by Lucy Snow
As soon as I got down the steps I couldn’t run anymore, the snow was too deep, but I made a good attempt as I set off toward the bus.
The snow coming down was so heavy that the path of the footprints in front of me was already tough to follow.
Shit. I was already too late.
CHAPTER 11 - NAOMI
It took about 30 minutes out in the snow before I realized that maybe this wasn’t the best idea I’d ever had.
It actually took only about 3 minutes for that to occur to me the first time, but back then I’d gritted my teeth and kept it moving, because, hey, that’s what I did in situations like this, and it had worked out for me pretty well so far.
Of course, very rarely had that involved a life or death situation, which it took me about 6 minutes after I stepped out of the door of the inn to realize that this was.
The storm was unrelenting, the wind whipping around me, pushing the snow coming down in weird angles that seemed to shift and turn without any rhyme or reason. It was like being assaulted by tiny, cold, melting flakes.
It wasn’t a great feeling.
Of course, by now I was committed, and I had a goal in mind, something to strive for, something to get to. Somewhere down this road that I could vaguely tell the shape and direction of by the way the hills caved downward to meet it lay the bus where Naomi’s diary waited for me…and the cliff that the bus hung so perilously over.
I shook my head and pulled my jacket closer around my shoulders. The cliff thing could wait till I got there. I could figure it out. Alex wasn’t the only one who knew a little bit about the cold.
Alex popped into my head again, and not for the first time, setting off a chain of flares in my mind that ignited memories of anger, frustration, amazing pleasure, and above all else, confusion.
I tried to turn him over in my mind and put him away for a little while, at least while I worked on putting one foot in front of the other over and over and get to the bus, but Alex kept bouncing around in there and making it difficult to concentrate.
I still couldn’t figure out what had happened last night. Sure, we’d fought each other as usual, and I had definitely left the dining room thinking that we’d never get along, much less see eye to eye on anything, but then he’d shown up at my room, and for a moment everything had become clear: we were both thinking the same thing.
Maybe we hadn’t figured out the whole, you know, talking to each other thing, or the whole saying anything to each other without being at each other’s throats, but for a little while last night in my room, none of that had mattered.
All that had mattered was the feel of his skin on my skin, his lips on mine, the insistent and powerful way he kissed me, the way our bodies fit together.
There had been nothing else. Not the inn, not the storm, not the day to day problems of every day life, nor the bigger questions everyone, especially me, seemed to be asking themselves, publicly and privately, at all hours of the day.
It was as if all of that had ceased to exist.
It had felt incredible.
And then…Alex had left. Without saying a word, he’d shown me a vision of what peace could be, and then taken it away from me, away from us, by getting up and leaving, without an explanation.
That was the worst part — not knowing what had gone wrong. Was it me? Was it him? Who knew? Oh wait, Alex knew. And I didn’t.
Something. Anything! Anything would have been better than the nothing I’d gotten.
I ground my teeth as I trudged on, half out of cold and half out of frustration, shaking my head at my inability to figure out this particular puzzle. This tall, gorgeous, sexy as hell, walking conundrum that bothered me in ways no other guy ever had.
It was infuriating.
I wasn’t a shut in, I’d grown up around TV and movies, and certainly had my run-ins with thirsty boys from high school, and a few in college too. I’d grown up thinking and learning that boys were pretty much out for one thing from age 13 to at least 30, before they, at least hopefully, cooled off a little bit down there long enough to have a rational thought once in a while.
Which made me even more confused - I was right there!
In bed!
Wearing very little!
Wanting more!
What the hell, dude?!
Way to give a girl mixed signals.
“Stupid boys,” I muttered to the blizzard all around me, and the wind picked up a little bit right then and there, shaking me to my bones, as if the universe, or at least the local weather system, agreed with me that boys were dumb.
“Yup, you get me,” I whispered back to the blizzard and kept walking.
About 10 minutes later I angrily realized that maybe this was for the best. Maybe last night could have played out a little differently and Alex and I would have had amazing sex, and then in the morning things would have gone back to how weird they were between us and we’d have kept fighting. What would I complain about then? The same thing — how we for some reason just couldn’t have a civil conversation without wanting to bite each other’s heads off.
I knew a little bit about dating, and if there was anything of value in there, it was that wanting to kill your partner made for an exciting thriller movie but an exhausting relationship. Especially after just over a day of knowing each other.
Ugh, dating. Come on, Avery, don’t get ahead of yourself. I’d just met the guy and here I was already thinking like we were going to end up together. As if the only reason we’d even met was the giant bucket of snow the world decided to randomly drop on New Hampshire just as we were both getting on the road to get back to Meridian.
One in a million chance! Didn’t mean anything!
No, it would never have worked out between Alex and I. Even if we had had sex last night, I’d have woken up this morning wanting more, and maybe he’d have wanted more, but then we’d have gone right back to our fighting. Sex didn’t change things, not when there were bigger problems at hand — it mainly just made it easy to ignore other problems for a little while longer while everyone was moony-eyed over all the hot sex they were having.
Of course, my life could have used some hot sex these days. Well, right about now, hot anything would have done the trick. Even that got a short laugh out of me as I slowly turned around one of the bends in the road.
I was getting closer; I could feel it. Naomi was getting closer to me by the minute.
By every slow minute.
No, Alex and I were doomed from the snowy start. It had been nice to think about, to briefly daydream about, but I was a grown woman and I didn’t need to daydream about guys like that anymore, not when I had real issues in my life, with people that were important to me, that I had to work out while figuring out what I wanted to do with myself.
And that life plan certainly didn’t involve any tall, dark, and sexy men named Alex. At least, not right now. It might have, if I’d been able to carry on a conversation with the guy without it turning into a shouting match, but those were the breaks.
Attraction didn’t really mean much, because I knew from last night that we both felt it in spades. He’d have to have been a world-class actor to have pulled off that kinda ruse, fooling me into thinking he was into me last night in my room, and even though I knew he’d been around the world learning a very particular and useful set of skills, I doubt acting classes had been on the menu.
Nah, he was into it, and I knew from my own vivid memories of having him on top of me that I wanted little more than to take him inside me, so that part wasn’t the problem. Something else had pulled him back.
A girlfriend back home? A wife? Could be, I supposed, but he didn’t strike me as the kind of guy to play around like that. Of course, my friends would have said, knowing glances passing across their faces, they never did.
That probably wasn’t it, but as the harsh light of a snow-covered morning washed over me, I couldn’t for the life of me figure out what other issue could there have been?
&
nbsp; It was wearing me out just wondering about it, I knew that much.
That was when I reached the conclusion to this entire thing - I didn’t need this crap in my life right now. I had enough going on with school and my parents and figuring the rest of my shit out to deal with some boy who couldn’t make up his mind, whether or not we’d just met.
My parents were the big thing right now. Once I got out of here, I had to figure out how to sit them down and make them understand that even though Naomi was gone and she wasn’t coming back, that didn’t mean they had to hold me close to their chest just to keep me safe. That wasn’t any way for me to live.
I had to be allowed to go my own way and make my own mistakes. Sure, it was pretty likely that this world would chew me up and spit me out, but didn’t that happen to everyone? How else was there to live so you could really say that you had when it was all over?
For all the issues I had with Alex, and there were many of those, at least he seemed to have figured one thing out about himself earlier than I had — he wasn’t meant to stay in one place for too long. He knew that he had to keep it moving and figure out where the next part of his journey would take him, because that was the only way he knew how to keep getting closer to the prize, whatever that was.
I could still see the look on his face in my mind from last night when he told me about traveling and what it did for him, what seeing the world and helping out people less fortunate than him for no other reason than he was born lucky and they weren’t, and how that had affected him.
I wanted a piece of that for myself, wanted to see and experience those things.
I wanted to travel the world.
At the moment, though, I only wanted to travel to this bus. I chastised myself for the dozenth time for coming out of the inn like this in the middle of the storm, but I really didn’t have anything else to do that morning, especially since the last person in the world I wanted to see was Alex, after last night’s embarrassment.
I hoped I was going in the right direction - I looked up and raised my hands to my eyes, protecting them from the glare of all the white around and tried to focus on the path in front of me as it stretched out, making sure I was still on the road going north toward the bus and the cliff.
So far so good.
And then things stopped being so good, so far.
The wind picked up something awful and knocked me over like I was a domino getting a perfect tap from the one in front of me, and before I knew what had happened I was eating snow.
I gulped, feeling the cold water seep down my throat before I picked myself up, slowly, staggering to my feet, careful to make sure I hadn’t gotten turned around.
Yeah, this hadn’t been one of my brightest ideas.
I needed a few minutes to catch my breath, and out here in the open was no place to do that.
I searched around the inclines of snow on either side of the road before discovering a lone pine tree, decades old if it was a day, leaning over a little to the right under the weight of all the snow that had piled up on top of it.
That was probably as good as I was gonna get, so I hiked over to it, brushing off as much as the snow that I’d picked up while lying on the ground as best as I could, and shivering at the cold wetness that it left on me.
I settled down next to the tree, hoping it would grant me at least a little shelter from the oncoming deluge of snow, and hoping even more that the snow would let up for a bit so I could keep going.
Nope, not one of my best ideas.
Not. At. All.
CHAPTER 12 - ALEX
I woke up early that first morning in this village, the third I’d been to in the last two months. The family I was staying with was already up and about when I cracked my eyes open and rolled over in the already oppressive heat. Sleeping outside meant you’d have to be up before dawn or the sun would act as your alarm clock; it occurred to me that giving me a spot inside was a great honor normally reserved for the elderly and guests.
I got up and took a drink, trying not to waste any of it, before asking the head of the family what I could do to help. She smiled and shook her head, handing me a plate of food. I ate in silence, frustrated that I couldn’t refuse without insulting her but knowing that I was eating more than I was giving back.
Just then the middle daughter of the family announced that she was leaving, a large empty jug in her hands. Her mother nodded, and inwardly I was proud of myself for starting to understand their language after weeks of trying. The subtle differences in dialects between villages, even though they were speaking the same language, made things especially tough.
“Where’s she going?” I asked her mother, haltingly. It was still a chore to speak their language, but with each passing day I was starting to understand a little more of it.
She laughed and took my plate, giving me a look that I understood. I shook my head that I didn’t want more, and she replied, “To get more water.”
I jumped up. “Let me help,” I said, and before anyone could say anything I jogged out of the hut and caught up with the girl.
It was already blisteringly hot, and the heat rose up off the barely paved road in sizzling waves that reminded me of mirages in the desert. We walked silently side by side. I tried to practice speaking with her, but the girl didn’t want to speak with me for whatever reason, which I could respect.
I was so different, and I was here in their world. I was here to help, of course, but that didn’t mean I belonged. They didn’t need saving; they could use help.
It took us 4 hours of steady walking before we crested a hill and the smattering of huts surrounding the area’s prized piece of infrastructure, a roughly dug well. There was a line of people with buckets and jugs of their own on the ground next to them, and we got in line at the end.
The girl pulled some food out of her pocket and after looking down at it for a moment, broke half of it off and gave it to me. I smiled and nodded gratefully; I was starving and there wasn’t enough for her, let alone the both of us, but she gave me half of hers without thinking about it for a more than second or two.
For the thousandth time I was struck by the generosity of people who had nothing to give, giving all the same, because it was the right thing to do, whatever the consequences.
After it came our turn to fill up the jug, the girl hoisted it on her head and we started on the way back. I gestured to her and spoke in my slow phrasing that I wanted to help, and after a mile of my asking, she let me carry the heavy jug for a ways down the torturous road back to the village, just when the sun reached its peak for the day, raining down spears of heat on all below it.
I tried to carry the jug in front of me at first, but my arms got tired way before my spirit flagged, and the girl shook her head disapprovingly before lifting her arms above her head, motioning like the other women had done with their containers when they were filled.
I nodded, and with a little help, and a few tiny splashes hitting the floor, which caused me great pain now that I knew how difficult it was to actually move water around this place, I managed to get the jug onto my head and stable, after taking off my shirt and coiling around my head like a combination heat shield and flattener to stabilize the jug.
It took us an extra hour to get back to the village weighed down by the water jug, and when we were about 30 minutes out, the girl stopped and wouldn’t continue walking until I had given her the jug back, speaking rapidly in words that I kinda-sorta understood to mean, “It wouldn’t look good if we arrived and you were carrying it.” I accepted that reasoning and gave the jug back to her, and she balanced it expertly on her head and we were off.
When we got back and set the jug down, the girl gave me a tiny smile before her mother admonished her for standing around and not helping. Before I knew it, the girl was right back to doing more chores.
The day didn’t end till after the sun had gone down.
And then the next one was just like it.
This was the opposi
te of that. In Africa I couldn’t get cool enough as the sun beat me down from above, but here I couldn’t pull my jacket around me tight enough to keep the cold wind from finding every nook and cranny and making its presence known, like a game of tag with an opponent that knew your favorite hiding places and taunted you mercilessly each time they found you.
I was headed in the right direction, and just as importantly, I was making progress — the footprints in the snow I was following were getting deeper, which meant less time between Naomi making them and me finding them. That was a good thing.
I still couldn’t make any sense of this, though. What had possessed that girl to wander off out of the inn in the middle of a storm like this, that didn’t look like it was planning on getting any better any time soon?
I knew there was something important to her in the wreckage of the bus, Naomi had made that abundantly clear, but hadn’t all she’d seen on our way to the inn and since convinced her that now was not the right time to go off half-cocked on some sort of adventurous trek through the middle of a blizzard?
I shook my head as the bitter cold enveloped me. How could she do this? Did she not see how dangerous it was to be walking around here?
Even if she made the decision to go back to the bus for whatever the fuck she’d brought with her but couldn’t live without…wouldn’t it have been wise to reevaluate 5 or 10 minutes in and, you know, turn the fuck around and come back to the inn?
Hell, the bus had probably fallen off the cliff by now, and I smiled acidly as I thought of her standing there trying to see if she could climb down, get what whatever bauble she needed and bring it back.
I wouldn’t have been surprised if she’d tried it, not after pulling this kinda stunt.
Almost as soon as I let my anger out, I reigned it back in — this was no time for me to lose my cool. That prompted another laugh — seemed the cold managed to bring out my icy humor.
No, I just had to find Naomi and make sure she was safe - I could figure out what had possessed her to do this later, once we were back inside where it was warm and, you know, not subjected to the elements all around us.
