15. Chapter 15
Chase Me
Meredith
The skis had been sitting in the back of a storage shed at the compound for two weeks before I worked up the nerve to touch them.
They were a pair Noelle dug up from some cache of human gear the elves kept for this kind of homesickness, and I stood there in the cold with my hands on the bindings for a long while before I let myself strap them on.
“You don’t have to do this,” Dash said, standing a few feet off, giving me room. He’d gotten good at reading my body language, giving me space when I needed it, with no push in his voice. He always left the offer sitting open if I wanted to take it.
“I know I don’t have to.” I clicked the second binding shut and straightened up, testing my balance, muscle memory flickering awake in my legs after eleven years of silence. “I want to. That’s different.”
He watched me a moment longer, something unguarded moving behind his eyes, and then that familiar spark caught, the one I’d come to recognize right before he said something that was going to get him in trouble. “Care to make it interesting?”
There it was. “Define interesting.”
“I chase. You run. Winner gets bragging rights.” He shrugged out of his jacket as if he knew my answer. My pulse picked up watching him do it, because I knew what came after the jacket. “Reindeer versus skis. Let’s see if that qualifier ever taught you anything worth remembering.”
“You’re on.”
He shifted before I’d finished the sentence, bones sliding, that huge dark shape rising up out of the place a man had stood a second before.
The old fear tried to climb my spine; the same fear that had kept me off skis for over a decade.
This time, underneath it, the flicker of something fierce and bright grew stronger.
“Catch me if you can,” I said, and pushed off.
The trail cut through open pine, packed snow gleaming pale under a sky gone hard and clear, and the second my skis found their rhythm, I felt free.
My muscle memory flooded back faster than I braced for - the glide, the push, the music of skis cutting snow that I hadn’t heard in eleven years, and had missed more than I’d ever let myself admit.
Behind me, I heard him. Hooves thundering, closing the distance with a speed no human on skis had any business outrunning. I laughed, loud enough so he could hear me as I pushed harder, feeling the icy burn clean through my lungs in a way that felt like being unlocked instead of hurt.
He came alongside me through a gap in the trees, huge and dark, breath steaming off him in great white clouds that rolled hot across my cheek when he drew close, and I felt my whole body light up with something that had nothing to do with fear anymore.
Adrenaline curled straight into desire, the pangs sharp and immediate, the drum of his hooves in the snow matching the pound of my pulse.
“You’re cheating,” I shouted, breathless, as he cut ahead of me and swung around, forcing me to veer wide through fresh powder, snow scattering up in a bright spray that caught the low sun and hung glittering in the air between us.
He didn’t slow. He herded me, gentle and relentless, cutting off every angle I tried until my skis lost their grip in a drift and I went down laughing, tumbling into snow that felt more like an embrace than a fall, and by the time I came to a stop on my back, chest heaving, he’d already shifted, dropping to his knees in the snow beside me, bare and breathing hard, dark hair damp at his temples.
“I win,” he said, pleased with himself.
“You cheated.”
“Nope. I chased. That was the deal.” He leaned over me, propped on one forearm, snow melting where his skin met the cold. His eyes had gone dark and focused in the way I had learned to recognize as pure want. “How do you feel?”
I took stock of myself. My lungs burned clean, my legs ached in the good way, the old fear nowhere in my chest where it had lived for eleven years, replaced instead by something wild, bright, and present. “Alive,” I said, and meant it more than I’d meant almost anything.
“Good.” He kissed me with his snow-cold mouth against mine, and the heat built fast between us despite the cold biting at every inch of exposed skin, his hands working at my jacket with an urgency that matched the wild thing still singing through my blood from the chase.
“Here?” I managed, laughing against his mouth, glancing at the open trail around us.
“No one comes this far out.” He proved his point by peeling my jacket back regardless, mouth finding the curve of my throat, and any argument I might have made dissolved fast under the drag of his lips and the reckless, giddy thrum still running through my body from the run.
We didn’t make it far past the treeline, tangled together in a drift with our discarded clothes forming a rough barrier against the worst of the cold.
When he finally settled over me I wrapped around him without hesitation, no fear left anywhere in my chest, just the cold at our backs and the heat between us and his low, wrecked voice saying my name like it was the only prayer he’d ever needed.
I came apart under him with the same bright, reckless joy that had carried me down that trail, and felt him follow soon after, both of us breathless and laughing into the snow, entirely undone and entirely, finally, whole.
Afterward, we lay tangled in the drift with the cold biting back in around the edges of us, and I looked up at the aurora bursting in the sky and understood for the first time that Dasher had given me the gift the black ice had taken from me so long ago.
He wiped away my fears, and delivered me joy.