12. Rafe
RAFE
The forecast says six inches, maybe eight, and I've learned not to trust a mountain forecast further than I can see out the window.
By early afternoon the sky over the ridge has gone heavy and gray-green, swollen with snow, and the wind's already carrying enough bite that I send Gunny out to double-check the propane tanks are strapped down before the first flake even hits the ground.
"You're doing the thing," Gunny says, watching me walk the taproom with a checklist in one hand and a roll of duct tape in the other.
"What thing?"
"The thing where a little weather turns you into a man securing a forward operating base." He nods at the tape. "It's snow, Rafe. Not an invasion."
"Six inches of snow closes roads. Closed roads strand people. I'd rather have tape I don't need than a door that won't shut."
"Sure." He says it the way he says everything, easy and unbothered, and goes to check the tanks anyway.
By two the flakes are coming down sideways, thick enough that the ridge disappears behind a wall of white, and by three the six inches the forecast promised already looks like a lowball.
I've seen storms roll in fast before. I haven't seen one roll in this fast, not since I've been back, and something in the pace of it puts me on a low simmer of alert I don't bother arguing myself out of.
The twins are camped at their usual corner table when Jenna comes through the door at half past three, stamping snow off her boots, cheeks already gone pink from the ten feet between her car and the entrance.
"It's getting bad out there," she says, unwinding a scarf that's collected its own small drift. "Pack up, you two. We need to beat this home."
"Ten more minutes," Eli says, not looking up from his worksheet. "I'm winning against Josie."
"You're not winning against me," Josie says. "You're losing slower."
"That's the same thing as winning."
"Now," Jenna says, in a tone that ends the debate before it starts, and both of them start gathering crayons and papers with the particular speed kids reserve for the one voice they know not to argue with.
I walk her to the door out of habit more than anything, and I'm still standing in the doorway when she tries to back her car out of the lot and it doesn't move, tires spinning uselessly in snow that's already deeper than it has any business being this early in the storm.
"Rafe." She's got the window cracked, snow already collecting on the sill. "A little help."
I push. She reverses. Nothing happens except the smell of burning rubber and a spray of slush that catches me across both knees. I try again from a different angle, boots sliding on ice I can't get purchase on, and the car settles another inch deeper instead of coming free.
"It's not going anywhere," I tell her, straightening up, snow already melting cold down the back of my collar. "Not without a tow, and nobody's towing anything in this until it lets up."
"So what do I do?"
I don't have an immediate answer, and I don't love that I don't have one. Then the lights in the taproom flicker once, twice, and go dark, the hum of the coolers cutting out mid-cycle and leaving a silence that feels bigger than it should.
"That answers that," Gunny says from the doorway, phone already at his ear. "Power's out clear across the valley. I just called Dot to see if she's got room, and she says she's already got six people and a dog on her living room floor."
"What about the shelter at the school?"
"Roads to the school closed twenty minutes ago.
County's saying stay where you are." Gunny looks between me and Jenna and the two kids now standing in the doorway with their backpacks, and something in his face says he's already arrived at the same conclusion I have and is waiting for me to say it out loud.
There's exactly one building in reach with heat and light that doesn't depend on the grid, and it's the one I've never once had to think about sharing.
"The loft's got a generator," I say. "Runs the whole upstairs. You'd be warm."
Jenna looks up at the building like she's only now noticing it has a second floor. "Are you sure?"
"I wouldn't offer if I wasn't."
"Okay." She says it simply, no argument in it, and something in my chest unclenches that I didn't know had been clenched.
The stairs up to the loft are narrow. I go first with a lantern, Eli and Josie close behind arguing in whispers about who gets to pet Biscuit first, Jenna last with both hands full of backpacks and a look on her face like she's bracing for something.
I open the door at the top and step back to let them through, and suddenly I notice the room the way I never do when it's just me, every bare wall and empty shelf like I'm seeing it for the first time in years.
Nobody's stood in this room but me, Gunny, and a dog who doesn't judge furniture. It shows.
"Oh," Josie says, looking around at the narrow bed, the single armchair, the desk with nothing on it but a laptop and a glass holding one very dead dandelion. "It's very tidy."
"It's very empty," Eli corrects her, not unkindly, already crouching to greet Biscuit, who's roused himself off his blanket by the window to inspect the new arrivals with mild, dignified interest.
The dandelion migrated up here weeks ago, off the office desk and onto a shelf nobody but me ever sees, because throwing out a dead weed felt harder than it should have and leaving it downstairs where Gunny might finally ask about it felt harder still.
I don't explain any of that. I just watch Josie's eyes catch on it and hope she doesn't ask either.
"I don't need much," I say. It's true, and also not the whole answer. Jenna's eyes move once around the room in a slow arc that I feel more than watch, taking in the bare walls, the single mug on the drying rack, the complete absence of anything that would tell a stranger who lives here.
Her gaze catches on the shelf above the desk, on the one thing in the whole room that isn't strictly functional, a photograph turned face down against the wood.
I see her notice it. I see her decide not to ask.
I cross the room before I've fully decided to and turn it another quarter inch further from her, a motion so small I could almost convince myself I didn't do it on purpose.
"Cocoa," I say instead, because it's easier than the alternative. "I've got a propane burner and enough powder mix to get us through the apocalypse."
"That's oddly specific."
"I plan for things."
"I've noticed."
It takes twenty minutes to get the twins settled.
Blankets come off my own bed and double up on the floor by the window, Biscuit commandeered as a pillow the size of a small ottoman, both kids full of cocoa and adrenaline and the particular exhaustion that comes from a full day of weather-based excitement.
Eli's narrating the storm to Josie in increasingly dramatic terms, something about survival rations and rescue missions, and Josie's listening with her eyes already at half mast, one hand fisted in Biscuit's fur.
"Are we having an adventure?" she asks, fighting a yawn.
"You're having a sleepover," I tell her. "With snow."
"Same thing." She's asleep before I finish getting the second blanket over her, and Eli goes down not five minutes later, mid-sentence, some story about a snowplow left unfinished.
That leaves Jenna and me by the window, candlelight throwing soft shapes across the walls, the generator running low and steady somewhere beneath the floor, snow coming down outside in a silence so complete it swallows the whole valley.
She's got both hands wrapped around a second mug of cocoa, knees pulled up on the armchair, and for a long minute neither of us says anything, and it isn't the careful silence we've been living in all week.
It's just quiet, the kind two people can sit inside without needing to fix it.
"Thank you," she finally says. "For this. For all of it."
"You'd have frozen in that car."
"I know. Still. Thank you." She looks toward the twins, both dead asleep in a tangle of blankets and dog. "They're going to talk about this for a month."
"They're not wrong to."
She's quiet for a moment, turning her mug slowly between both hands, and when she looks up at me again there's a question sitting behind her eyes that she hasn't decided yet whether to ask out loud.
"What?" I say.
"Why me? You said nobody's been up here in years. Why us, tonight, out of everyone in this town you could have put in a truck and sent to Dot's floor instead?"
I could deflect. I've spent three weeks deflecting, careful and polite, exactly the kind of man who signs invoices without looking up. Something about the storm, the candlelight, the fact that there's nowhere left in this room to retreat to, makes the deflection feel like more work than the truth.
"I don't let people up here," I say. "Ever. Gunny's been up twice in six years, both times to fix something."
"That's not an answer to why me."
"Because the alternative was you and the twins freezing in a car, and even I'm not stubborn enough to let that happen over a rule I made for myself." I turn the mug in my hands, watching steam curl off the top. "That's not the whole answer either."
"What's the whole answer?"
"I don't know yet. I'm working on it."
She laughs, soft, surprised out of her. "That's the most honest thing you've ever said to me."
"Low bar."
"That's my line."
"I'm allowed to borrow it. You said it to me once, when I needed it more than I could admit."
The wind picks up outside, rattling the old window in its frame, and neither of us moves to check on the twins, both of us trusting the dog to sound an alarm if one's needed.
Jenna sets her mug down on the floor and pulls her knees in tighter, and when she speaks again her voice has dropped, quieter, like she doesn't want to wake the room even though the room's already asleep.
"Can I ask about the photograph?"
I don't answer right away. She doesn't fill the silence, doesn't push, just waits with the same patience she gave me the day the nail gun took me somewhere else entirely.
"Not tonight," I say. "Not because I'm hiding it. Because I don't have the words lined up yet, and I'd rather give you the real version than a bad first draft of it."
"Okay." She says it the same way she said it downstairs, simple, no argument. "I'll hold you to the real version someday."
"I'd rather you did."
We keep talking after that, about nothing that matters and everything that does.
Her childhood two states from here. The twins' first steps.
The sound a Humvee makes over gravel. The funniest thing Gunny's ever said with a straight face.
None of it's urgent. All of it's true. Somewhere in the middle of it, the space between our two chairs closes without either of us noticing, until her knee is nearly touching mine and neither of us moves it back.
Eventually the conversation just runs out, not from lack of things to say but from something else entirely, the words no longer necessary between us in the way they were an hour ago.
She looks at me. I look at her. Outside the window the snow keeps falling, steady and silent, burying the whole valley under something clean and unbroken.
"Rafe."
"Yeah."
"I'm not going to pretend I don't want this."
"Good. Neither am I."
I don't remember deciding to close the distance between us any more than she seems to.
Both of us just arrive there at the same moment, her hand coming up to rest against my jaw, my own hand finding the curve of her waist like it had been waiting all along for permission.
The kiss is slow and certain, nothing like the fireworks, when her hand just found mine and neither of us planned it.
This time we're both choosing it with our eyes open, and there's no old habit in me looking for the door.
Just her, steady under my hands, and the snow still falling outside like the whole world's decided to hold still for once.
Then we both go still at once.
Josie stirs on the floor, a small sound and a shift of blankets, Biscuit lifting his head to check on her before settling again, and Jenna and I break apart so fast it's almost comic, both of us watching the little pile of blankets like it might report back on what it saw.
Josie doesn't wake. She just resettles against the dog with a sleepy murmur and goes still again, and the moment we were standing inside of a second ago has already scattered into something neither of us gets to finish saying out loud.
Jenna looks at me, breathless, her mouth still soft from mine, and neither of us says a single word about what just happened.
We don't need to, not yet.