Chapter 2
“Motherfucking butthole titfaced pig fucker!”
Ooh. That was a good one.
Every few minutes I’ve been spewing out whatever creative filth my brain can conjure, but interestingly I haven’t cried yet.
I should probably examine that at some point.
But not now. Right now I’m trying to make Mac’s comfy old SUV pretend it’s a snowplow and get me through this blizzard without dying.
The snow started out harmless, almost romantic. Soft little confetti flurries that make you remember each snowflake is different. Now, in late-evening pitch black, it’s a full-on assault of chunky globs, bound to settle.
The wipers slap back and forth like a metronome for my questionable decisions. Like storming away from the Olympic archery team’s Christmas “bonding” getaway.
Like driving a few hundred miles through Montana to my former stepdad’s cabin the day before New Year’s Eve.
Mac may be the asshat who cheated on my mother, but he was also the only father figure who ever stuck around, and actively wanted to.
When he begged to stay in my life after the divorce, I yelled at him for being such an irredeemable dipshit, asked Mum if she was OK with it, and then he and I just slid back into our version of normal.
It’s hard to resist sticking with someone who so genuinely wants you in their life.
“Hey, pumpkin,” he’d greeted me earlier, then winced when he saw my face. “Shit. Who am I having killed?”
“Josh,” I bit out, and told him about coming in from target practice and walking in on my boyfriend of almost two years balls-deep in Olivia. My teammate. My friend. Or so I had foolishly thought.
Mac gave me the same scowl that launched half his renegade cop movies. “That asshole,” he snarled, forgetting for a moment that he did the selfsame thing to my mother. “What do you need? Just say the word.”
“Your cabin, please, Mac.”
“You got it.” He grabbed car keys off a hook and pressed them into my hand. “Take the SUV. It’s gonna snow. Keys to the cabin are in the box. Code is…” He sighed. “6869.”
Mum’s birthday.
I gave him a mildly sympathetic look - mildly, because losing her was his own damn fault - and hugged him. “Thanks.”
“Anytime.” He waved me off. “And I still have the 1873 Winchester from Gunslinger’s Eulogy. Maybe drop that into conversation with Josh next time you see him.”
I’d managed a small smile, then left before my knees could give out.
That was six hours ago.
When Mac said it was going to snow, I don’t think he envisioned this post-apocalyptic rave.
“Dicksplash shitstain bucket of fetid monkey balls,” I mutter now, grabbing another chocolate chip cookie from the pack on the passenger seat.
I picked up other essentials at a gas station: essentially, ramen, ramen, and more ramen, with some Doritos and guacamole for veg content and shit tons of cookies for comfort.
Mac comes to Montana to “get back to nature,” which translates as fuck all in the freezer, kill your own dinner.
But right now, these cookies are everything.
These cookies are not sneakily trying to get noshed on by anyone else.
The heater wheezes, and I thump the dashboard. “Hang in there, champ.” The dregs of coffee in the cup holder have gone cold and sad. If the heating packs up, I’m toast. Frozen toast. Gross thought.
I grip the wheel tighter and tell myself it’ll all work out all right. Driving in a raging blizzard like this, well, it’s refreshing. Invigorating. Character-building. And I’d still rather be here than with Josh, the self-proclaimed humble feminist nice guy with his lying, cheating fucking face.
At least Olivia’s form improved, I think sourly. Her back looked very… committed to the arch, let’s say.
The adrenaline from getting out of Dodge is burning off, leaving a headache burning behind my eyes. I keep replaying Josh’s stunned, wounded expression when I told him never to speak to me again, as if fidelity was optional fine print I’d sprung on him without warning.
Never mind. At least he’ll have a support group of gym mirrors to talk to.
The road narrows and I slow to a crawl. Visibility is somewhere between difficult and oh shit help, I’m being eaten by the void.
My phone screen, abandoned on the passenger seat next to the cookies, glows with a helpful little No Service.
Figures. Still, I think I’m only a mile or so from the cabin.
Being alone over New Year’s Eve is usually my idea of hell. This year, I crave it: silence, peace, not having to smile for anyone. Bliss.
The car skids, sudden and sharp. Instinctively I downshift and pump the brakes; the back end fishtails, then grudgingly corrects.
“Perfect,” I huff. “Love that for me.” You know what else I love? No-one is in this car to be a prick about the way I talk to myself.
The rest of the roads start to climb more and more.
Montana’s way of testing character. Snowbanks rise on either side like walls, and the wind shrieks like it has teeth.
The windshield fogs, and I scrub it with my sleeve.
In the smeared reflection, I catch a glimpse of myself: flushed, hair a mess, eyes blazing.
The girl training for Olympic gold isn’t here.
The woman left behind looks tired, furious… and weirdly alive.
It’s something, at least. Some fragment of self respect to hold onto after being cheated on.
At long last, the turnoff appears. Mac’s cabin sits at the end of a long, straight track, just a darker triangle against the storm.
The car wavers again and I bark out a laugh, thinking of that cartoon dog in the burning room insisting This is fine.
“Rebirth through peril,” I mutter to myself. “Very on-brand.”
The SUV groans along the last hundred yards. There’s already a foot of snow on the roof. My shoulders finally loosen a fraction as my headlights sweep across the A-frame cabin. Even though I’ve only ever been here once, there’s a sense of coming home. I made it. Suck it, Josh.
The snow is still pelting sideways, a white tantrum. The wipers can’t keep up anymore. I steel myself with a mild growl, grab my bags, and yank the door open.
The wind punches the breath out of me. Icy coldness claws at every bit of exposed skin.
My hair whips across my face and immediately sticks to my lip balm.
The steps up to the cabin are half-buried; my boots slip, the rail is freezing beneath my gloved hand, but it keeps me upright.
I may be dumped, frozen, and alone, and possibly starring in an indie film called Portrait of a Dumbass in the Snow, but I’m still standing.
My fingers are half numb by the time I reach the door. When I get it open, the flood of heat is so intense it almost hurts.
Warmth…
Odd. I’d expected the place to be freezing from standing empty.
I stomp snow off my boots, shove the door closed, and only then really look. A healthy fire is crackling in the living room grate. My relief does a messy pirouette with dread.
Someone’s here.
For a second I hope it’s Mac having somehow beaten me here, because that’s simple. I can yell at him to stop being noble and go spend New Years with someone he’s not already cheated on.
But then I spot the details: boots by the door that aren’t his. A mug of soup steaming on the coffee table beside an open book. Confessions of an Actor by Laurence Olivier.
My stomach drops. No. You’ve got to be tittyfucking kidding me.
Of all the people in the world Mac could have lent the cabin to…
My heart is suddenly thudding for a reason that has nothing to do with hypothermia. A flash of an old memory slices through me unbidden: a different door, a different room, a different bed. Nate sprawled across it, drunk and bare-chested, with Chelsea…
The way my stomach had dropped then.
The way my skin had gone hot and cold as I realized, I liked him more than I knew. And it’s never, ever going to happen.
I shove the memory down where it belongs, deep and bitter and teenaged in its maturity levels.
“If anyone is naked in bed, I will fucking lose it,” I swear to myself quietly. I’ve had enough of that for one lifetime, and I’m deadly serious when I say, not today, Satan.
I hear footsteps thumping up the front door steps I just scaled, and there’s a man in the now open doorway before I can blink.
For a wild second I assume - or hope - that I do indeed have hypothermia, and it’s making me hallucinate.
But I knew it. As soon as I saw the title of the book on the table, I knew who was here.
He says my name, and the voice slices through the wind, rough and familiar. “Ally?”
“Nate?”
The word tastes weird in my mouth, like I haven’t said it aloud in years. Because I haven’t.
He looks almost exactly like twenty-year-old Nate, just… upgraded. Broader shoulders. Jaw covered in rough stubble. Lines at the corners of his eyes that shouldn’t be as attractive as they are. Movie-poster handsome, annoyingly real.
And entirely out of place in the middle of my badly timed emotional breakdown. Only Josh and Olivia would be less welcome.
“What the hell are you doing here?” I demand, entirely tired of today and its unwelcome surprises.
He shuts the door, already trudging toward me, snow up to his shins. “I could ask you the same thing. You shouldn’t be driving in this!” I’d almost call his tone outraged.
“Well, I was. The road tried to kill me. Why are you here?”
“Fixing the generator.” A puff of white leaves his mouth on a dry, huffed laugh. “Fallon said the cabin was empty.”
“Mac told me the same.”
He shakes his head. “Guess he ignored my messages, then. I’ve been here days.”
Of course he has. Of course the universe would pull this stunt. “So there’s no cell reception here?”
He shakes his head. “I sent them on the way. There’s been none here at all since the snow came.”
“Shit.” Mum will be frantic. And there’s nothing I can do about it.
For a second we just stare at each other, snow whipping outside, both breathing hard from shock and cold. His gaze skims over me, with my soaked parka and my wind-reddened face. And something flickers in his eyes that I refuse to try to interpret. “You’re soaked,” he says.
“So are you.” I wrap my arms tighter around myself. “Congratulations, we’re both geniuses.”
His mouth twitches. “By the fire. Now. Before you freeze solid.”
I want to argue. To throw something like I’m fine, thanks, I’ve walked in on worse situations at his head. But my fingers are starting to go numb in my gloves, and I’d quite like to keep all ten. My career kind of relies on them.
The sudden quiet is enormous. The fire cracks, the generator hums loudly, and, in the middle of it all, my pulse thunders.
Nate pushes his hood back, scattering droplets into the warm air. He looks at me like he’s not a hundred percent sure I’m real.
“I swear I’m not hallucinating you, right?” he says.
“Not unless I’m hallucinating you too,” I shoot back.
The words hang there, almost playful, absolutely not how I feel. Because under the shock, there’s a different burn.
A memory I’ve never fully shaken: opening a door at twenty, very mildly tipsy on cheap vodka and reckless possibility, expecting to find an empty guest room and finding him instead. Nate, sprawled on top of the covers, dead asleep. My friend Chelsea, curled into his side like she owned him.
The way my heart had dropped, hard and sudden.
The way I’d laughed it off later, made jokes about movie stars and messiness, while something in me quietly re-calibrated around you’re not just my stepbrother, are you?
That was the night it hit me I liked him, a lot more than I should. And the night I decided showing it would be the stupidest fucking thing I could do.
Apparently my subconscious thought tonight was a great time to revisit that humiliation, upgraded in HD, with bonus fresh betrayal from Josh.
Outside, the storm howls against the cabin walls. Inside, everything narrows to the space between us, which is too small, too charged, smelling like woodsmoke and wet wool and annoying memories I didn’t consent to revisiting.
Of all the places in the world to run to, I had to pick the one already occupied by the first man I ever saw in someone else’s bed. My first taste of that particular kind of pain, hard on my latest taste of it.
And I am absolutely, definitely, not thrilled about it.