Chapter 20 - Cole
The blackness inside the cave was absolute—a kind of blindness so complete and suffocating that Cole lost all sense of direction, self, even time.
Cole could smell blood, coppery and bright, leaking from the raw gash on his knuckle where he’d slammed it into the stone.
Each inhale dragged in air thick with wet stone, decaying leaves, and the cold torn earth.
He didn’t move at first. He counted his own pulse in the darkness—thump, thump, thump—a solitary drum that threatened to outpace the clock.
Then, from somewhere to his right, he heard the desperate rattle of breath, a shuddering inhale followed by a groan.
Cole’s body snapped into motion. He fumbled sideways, crawling toward the sound.
“Ethan? Say something. Talk to me.” The echo of his own voice bounced back, small and helpless.
He crawled until his fingers grazed flesh—bare forearm, slick with sweat or water, Cole couldn’t tell. Ethan was curled, knees to chest, shivering hard. “You okay?” Cole tried again.
Ethan curled tighter, knees to his chest. His shirt was torn, shoulder wet with rainwater.
Cole grabbed for Ethan’s wrist, squeezed, and felt the frantic flutter of his pulse.
He patted down Ethan’s body, searching for breaks, cuts, anything that spelled disaster.
There was a lump at his temple, sticky with blood but not gushing.
“You’re bleeding,” Cole said, his mouth working on autopilot while his brain replayed the fall on a loop.
“So are you,” Ethan managed, voice warped by pain but still, somehow, dryly amused. “Looks like we match.”
Cole pressed his forehead to Ethan’s and held them both very still, listening for anything outside—the storm, the shouts of rescue, even just the hiss of wind above. Nothing. They were buried alive, and nobody would find them until the rain let up. If it let up.
“Can you move?” Cole asked, pulling back to brush the matted hair from Ethan’s face.
“My legs work, at least. You?”
“I’m good.” Cole lied, ignoring the red trickle running down his wrist and the tremor in his shoulders. He shifted, maneuvering both of them against the cave wall, arranging Ethan so that his back was braced, head upright.
Ethan whispered, “It’s okay, you know. If you’re scared.”
“Not scared.” The words were automatic, a leftover from a million tough-guy performances. But it wasn’t true. He was scared—a deep, swallowing kind of fear that never left his chest.
They sat for a minute, breathing together, the rhythm of their lungs syncing.
The darkness pressed tighter, as though the cave itself was trying to crush them. Cole pictured the rocks above, tons of earth, all waiting for one more tremor to finish the job.
“It’s my fault,” Cole said, the admission leaking out in a whisper. “I should’ve stopped it. I saw the clouds coming in, heard the thunder. I should’ve called it.”
Ethan’s fingers found his, squeezed until the knuckles bled. “You did everything you could. All of us saw it, but nobody wanted to be the one to turn back.”
“Yeah, but I’m supposed to be—” Cole stopped, the word “leader” sticking in his throat, too big and false. “If I’d said the word, they’d have listened. But I didn’t and now look at all the trouble I have caused.” He could taste panic now, bitter and upwelling.
Ethan shifted, leaning his head to Cole’s shoulder. “You didn’t freeze. You ran toward Riley when the boulder came down. You got us in here. That’s not freezing, that’s—” He trailed off, breath hitching. “That’s you saving everyone’s asses.”
Cole clenched his jaw so tight it ached.
He tried to picture daylight, or the sight of the group back at the Basin, everyone’s skin a little red from sun and laughter.
He forced himself to move, to act, because that’s what you did when you were scared out of your mind, you calculated, you rationed, you made a plan.
He groped for the wall again, traced the rough, mineral ridges, and measured the size of the chamber by touch.
No more than six feet across. Maybe three feet to the ceiling.
At the far end, the rockfall at the entrance sloped upward—he could feel the faintest breath of moving air leaking through a seam at the very top, but it wasn’t much.
“How much air do you think we have?” Ethan asked, his voice no longer playful, just weary.
Cole did the math, ran through the numbers in his head. “A few hours if we’re lucky.”
They went quiet again. Cole drew in a deep, steadying breath and pulled Ethan closer, so close he could feel the jackhammer panic beneath Ethan’s skin. He wanted to say something to make it better, to fix the one problem in his life he hadn’t already ruined, but nothing came.
It hit him then, with the power of the first time he’d ever seen Ethan smile: this was it. The endgame. Whether they made it out or not, everything Cole had ever wanted was right here, in this dark and merciless hole, where there was nothing left to protect and nothing left to lose.
He pressed his lips to Ethan’s temple, careful not to touch the wound. He felt the tremor run through them both, a single current neither could control.
Ethan’s hand found his again, this time holding tighter.
Cole swallowed, feeling the old, familiar ache of wanting more than he was allowed.
He wanted to tell Ethan how much he needed him, how the idea of dying didn’t bother him nearly as much as the idea of dying without saying the thing that had been burning in his chest since the first night on the ridge.
They stayed like that, side by side, until time went soft at the edges. Occasionally the cave would shudder with a distant rumble, and Cole would brace for the ceiling to come down, but it held.
He tried to hold on to the memory of sunlight, of the last time he'd watched Ethan's face light up in laughter from some joke on the trail that Cole couldn't even remember now.
It was starting to seem impossible that they would ever escape this frozen darkness, their bodies trembling and the air thinning minute by minute.
Cole shut his eyes and forced himself backward through time as he tried to remember what it had felt like, back on the ledge above the meadows, to be alive with want and not just fear.
He remembered the way Ethan’s mouth had fit around him, the warmth and the filth and the sweetness all wrapped together.
He remembered the look of pure need and want on Ethan’s face as he swallowed down Cole’s cum like it was the most precious thing on earth.
But more than that, he remembered the look after.
Ethan’s eyes, round and bright and unguarded, like he’d just won the world’s last golden ticket and didn’t know what to do with it.
And instead of meeting him there, in that exposed place, Cole had done what he always did—run.
He’d zipped up, climbed back into himself, and left Ethan standing alone on the edge of forever, desperate and wanting.
It had been easier to pretend, then. To rewrite the story in his own head and convince himself that nothing real had happened.
But the aftermath always came for him, every goddamn time.
In the mornings, the guilt would start at his chest and spread outward, tingling in his limbs, squeezing behind his eyes.
A slow rot. He punished Ethan for wanting him, punished himself for wanting Ethan, and then punished the world for making the whole thing so complicated when it could have been so simple if only he’d been braver.
None of that mattered now. Not with the taste of iron in his mouth and the slow, certain realization that if help didn’t come, they’d be dead before sunrise. Every second in the darkness felt like another chance to make it right or ruin it forever.
The panic hit him as a bolt of lightning up his spine, a cold, clammy sweat that turned his palms slick. He tried to slow his breathing, but every inhale felt thinner, every exhale sharper, until he was panting and gasping, heart stuttering with the effort of clawing for air that wasn’t there.
“Cole,” Ethan said, voice quiet but unbreakable, the way a mountain was quiet. “You’re okay. Breathe with me.” Ethan pressed his forehead to Cole’s, their noses brushing, the rhythm of Ethan’s breath steady and deep, a deliberate pattern that demanded Cole do the same.
He wanted to resist—he always did—but Ethan’s gentleness whittled away his defenses, and Cole found himself matching the breath, falling into the hypnotic cycle of inhale, exhale, inhale, exhale.
In the suffocating dark, Ethan’s face hovered in Cole’s imagination, a pale, impossible ghost, lips so close he could feel the heat of every syllable. “Talk to me,” Ethan said, and there was a challenge in it, the old dare that Cole had never once accepted.
A hundred lies flashed through his mind, reflexive and empty.
He almost picked one—about his childhood, or horses, or the time he’d broken his arm trying to impress his father—but none of them fit now, not with the walls closing in.
What was the point of dying with all your secrets still locked inside you?
He started with a whisper, so soft he could barely hear it himself.
“When I was eighteen,” he said, “my old man walked in on me jerking off to a copy of Playgirl.” He let the words hang, fragile and mortifying.
“I don’t even know where I got it. But I remember every goddamn page.
Especially this one guy—a rancher or something, big arms and hairy chest and body, and a perfect cock.
” He felt Ethan’s laugh before he heard it, a silent shake that traveled through their bodies.
“My dad made me burn the magazine in the fireplace. Said if I ever brought that kind of filth into the house again, he’d burn everything I owned and then disown me.
He didn’t talk to me for a month after that. ”