Chapter 22
TWENTY-TWO
JOSIE
What the hell am I doing?
I’m staring at myself in the bathroom mirror as I brush my teeth, unable to let go what happened in the hot tub and it’s been hours.
We came in, we showered, we cooked and finished dinner.
We worked on crocheting our scarves, we watched a show, and I still can’t let it go.
God, Colby’s fingers are magic. Yes, my shoulders feel better, of course.
I mean, how could they not? But does Colby have any idea the amount of physical restraint it took for me to not turn around, pull her into my lap, and taste that sweet Cupid’s bow mouth again?
Something has changed. This time together, the air, the quiet.
It’s been less than a week, but I am not the same person I was when I first came here and got stuck in the snow.
Sure, I haven’t totally changed and there’s so much to work on, but I know that something in me has lifted.
I’m lighter. More settled. Not filled with this incessant need to keep moving until I drop.
At the sink, I spit out the toothpaste and swish my mouth out, and when I come out of the room, Colby is standing in the hall with a freshly washed face, wearing pajama bottoms and a cotton shirt.
Her long chestnut hair is cascading down her shoulders, and I swear this woman can wear just about anything and she’d be the most beautiful woman in the room.
Flannel, jacket, Henley, cotton pjs. It doesn’t matter.
I want to take a moment to absorb it all. But the look on her face is something I haven’t seen since I’ve been here, and it makes me stop in my tracks. I swallow back the nerves in my throat. “Everything okay?”
Her gaze sweeps her clasped hands and she nods.
When she pulls her head back up, she gives me a smile.
“Yeah. I, um, I just saw on the news that everything should be cleared by tomorrow morning. So, after we get up, I can get the scraper on the Jeep and clear the driveway, then pull your car from the ditch.”
A sickening thud hits my chest. It’s over. This time, this moment, this honeymoon period where I shut out the outside world, learned things about myself that I never knew, relaxed in a way that I didn’t know was possible, is gone.
And so is my time with Colby. Someone who I’ve very quickly grown to care for, someone who I want in my life, someone who I really, really don’t want to leave. It’s all done.
Of course I knew that it was all going to end at some point.
We live in Minnesota. The weather might be somewhat unpredictable, but I wasn’t delusional enough to think that we’d be stuck here for months.
The sun was always going to come, the snowplows were always going to clear, the snow was always going to stop.
And our time together was always going to end.
And yet, I held on to this hope that it would last just a few days longer.
I swallow back the urge to cry and push out a smile.
“Ah… that’s great. You will be so happy to get rid of me.
Wow.” I scratch at the back of my neck and avoid her gaze, because if she sees me, she will see through my bullshit.
She’s already done enough. I can’t exactly ask her to keep housing me indefinitely. “It’ll feel nice to be back in my bed.”
None of this is a lie, but it’s also not all the truth.
Sure, being back in a bed would be nice, even though Colby has offered her bed to me every single night.
But this place has grown on me, and the idea of going back to my tiny apartment on the third floor of a semi-decent complex isn’t as nice as being surrounded by acres and acres of trees, the coolest dog in the world, and the woman that I really, really like.
Colby clears her throat. “I was thinking, if it’s not weird… Do you want to sleep in the bed with me tonight?” There’s a flush to her cheeks, one that makes my cheeks match. “Nothing like… you know. Just friends. Like a sleepover from when we were kids?”
She’s shifting the weight in between her feet, and I feel every silent emotion.
In the bed. With Colby. In Colby’s bed. But she marked out her boundary line, which I respect.
And it’s probably a good thing that she clarified, especially with the way my body is still tingling from that massage this morning.
Because seriously, how does she have such gifted hands?
The way that she worked my shoulder made me think all day about the way she could work other areas.
Seriously, snap out of it.
A smile spreads. “A sleepover, huh?” I say. “That means that you’ll either have to get out the Ouija board or tell ghost stories. We can flip a coin and decide.”
“Hell to the absolute no on that,” Colby says with a laugh, clearly relieved I didn’t make her request awkward. “You forget that you get to leave to go back to the safety of your un-haunted apartment, and I’ll be stuck here with whatever demons we summoned. And sadly, I’m fresh out of holy water.”
“Okay, that’s totally fair.” I giggle. “Yeah, sleeping in a bed sounds nice. I’m going to grab my pillow.”
Holy shit. I’m going to sleep in the bed with Colby. Keep hands to self, be respectful, do not, under any circumstances, do exactly what you want to do.
After I grab my pillow, I stand in the living room and take a few deep breaths. I need to calm my insides, because I’m terrified that I am going to do something really stupid and mess this up.
But the moment I crawl into the bed with Colby, every hesitation I felt about this being awkward or weird, or even deeply sexual, evaporates.
I should’ve known. Her bed is so plush. She has so many layers of blankets that it feels like I’m in a velvet cocoon.
Kona settles with a scrape of the cone and a heavy thud against the floor by Colby as I roll onto my back and clasp my hands under my head.
“Oh, you have an amazing skylight. And… wait… you have glow-in-the-dark stars? This surprises me.”
“The glow-in-the-dark stars?” Colby asks as she wiggles lower and tucks the blankets up to her chin. “Why?”
I stare at the hundreds of stars lined across her ceiling. “I don’t know. I guess there’s something so innocent about it,” I say. “Like what a kid would have in their room. And you are so…”
“Not innocent?” She chuckles. “Really. Tell me all your true feelings. No reason to hold back now.”
“Stop.” I laugh and slide down further on the pillow until our shoulders are touching. Her body sinks like it let out a sigh when we touch. I stare at the stars, the real ones from the skylight and the fake ones on her ceiling, and try to soak this moment in. My last night here. Maybe even forever.
We’re silent for a while. Comfortable. Quiet.
And then we talk. For hours. Through heavy yawns, Colby tells me about growing up near the ocean and how much she misses it, but how Lake Superior and the smooth beach rocks up here are so phenomenal that they fill that void.
I tell her about my family, go through each of my siblings, talk about my mom.
We talk about the difference between being an only child and one of six, and I say just because I was surrounded by people, it didn’t make me any less lonely.
And then I tell her about my solo walk in the woods today where I started making the peace I desperately needed with my dad, with myself on my dad’s absence, and how for the first time in my life I feel simultaneously lighter and whole.
Turns out that Colby loves to hold and I love being held, and somehow during all these words, we seamlessly intertwine. She spoons me like we’ve done this a million times. I settle into her, comfortable, relaxed, satiated by the warmth.
A few things happen tonight.
One, we don’t have sex. We don’t even kiss. Not a peck, not a brush of lips on the top of the head, not a hand.
Two, I feel safer than I have in a long time. Maybe even ever.
And three, I realize that I’m developing true, deep, serious feelings.
I just need to figure out what I’m going to do about it.