7. Hadley #2
The cold hits different without clothes.
Not the slow creeping numbness of wet fabric.
A direct, full-body assault. My skin contracts so fast it hurts.
Every hair on my body stands straight up and my lungs seize on the inhale and I wrap my arms around myself and clench my jaw to keep my teeth from shattering.
"Get in."
Banks is under the furs. On his back. Eyes fixed on the ceiling with a rigid, locked-jaw determination that would be funny if I wasn't so cold I could die. The firelight picks up the hard plane of his body above the fur line, the heavy bandage at his side, the corded tension in his neck.
I cross the three feet of freezing floor and slide under the pelts beside him.
The heat of his body is a wall. A physical force.
Like stepping from a walk-in freezer through a door into August. My skin registers the contrast so sharply that I gasp, an involuntary, full-body sound that I couldn't have stopped if I'd wanted to.
He's burning. Furnace-hot despite the blood loss, despite the cold, like his body runs on a different fuel than mine.
"Closer." The word grinds out between his teeth.
I push against his uninjured side. Shoulder to hip.
Thigh to thigh. The full length of me against the full length of him and the size difference is absurd.
I'm not a small woman but next to him I feel compact.
Contained. His arm comes around me, pulling me flush, and my cheek leans against him and his skin is so hot against my frozen face that my eyes water.
His heart pounds beneath my ear. Slow and heavy and deliberate, like a fist knocking on a door.
Neither of us speaks. The fire crackles in the stove. The wind howls outside the shutters. His arm tightens around me by a fraction. By a degree. By exactly the amount a man tightens his grip when he's holding something he's terrified to hold.
I stop shivering in stages. Fingers first. Then shoulders.
Then the deep, core tremors that have been rattling my bones since the cave.
The heat seeps in like water filling a vessel, slow and thorough, and I feel my body unlock against his inch by inch.
My palm rests flat against his stomach. Bare skin on bare skin.
Muscle tight as braided rope underneath my hand.
He doesn't move. He breathes. In through the nose. Out through the mouth. Controlled. Measured. The breathing of a man running a very specific internal protocol to keep himself from doing something he wants to do.
The fire settles in the stove with a soft, collapsing sound.
A log shifting. Embers rearranging themselves.
The orange light dims to a low, steady pulse that barely reaches the ceiling, and the shadows come closer around the bed like the cabin is shrinking, folding itself down to just this.
Just us. Just the fur and the heat and the sound of his breathing and the wind outside trying to pry the world apart.
I should sleep. My body is begging for it.
Every muscle wrung out like a wet rag, every nerve ending finally going quiet after hours of sustained, screaming alarm.
But my mind won't stop. It keeps looping.
The frozen waterfall. The gunshot. The man crumpling on the ground.
The duffel bag tumbling into the crevasse.
The sound my boot made on that twig. That tiny, stupid snap that unraveled everything.
"I wasn't even supposed to be here."
The words come out before I decide to say them. Quiet. Almost swallowed by the wind. Banks doesn't respond, but his breathing changes. A fraction slower. The arm around me doesn't move. He's listening.
"I mean, obviously. Nobody looks at me and thinks 'natural wilderness survivor.
' But I mean, this trip. Alaska. The whole thing.
" I look at the underside of his jaw. The rough grain of stubble catching firelight.
"It was a brand deal. AlpenLux. They make overpriced hiking gear for people who hike from their car to the trailhead sign, take a photo, and drive to brunch. "
My laugh sounds hollow in the dark cabin.
"They wanted an influencer. Someone with reach.
Someone who could make their new winter line look aspirational.
And my agent pitched me because I've got three hundred thousand followers and a 'relatable girl-next-door energy.
'" I make air quotes against his stomach.
His muscles tense under my fingertips. "So they flew me to Anchorage.
Put me up in a hotel. Gave me six thousand dollars' worth of gear that, as it turns out, cannot actually handle being outside for more than forty minutes. "
"I noticed."
Two words. Low and dry. I almost laugh again but what comes out is closer to a breath that catches in my throat.
"The thing is, I needed it. Not wanted. Needed.
" I swallow. The truth sits in me like a stone I've been carrying so long I forgot it had weight.
"I'm broke, Banks. Not Instagram broke, where you pretend to budget while drinking twelve-dollar oat milk lattes.
Actually broke. I have sixty-three thousand dollars in credit card debt.
My apartment in Brooklyn costs twenty-four hundred a month and it's as big as this cabin.
Smaller, actually. This cabin has better square footage. "
He says nothing. His thumb moves against my shoulder. One slow pass. Back and forth. I don't think he knows he's doing it.
"Everything you'd see if you looked me up is a lie.
Every outfit is borrowed or bought on credit I can't pay.
Every restaurant is comped because I tag them.
Every vacation is a brand trip where I shoot content for sixteen hours and post three photos that make it look like I'm living this gorgeous, effortless life.
My mom thinks I'm successful. She shows her friends my posts at church.
'Look at Hadley in Tulum. Look at Hadley at that restaurant with the gold leaf on everything.
' She doesn't know I cried in the bathroom at that restaurant because my card got declined for the Uber home. "
The fire pops. A sharp, bright crack that sounds nothing like the rifle shot on the ridge and still makes me flinch. Banks's arm tightens. Holds.
"I built this whole life out of nothing.
Out of photos and captions and filters and the exact right angle to make a nine-dollar salad look like something worth wanting.
And people do want it. They follow me and comment and save my posts and tell me I'm living the dream.
And I smile and I say thank you so much babe and I mean none of it. "
My palm glides over his stomach. Feeling the ridges of muscle. The heat. The undeniable, irreducible reality of a human body that has been shot and battered and frozen and is still here. Still warm. Still alive beneath my hand.
"Tonight a man got murdered in front of me. I got shot at. I crossed a bridge made of ice over a drop that would have killed me. You collapsed and I thought you were dead and I have never been so scared in my entire life."
I pause. The admission rises up like something surfacing from deep water.
"And it's the most real thing that has ever happened to me."
His hand moves.
Not the arm around my shoulders. His other hand.
The one that's been lying at his side this whole time, still and controlled, knuckles against the fur.
It rises in the dim orange light and finds my face.
Rough calluses. Blunt fingers. The pad of his thumb settling against my cheekbone with a precision that stops my heart.
He tilts my chin up. Gently. Firmly. The way you'd handle something you were afraid to break but refused to let go of.
We gaze at each other in the firelight. Close enough to see the gold flecks in them I never noticed before. Close enough to see the fracture line from earlier still running through his expression, wider now. Deeper.
His thumb traces the arch of my cheekbone. One slow pass.
"I'm never letting you go back to a fake life."