Chapter 3
“Who’s Iris?”
It’s a quiet question spoken while they’re sharing a bag of chips for breakfast. It stops Nora cold, one hand hovering in mid-air with a chip between her fingers. “How did you—”
“You said her name while you were asleep.”
“Right. Of course I did.” She drops the food back into the bag now that her appetite is gone.
Hadn’t considered that she might have a nightmare, but the stress from the crash likely spurred it on.
Not that she needs much incentive to let her own mind betray her.
“Sorry if I woke you. Sometimes I have dreams.”
“It’s alright.”
He doesn’t seem annoyed, but she’s predisposed to worry that he might be. Finn tried to be patient, but in the end, she drove him out of the bedroom and into the spare once he realized he couldn’t fix her enough to make the nightmares stop.
“I wasn’t sure if I should wake you up or not,” he continues.
“I either wake myself up or I don’t remember it the next day.”
That’s a non-answer and mostly a lie. She remembers almost all of her nightmares. All those awful details, right down to the phone ringing, and the phantom ache of her heart ripping in two as the voice on the other end explained her daughter’s fate.
Nora only ever has two dreams. She knows them like a movie watched on repeat or a book read until the pages are raw and tattered.
It’s her very own version of Groundhog Day.
A part of her wants to ask him to jolt her out of that routine next time so she’s not stuck living it out again, but the words catch in her throat and she stays quiet.
It’s not his job to help her manage her demons.
They have only just met. She’s used to dealing with these dreams alone.
Her main worry is driving him to the other side of the plane with the noise because she fears abandonment even now, in the middle of an arctic tundra with no civilization in sight.
“If I bother you, if it gets worse, just…nudge me. I’ll wake up.”
“It didn’t bother me.” He doesn’t push further or ask again who Iris is. Only gives her a sympathetic look, like he understands when she barely understands herself.
Before she knows what’s happening, her mouth opens and an explanation falls out. “About Iris. She’s—”
“You don’t have to answer. I shouldn’t have said anything. I’m not much good at this to begin with, and now I’m sticking my nose in your business.”
She’s not sure what “this” is. If he means he’s not good at plane crashes, because who is, or just the unfortunate situation of being stuck with another person with nothing else to do but talk and develop frostbite.
Telling a relative stranger about how her child died isn’t how she prefers to spend her social time.
Not something she’d normally share when she’s gotten used to stuffing it down so deep that her therapist still has to drag it out of her.
But what does it matter anyway? So what if he knows?
They may never even make it out of this pile of rubble.
That therapist she tries to avoid is always telling her she needs to open up more and let herself make connections, failing to understand just how terrifying that is.
There’s something different about being out here in the wilderness with Theo.
Almost as if it’s not real. They’re in their own bubble, so far removed from anything familiar, that for a moment she can pretend to be the type of person who opens up.
Maybe.
If he does, too.
“Did you think of someone before we crashed?” she asks quietly. “Doesn’t have to be a significant other, I just mean anyone.”
He nods. “I thought of a couple of people. Some still here, some already gone. Not all of them good.”
“Me too. She was one of mine. You tell me about one of yours and I’ll tell you about her.”
“Story for a story?” he replies, with a raised brow.
“Exactly.”
That same hesitation she feels in her soul is clear across his face.
It’s easier to ask than to offer, but if he agrees, then they’re on a level playing field.
There has to be some give and take here, especially considering they’re so new to each other that she’s not entirely certain she can trust him with these secrets.
He’s disarming in a way she’s not prepared for, but she’s been fooled before.
Theo ponders her question, glancing her way a few times, chewing on his lower lip in what she assumes is a nervous gesture.
He taps his gloved fingers against bent knees before finally coming to a conclusion.
“Stranded. Miserable. Frozen. Nothing to do but talk about shit we don’t wanna talk about, right? ”
She shrugs, mimicking his fake matter-of-fact tone. “Right. Why not?”
“Okay. Deal.”
She half expected him to refuse and isn’t quite sure how to feel about his agreement, but it’s too late to go back on it now. It was her idea after all. “Alright. You first.”
“I thought of my brother. Got a couple others that left a scar big enough they shoulda come first, but Oliver was right there front and center.” He crumples up the empty chip bag, tossing it in a pile of trash they’ll have to move later.
“Me and him, we fight more than we don’t.
He’s always been an entitled asshole, that’s nothing new.
Our father had a particular obsession with pitting us against each other to earn his affection, and that sort of thing breeds resentment the way you think it might.
We spent so many years on opposite ends of this family…
but then I thought I was about to die, and I wished I could talk to him again.
Say everything we never said. Tell him nothing that happened when we were kids was his fault.
That I was never really angry with him.”
Nora didn’t come into this wedding weekend knowing much about who Gwen was marrying or what family she was attaching herself to.
She can tell by the way Theo’s eyes dart sideways and how roughly his voice catches that there’s a significant amount of trauma woven into this bloodline.
Curiosity gets the best of her when she has no right to ask. “What happened when you were kids?”
“That’s another story,” he replies, carefully.
Unbothered, but unwilling to answer. “Anyway, I thought of him first. How I wished things were different. How this crash was gonna ruin the one good thing that’s ever truly made him happy, and I didn’t want that.
It probably already has, though. He thinks I’m gone now. ”
“You don’t know that. I’m sure he hasn’t given up yet, and neither have the rescue crews. It’s only been one day, Theo. No one’s abandoning us out here. You’ll see your brother again.”
“Yeah. You’re right. Fuck, I’m just running off at the mouth.”
She bumps his knee with her own, pairing it with a sad half smile. “I asked, didn’t I? Like you said, what else do we have to do out here anyway? Listen to another wolf howling in the distance? Heard one, heard ‘em all.”
He snorts, ducking his head in embarrassment. Once he started, he just kept going, but that eases a bit of her own anxiety. He let himself be honest and open with her, showing something vulnerable when he didn’t have to, and maybe she can do the same.
It only makes sense that they get to know each other, she tells herself. When they get out of this, they’ll spend a decent amount of time together one way or another because she plans to see Gwen as often as she can and his brother is marrying her. There’s bound to be….intermingling going forward.
He’ll find out anyway.
“She was my daughter,” Nora says, suddenly. “Iris. She died with her father seven years ago. Carbon monoxide poisoning.”
Theo sucks some air between his teeth. “I’m sorry.”
“She’s who I thought of first. How I hoped I might see her again.
The day she was born. Her smile. The day she died, and how it felt like I died, too.
It’s weird how much you can stuff into a few minutes of terror.
I replayed that day I got the call, and so many moments that came before and after.
If I wake you up again, I’m sorry. Sometimes I go days without dreaming, and other nights I can’t stop. ”
“Don’t worry about it. I have dreams, too. So, if I start yelling, just poke me or something.” He pauses, shaking his head. “I’m joking, don’t do that. I’d jump a mile.”
She wonders what his nightmares are about, but doesn’t dare ask. Maybe she’ll find out eventually if they trade another set of stories, and something tells her they may end up having more time on their hands than she thought.
“Hopefully, we don’t need to worry about it either way because someone’s going to find us soon.”
They lock eyes for a moment, barely a heartbeat before it’s too much, too awkward.
She can’t dig around in her own broken heart anymore without crumbling and is only grateful that he doesn’t seem to have much desire to wade around in more of his traumas today, either.
They’ve both shared something, though, and in a way, it’s opened up her internal wounds and laid them bare more than all her therapy sessions combined, despite only scratching the surface.
He’s a captive audience, yet the fact that she didn’t have to pay him to listen might have something to do with it.
She shivers for the hundredth time that day, and he gives her another foot of his own blanket, inching it over her legs.
She’s pretty sure her heart just backflipped.
How sad is that? A kind gesture in a life-threatening situation in the middle of an Alaskan winter, and that’s enough to have her smitten. So easy. So desperate. Shit.
“We should write SOS in the snow. Just in case,” she mutters.
“You shouldn’t stress your wound.”
“I won’t overdo it.”
She gets a grunt of agreement, but it’s not long before she regrets it.