Chapter Six
And now I know why Boone laughed.
It’s edible, at best.
So, he isn’t perfect…not that anybody really is, but I had begun to wonder.
There aren’t many things to look at in this small space we are stuck in, and I’d found myself staring a little too often, sketching his details into the ridges of my mind.
He isn’t just good looking. He is exactly the kind of rugged gorgeous that would sell out a Cabela’s if he was wearing or using it.
I mean, I kind of feel like taking up fishing or hiking or even hunting, and I hate all those things.
Any woman with any common sense would assess her current circumstances and take a chance on a swoony Christmas romance.
I mean, movies are made of women stuck in similar predicaments like I am.
But I’m not common, therefore my senses are directing me in the opposite direction that doesn’t include rejection.
I’ve had enough of those. Honestly, I should probably try to strike up a fancy with Dog because I’ve already decided that I’ll grow into an elegant spinster with multiple cats, showing up at family gatherings as the quirky aunt, slipping envelopes of spending cash behind my brother’s back to my nieces and nephews so he can’t argue that it is too much.
I’ve become fond of this story I’ve written for myself.
“What exactly did you put in this?” I ask between slurps.
“I’m not really sure. There was some broth, some chicken, some spinach that looked a little more wilted than it should have been, some beans, and some flimsy celery.” He details out the list that, honestly, should have tasted better than this.
“Well, it’s something,” I mumble.
“Something horrible. You can say it.” He smiles with his eyes, allowing them to fold into his wrinkles, which I suspect are a combination of joy and grief.
“It’s a free meal. I’m not going to complain.”
“You know, all free things aren’t good things. In fact, sometimes free should be questioned the most.” Boone dips his spoon back into the liquid that is tinted a strange yellow-green that doesn’t look quite right.
“That’s a good point, but I’m not sure the chef warrants a complaint after all the trouble I’ve already put him through today,” I answer, holding back a grimace as I take another sip.
“Actually, two days,” he states.
I feel my eyes widen. “What day is it?”
“December twenty-third,” he answers. “I found you yesterday afternoon. I had to keep checking on you through the night to make sure it was just the chill wearing off and not something worse.”
My mother had said two days on the phone, but I hadn’t calculated it quick enough.
Not between the nonchalant way she’d acted like it didn’t matter if her own daughter made it home for Christmas or not, and the way she hadn’t even been concerned that I’d almost died and was now at some random guy’s house in the middle of the woods.
My own mother doesn’t care if I spend the holidays with a serial killer.
Not that Boone is. But how would my mother know that?
Moms should be suspicious when their daughter is at an unknown man’s house.
“Oh,” I sigh. “So, how snowed in are we?”
“Very.”
“Like you’re-going-to-have-to-spend-Christmas-Eve-with-someone-other-than-yourself kind of snowed in?
” I question, finally claiming defeat and putting my spoon down in my bowl.
I’m not sure my stomach can take whatever not-so-magical ingredients are in this soup.
It’s like an off-brand soup can had a baby with the produce they took to the back to be disposed of instead of consumed.
“Looks like it,” Boone confirms before also admitting to his own defeat.
Our bowls are half empty. Or half full. It seems like the entire world is always reminding you that you are defined by whether you look at a situation as half full or half empty.
I’m usually a half-full girl, but my gut-brain connection has been infected by whatever was in the soup. Our bowls are definitely half empty.
“Are you okay with that?” I question.
“Do I really have a choice?” He stands up from the small kitchen table that only has two wooden chairs, in which Goldilocks would have been severely disappointed if she’d come across this cabin. Both chairs are hard. Or at least, mine is, and I suspect his to be the same.
I hand my bowl to him, a look of pity pulling down at the skin on my face.
“I tried to finish. I promise. Please forgive me. It got a little better sometimes, and then it sat on my tongue too long, and it would turn into something that kind of resembled the rubber from a tire. Well, what I imagine rubber from a tire would taste like. Then the next bite seemed to curdle before I could swallow it. And then…”
“I get it, I get it,” Boone interrupts. “I didn’t finish mine, either. I’m not offended.”
“How mad would you be if I took over the kitchen tomorrow?” I ask.
I’m scared to look inside the fridge and the cupboards, but surely, I could patchwork some kind of Christmas Eve meal that was palatable.
Enjoyable even. My cooking skills aren’t expert level, but I’d challenged myself for a year to cook every single meal I had, and just like anything I made a challenge, I’d conquered it with no mercy or room for grace. I hadn’t slipped up once.
My friends hated me that year. I refused to go out, but eventually they just began showing up at my apartment for dinner, knowing whatever I was cooking was just as good as what they’d order elsewhere. And it was free.
I got the company. They got the food. It was a win-win situation.
“I’d be the same level of mad I am that you didn’t eat your soup,” he answers.
“You really don’t care that I didn’t like it?” I question.
“I’d be more concerned if you did.” He laughs while rinsing the bowls out in the small kitchen sink.
“Do you mind if I peruse the kitchen and get a feel for what I’m going to be working with?” I stand up, and the wooden chair shrieks on the tile floor as if I’ve just dragged my nails across a chalkboard. I wince.
I watch from behind as his shoulder muscles pull up into a shrug. “My mom tries to keep me in food up here. I’m not sure that you’ll find what you’re used to.”
“Does she live close by?” I ask, curious about the mother he said he loved on the phone.
“She lives in town. It’s about forty-five minutes away,” he answers while squirting some clear dish soap into the sink. I note the lack of blue dye in the soap. This man cares about what things are made of.
“See her a lot?” I ask as I walk over to the fridge and open it.
It resembles a grocery store that has been ransacked by crazy people reeling off the fear of being told the world is ending, except for the coffee creamers.
There are plenty of those, hinting at the fact that I’m probably not the only one in the room surviving off coffee.
“A couple times a week,” he answers.
I shut the fridge. “And how bad is that snowstorm exactly?”
At this question, he marches over, grabs my hand, making it tingle again without my permission. Then, he pulls. Hard. Dragging me behind him like I’m some sort of sled instead of a woman.
He swings the front door open, and snow literally plummets inside to the floor. Boone has been neglecting his shoveling duties to keep me in coffee and company.
“Right,” I say with gritted teeth, partly because this image really solidifies how stuck I am and partly because Jack Frost snuck in with the snow and is beginning to nibble at my earlobes.
Boone shuts the door, and the snow instantly dissolves to puddles on the wooden floor, glistening from the glow of the fire from across the room. “But what do you need?”
This time it’s me that grabs his hand, pulling him behind me back to the kitchen. “Where’s the pantry?”
He steps in front of me and opens a single cabinet door, revealing even fewer items than were in the fridge, but they are at least staple necessities that you can build a recipe from. Flour. Sugar. Baking Soda. A few spices and canned goods.
“If you had some eggs…” I mutter, my finger tapping against my lips as my brain begins to grab information to construct recipes that just might create us at least a partial Christmas feast.
“Give me a few minutes,” he answers matter-of-factly before taking two large strides out of the kitchen. He’s pulling on a large parka and his boots before I catch up to him.
“Give you a few minutes? Are you going to go lay one yourself? Because I hate to break it to you, but thinking like a chicken doesn’t make you a chicken.
Your body can’t suddenly develop the ability to form a yolk and then build the shell around it as it exits your body.
Plus, it takes twenty-four hours for a chicken to lay an egg.
I need eggs right now. Plural. Not just one,” I spout, my palms now pressed up against my hips.
And there’s that smile again that slowly crawls out from his lips, extending until the dimples press firmly into his cheeks. The man can’t lay an egg, but he sure can smile. I’ll give him that.
“I’m going to the coop,” he answers.
“The coop?”
“The chicken coop, where chickens live. I’m not a chicken, but I do have them,” he explains, tugging a knitted stocking cap over his unruly hair that curls around the wool almost immediately, as if his hair follicles are more accustomed to him wearing a hat than not.
“Also, how do you know the process in which an egg is made?”
“My nephew has detailed it out to me too many times. It’s permanently engraved in my brain.
I may forget how to sew a button on, the last name of my high school boyfriend that liked other girls more than me, and how to speak French after three years of classes in high school, which emboldened me to believe I could traipse across France.
The French make some killer gelato and baked goods, but I’m pretty sure they invented the eye roll because they sure preferred that over helping me figure out what words to say.
However, I will never forget how a chicken lays an egg. ”
He nods his head at me, and I feel like I just saw questions pass through his ice blue eyes, but instead he sighs. “I’ll be right back.”
“Wait!” I shout, and I don’t know why. “Can I come?”
It’s not like there is anything dangerous in this cabin. In fact, there is more danger outside of it than within it, but for some reason, it just seems safer to be with Boone than not be with him.
His eyes shift down to my feet. “I’m afraid I don’t have any boots that will fit.”
I glance over at the rather neatly assembled row of coats and a single pair of boots left. A monstrosity of a pair of rubber muck boots that look as if they will swallow up my entire leg as soon as I slip them on. And they do, moments later as I’m stepping into them.
“What are you doing? I’ll be back in just a few minutes,” he mumbles.
“Hat, please,” I request, extending my hand.
A deep sigh creeps up his chest and escapes through his lips before he bends over, sorting through a small wicker basket. A fuzzy red hat is soon placed in my hand.
“Thank you.” I tug the crimson cap over my head, flattening out the blowout I’d just had done that should have lasted through Christmas. Not that it is holding up well. Almost dying will do that to a good hair day.
Boone already has a black coat ready for me to slip on.
An oversized coat that matches the oversized boots.
I thread my arms through the large holes, and I’m sure I look absolutely ridiculous, but even my toes relax as the warmth of the heavy coat seeps through to my bones.
This is the kind of coat I should have been wearing instead of my cotton-candy pink one.