra maintains his grip. “This isn’t my idea of fun, dude. Let me go!”
Ezra does as he asks and releases his coat, and Bennett tumbles out of the sleigh. We hurry to follow him so that he can’t weasel his way back to safety.
As we step fully into the clearing, I’m able to see more of the interior surroundings. A few log buildings dot the perimeter. Some are narrow, and some are more squat and fat. Steam rises from vents in the roofs of the fatter buildings.
“What’s all this?” I ask Kindra.
She looks as bewildered as I do as she glances around. “I haven’t a clue. Ezra and the guys ran with this one.”
“Yet I wasn’t included in the planning,” Bennett grumbles.
“Yes, well, if you hadn’t been so busy chasing skirts in Florida, we might have included you a bit more.” Ezra levels him with a glare that shuts his mouth.
Those little jabs at his expense usually give me a twinge of joy, but not this time. Can no one else see the glimmer of hurt in his eyes? Perhaps this glimmer is something new, something brought on by our little affair. Maybe I’ve softened him.
Or maybe that glimmer of pain has been there all along, and we’ve all been too self-absorbed to see it.
I tuck this little tidbit away for later. If I bring it up now, he’ll get defensive and I’ll get nowhere. In fact, I’ll get the opposite of nowhere. I’ll go backward. His walls are already up for some reason I have yet to discern, and the last thing I need is for his alarm system to start wailing.
“Everyone, gather around over here,” Ezra calls to the people wandering the edges of the narrow strip of water.
But as we step closer, I realize there isn’t only one lane. There are several, each of them set at an equal distance from the next. The lanes aren’t terribly long, but from this distance, I can’t tell how deep they run.
Eve appears from the group heading our way. She sidles up to me and puts her arm through mine, then pulls me closer. “Glad you made it,” she says.
“Do you know what we’re doing?” I ask.
She shakes her head, and her braids rub against the inner lining of her hood. “Not a clue. I tried to get more info out of Maverick, but he said Ezra would break his fingers if he leaked the details.”
“Speaking of Maverick . . .”
“Oh! Right!” She starts to pull me away from the group, but Ezra stops her.
“Ladies?” he says after clearing his throat. “If you don’t mind, I was about to explain the activity.”
We offer him matching smiles of equal sheepishness, then move back to the group.
As Ezra runs down the rules for the event, I try to pay attention, but my mind keeps wandering to Bennett and Maverick. Eve can answer any questions I have about the latter, but she can’t tell me why I don’t care anymore.
Maverick has been my obsession since I met him after the summer retreat. He’s easy on the eyes, and he’s sweet enough to give a toothless grandmother a cavity. Kindra and Ezra encouraged it at first, but somewhere along the line, they changed their minds and subtly hinted I should put my efforts into someone else. I’m not desperate enough to continually throw myself at someone who doesn’t want to catch me, but I also wasn’t ready to relinquish my crush. Hoping he’d eventually develop feelings if given enough exposure, I inserted myself into situations just to be near him.
It’s not an easy thing to admit, but the obsession I had with Maverick was borderline unhealthy.
And that’s what’s so puzzling to me.
The obsession I had with Maverick.
“Earth to Cat?” Bennett’s fingers snap in front of my face. “Did you hear anything he said?”
I look around. Eve is no longer beside me, and everyone has split off into their pairings. Bennett and I are the only two still standing away from the lanes.
“Sorry, I was lost in thought,” I say.
Bennett scoffs. “Your brain isn’t big enough to hold more than one empty box, so you couldn’t have gotten that lost.”
“In case you haven’t noticed, we’re the only people over here. You can drop the asshole act.”
“It’s not an act. I’m an asshole, remember?”
Yeah, something is definitely different.
“Bennett, what’s wrong? You’re acting strange.”
“Maybe I’m just realizing some things, that’s all.”
“What sort of things?”
“Let’s get this show on the road!” Kindra yells from one of the lanes. “We can’t start stripping until you two line up!”
I turn to Bennett. “Are we up first?”
“No, we all go at the same time.” He grabs my arm and starts hauling me toward the first lane.
“But I don’t know what we’re doing,” I whisper as I try to keep pace with his long strides. “Can you go first?”
“Nope.” He brings me to a stop at the head of the lane. “Take off your clothes, swim to the end of the lane, and drown the Cattle at the end. If you get too cold, tag out and I’ll jump in.”
“Tag out? How do I tag out?”
He rolls his eyes and starts unbuttoning my coat when I don’t move. “Just yell my name, and I’ll jump in and save the fucking day. Like I usually do.”
With a glare, he rips off my coat and gets to work on my pants.
“Won’t we die of hypothermia?” I ask.
He shrugs. “That’s why you’re going first. So I can decide if I even want to torture myself.”
I peer down to the end of the lane—which looks impossibly long, now that I know I have to swim in it—as the workers position Cattle at the end of each rectangle. The Cattle’s hands are bound behind their backs, and their feet are wrapped in a heavy chain that trails into the water.
“Are we supposed to pull them in?” I ask. “I don’t have the upper-body strength for that.”
“Figure it out, kitten .”
The pet name is no longer doused in longing and lust. Now it’s dripping with condescension and hate. Something is definitely wrong.
“Hey, maybe we should talk before we have to rely on each other in this game, you know?” I say.
He finishes unlacing my boots and looks up at me. “Pull your fucking feet out of the boots.”
I do as he says, and he pulls them off.
“How has your day been, Cat?” he asks.
“This wasn’t the sort of conver?—”
“Mine was great too. Now take off your clothes. You’re holding everyone up.”
I look down the line, and he’s right. A bunch of nearly naked people stare back at me, each of them shivering and looking miserable.
Shit, shit, shit.
I shed the rest of my clothes, and Bennett does the same. Now that we’re all down to our swimsuits, the games can begin. The games that I don’t know the rules for.
“On your marks!” Ezra yells.
I look back at Bennett, mentally pleading with him to give me a hint.
“Get set!”
Bennett smirks.
“Go!”
I jump into the water, expecting the freezing depths to bury me up to my head, but my feet collide with the ground when I’m only chest deep. With a squeal, I shuffle through the water and try to remember to breathe. My lungs don’t want to work at these temps.
But as I shuffle along, I realize the water isn’t as cold as the air outside. In fact, it’s almost bearable in the center of the lane, which makes me think there’s some sort of temperature control at work here.
It’s still miserable, though. The cold penetrates my skin like needles, and each breath comes in too quickly. I grit my teeth and shuffle forward a few steps, and the freezing water rises past my shoulders.
“It-it’s an in-in-incline!” I call back to Bennett.
“No shit?” he calls back, and I can hear his eyes roll in his head.
The water not only gets deeper as I move from the center. It’s much colder as well. Whatever warms the frigid depths near the middle can’t reach this far, it seems. And now I have to start swimming because the bottom ceases to be.
As I bob toward the end of the lane, I try to peer over the edge to see what others are doing. Maybe if I see how everyone else gets their Cattle into the water, I can just follow suit. But no matter how much upward thrust I apply to each kick of my legs, I see only snow and black water.
I can’t stay in these temps much longer. The prickly needles have become swords sawing at my bones. I swim back toward the middle and look to Bennett for help.
“Wrong fucking way!” he yells as he rubs his arms. “Swim toward the Cattle!”
“You have to do it!” I yell back. “I’m not strong enough!”
As I make my way back to the beginning, splashes come from the other lanes. Bennett holds his hand toward me as I draw closer, and I reach up and grab it. He hoists me out of the water as if I weigh nothing, then hops into the frigid ice bath.
“Fuck!” he roars as he rushes down the lane. “Shit! God damn this snowy hell!”
A warm blanket drops over my shoulders, and I look back and see Maverick. “You’ll freeze,” he says. “Your partner was supposed to have it waiting for you.”
“Where did it come from?” I ask. “And how is it so warm?”
Maverick nods toward the squat building I noticed earlier. “Those are steam rooms. We can warm up in them when the event is over, but the blankets are meant to keep us from freezing to death in the interim.”
“Couldn’t we have done this activity in the heated pool?”
As soon as the words leave my mouth, a loud splash comes from the end of my lane. Bennett managed to wrestle the Cattle into the deep end, and now he’s glaring at me.
“Your turn!” he calls as he starts making his way back.
“Looks like my partner needs a little help too.” Maverick looks at his lane, where Ice Pick’s bald head bobs like a cork in rough waters. He’s struggling to keep his victim’s head below the surface.
As Maverick jogs away to save the day, I drop the blanket and mentally prepare myself to go back into the water. The sooner I can drown the fucker at the end, the sooner I can get warm.
And that’s Bennett’s plan, apparently. He easily could have done the drowning and ended this thing for us, but he wants to make me look like a fool.
“Thanks for the warm blanket,” I mutter as I step to the edge to pull him out.
He smiles up at me. “Don’t mention it.”
I release his hand, and he falls back into the water. “Whoops! My hand slipped.”
His hand wraps around my ankle, and down I go, right into the water with him.
“Looks like your feet slipped too,” he says as I sputter to the surface.
Body heat comes off of him in waves, giving me an idea.
“Did Ezra say we couldn’t be in the water at the same time?” I ask.
Bennett catches my meaning and grins for the first time since climbing in that sleigh. “He sure didn’t. Climb on.”
I hop onto his back, and he turns and takes us toward the Cattle at the end of our lane. Our combined body weight makes it easier for Bennett to press the man’s shoulders and keep him underwater, and we’re able to last longer in the lower temps because we’re sharing our body heat.
“No cheating!” Kindra calls from her lane.
“Go ahead,” Bennett grunts so that only I can hear him. He shifts his grip on the man beneath him. “Tell them it was my idea. In fact, let go before someone sees you touching me.”
“Is that what this is about?” I ask through clenched teeth. It’s all I can do to keep them from chattering. “Are you upset that I want to keep this a secret?”
“Lean forward a bit. Help me drown this piece of shit.” He shifts his grip again, and I realize why he’s struggling. The Cattle has kicked the chains free, and now he’s using his lower body to power upward.
I lean forward, but it doesn’t do much good. The man is able to lift his nostrils above the waterline and get a breath.
“You’ll have to get off my back and help me end this,” Bennett finally says. “Swim down for that chain. I’ll wrap it around his neck and finish this a little quicker.”
“Answer the question. Are you upset that I want to keep this a secret?”
Bennett releases a guttural groan and pushes the man’s head below the surface again. “If you will just help me kill this sorry motherfucker, I will answer any question you have. Now swim!”
I slide off his back and immediately regret it. A wall of cold pushes through my body and steals my breath. In fact, taking a deep breath so that I can dive seems a near impossibility at this point. But I try. I suck in what air I can, and down I go.
The cold is almost more bearable when I’m fully submerged. Maybe that’s why so many people drown in cold water. The thought of piercing the surface and feeling that frigid air once more is almost more than I can bear once my hand wraps around the chain’s tail. But up I go, ready to deliver the weapon that will end this battle.
Careful to avoid the man’s untethered feet, I rise and push the chain into Bennett’s hand before trying to climb onto his back again. I want his warmth, but more than that, I want to feel close to him.
Now that I know the weird attitude wasn’t part of my imagination, now that I know something is truly bothering him, the rift between us causes me more discomfort than I thought it would.
An obsession still worms its way inside me, but it no longer focuses on Maverick. Like it or not, I have a new problem on my hands.
I have a crush on Bennett.