Caroline
The man slides into the booth across from me. "This seat taken?"
It is, actually. It's taken by a glowering Russian and a complicated emotional situation.
But the glowering Russian is currently outside in the snow making mysterious phone calls and the emotional situation is a real damn clusterfuck, and that's all pretty hard to communicate in a few words.
So I just blink at the newcomer and say, "Um."
"Saw you sitting here all by your lonesome," he says, settling in like he's been invited.
He's big—not Afon big, but big in a soft, gym-membership-he-doesn't-quite-use way—with a canvas coat dark at the shoulders and a wool cap pushed back off a broad, pleasant face.
Late thirties, I'd guess. The kind of face that probably gets called boyish by women who have not yet learned better.
"Couldn't let a thing like that stand. Not on a night like this. "
"That's very civic of you," I say.
He grins. He has good teeth, and I get the feeling he knows it. "Name's Drake."
"Caroline."
"Caroline! What a pleasure to meet you, Caroline," he purrs. "Pretty name for a pretty girl."
Oh, Drake.
I have spent the last week being kidnapped, concussed, shot at, frozen, and starved. I have watched a man chop a deer into pieces. I have hauled a bleeding former assassin fourteen miles through a blizzard while losing feeling in my own extremities.
And now, here is Drake, with his good teeth and his expensive coat, deploying pretty girl like it's a brand-new invention he just patented.
I am too tired to be annoyed. Honestly, there's something almost soothing about it. Drake is the most normal thing that has happened to me in seven days. Drake is a man who has clearly never had to think about kerosene rationing. I could weep with the ordinariness of him.
So when he asks what brings me to Pike Hollow, I find myself smiling and saying, "Oh, you know. A wellness retreat."
He laughs like it's the funniest thing he's ever heard. "A wellness retreat! In Pike Hollow!" He shakes his head. "You're a riot, you know that?"
I am not a riot. I am a sleep-deprived woman with frostbite-adjacent toes. There's a mean part of me—probably at least related to the part that's still smarting from Afon snarling We're not together like that is the worst thing that anyone could ever accuse him of—that is leaning into this.
Look, it says. Somebody thinks I'm a riot. He slid into a booth just to be near me. And I bet dollars to donuts that he isn't keeping a secret phone in his pocket.
It's pathetic, but then again, pathetic is exactly how I feel right now.
"What about you, Drake?" I ask, propping my chin in my hand. "What brings you to this thriving metropolis?"
"Work, mostly. I do a little of everything around here.
" He spreads his hands with false modesty.
"Plowing. Hauling. Whatever needs doing.
Town like this, you wear a lot of hats." He leans in.
"But I'll tell you what: If I'd known the scenery was gonna improve this much, I'd have come in for pie a whole lot sooner. "
I laugh. It just sort of falls out of me, and Drake beams like he's won the lottery.
That's when the bell over the door jingles.
I know it's Afon before I even look. The air in the diner boils. Barb, behind the counter, goes very still. The trapper-hat man cranes around.
And Drake, who has no idea what's about to happen to his evening, twists toward the sound with his good teeth still showing.
Afon fills the doorway. Snow on his shoulders, in his beard, melting into the silver. His face is concrete, harder than ever before, except now, beneath that frigid rock is something hot and live. A rage, churning behind the flat brown-green of his eyes.
His gaze goes to Drake.
Then to me.
Wolf slips in at his heel and sits, ears forward, doing his very best impression of a furry exclamation point.
"Hey there, friend," says Drake, who is a dead man and does not know it. "Cold one out there, huh?"
Afon doesn't answer. He does not even appear to register that Drake has produced sound. In a physical sense, he crosses the room, but from where I'm sitting, it feels more like he drags the entire room closer to him.
"Caroline," he growls. "Time to go."
"We were just talking," I protest.
I don't like that it comes out a little defensive, a little what's it to you, because what is it to him? We're not together. He said so himself. He carved it into the chopping block not twenty minutes ago.
"I can see that." His eyes flick to Drake and stay there. "Who's your friend?"
"Drake," says Drake, extending a hand across the table. "Drake Pruitt. I do plowing and—"
"I didn't ask what you do." Afon ignores the hand. "I asked who the fuck you are."
Drake's smile fades slowly. He withdraws the hand. He looks at me, then back at Afon, then starts figuring out some things that he really should've figured out before he ever sat down.
"Hey, no trouble," he says, sliding out of the booth, hands up. "Didn't realize the lady was spoken for."
"She's not," says Afon, at the exact same moment that I say, "I'm not."
We glare at each other across the table. Drake, sensing correctly that he has wandered into the crossfire of a really hairy domestic situation, edges toward the counter. "I'll just— Er, yeah. You folks have a good night."
He's gone, back to wherever Drakes go. In his absence, the diner is suddenly very quiet. Barb is studiously polishing the same six inches of countertop she's been polishing for the last five minutes, and Wolf is looking between Afon and me with growing concern.
"Get your coat," Afon says.
I don't move. "I was talking to him, you know."
"You were talking to a man you've never met in a town crawling with people who want me dead." He grits his teeth. "Get your coat, Caroline."
I want to argue. God, I want to argue. If I had it my way, I'd stand on this booth and deliver a speech about autonomy and human connection and the fundamental right of a woman to flirt mildly with a Drake if she so chooses.
But the look in Afon's eyes says I'd better not fucking dare.
And after everything he's done for me, I can't do that to him.
So I get my coat.
I drop two of his crumpled twenties on the table. "For Barb," I tell him when he glares. "She's the only one who's been nice to me all week."
He doesn't take the bait. He just holds the door, and the bell jingles once more, and we step out into the storm.
We don't go back the way we came.
We don't go anywhere that makes sense, as far as I can tell.
Afon leads us out past the Sunoco, around the dark hump of the church with its sign about picking up after your dog, and then off the road entirely, into the trees, where the snow is deeper and the wind is meaner and there is no diner, no Barb, no Drake, no electricity, no heat, no glory of civilization.
Just the white and the dark and the cold closing back over us like water over a stone.
"Afon." I'm following in his bootprints again, the way I have for fourteen miles, except now I'm doing it on a full stomach and a freshly broken mood. "Afon. The town was right there. There were beds in that town, probably. There were humans."
"That's the problem."
"That humans exist? Yes, I've heard you take issue with the concept."
He just keeps walking, breaking trail, his shoulders a dark wall against the snow. I only trudge after him because the alternative is freezing to death out of spite.
We go maybe half a mile—uphill, of course, because Afon has never met a flat surface he didn't want to turn his back on—before he stops in a stand of dense spruce. In here, the canopy is thick enough to break the worst of the wind.
He shrugs off the duffel and starts clearing snow, scraping down to the frozen needles underneath. It takes me a moment to realize that he's…
… making a camp.
Out here.
In the storm.
A hundred yards from civilization.
"You have got to be kidding me," I say.
"I'm not. Take a seat."
"Which snowdrift looks like a 'seat' to you?
!" I demand. I cross my arms over my chest. "I want to know why we're camping in a snowbank when there is a perfectly good town nearby with, presumably, a hotel or a neighbor with a spare couch.
Are you aware that we abandoned central heating for—let me check my notes here—frozen fucking dirt?
" I'm wheezing now, throat achy from the cold.
"What was that all about, anyway? Did you know that guy, Drake?
Is he someone from your past? Was that secretly Viktor Reznik in a wool cap? "
"I don't know who Drake is."
"Then how do you know he's dangerous?"
"I don't." He's stringing the tarp now, fast and economical, lashing one corner to a low branch. "That's the point. I don't know who any of them are. The trapper at the counter. The woman in the parka. Barb." He pulls the cord taut. "So I have to assume all of them represent a potential threat."
"Barb wouldn't hurt a fly."
"You don't know what Barb would or wouldn't do.
" He ties off the last corner. "You knew her for forty minutes.
You think you can read people. Maybe you can, in a courtroom, in Manhattan, where the worst thing across the table is a man who beats his wife.
Up here, you can't read anybody. I can barely read anybody, and I've been doing this since before you could drive. "
"So that's it? Everyone is the enemy until proven otherwise?"
"Until you're home, yes."
I stand there in the snow, fists clenched at my sides, the warmth from Barb's coffee already a distant memory. I feel the wet heat come back behind my eyes. This time, I'm not sure if it's the cold or the anger or the thing underneath both of those that I'm trying very hard not to look at directly.
"Then explain why you freaked out when you saw Drake," I say. "Because that didn't look like your usual overprotective bodyguard tactics, Afon. You looked at that guy like you wanted to put him through the window."
His shoulders go rigid. He's crouched over the duffel, pulling out this and that, but refuses to look in my direction.