Glacier Gold

by Crystel Greene

  When he’s finally lying on the bunk bed, naked but for my neck warmer around his foot, I hastily grab for the sleeping bag and pull it up around him. He’s trying to help, awkwardly scrambling into the bag, hampered by his splinted foot.

  At long last he’s safely inside the silver wrap, with the hood covering his head.

  All that’s still visible of him is his face.

  I’m so relieved I feel like we’ve resolved all our problems.

  Until he mumbles, “What about you?”

  It’s only then I feel the heaviness of my own soaked clothes. I shrug out of my jacket and trousers. It doesn’t do much good; now I’m standing in the cold in just my drenched underwear. It feels like it’s already starting to freeze to my skin.

  “I’m fine,” I say, putting the jacket and trousers back on. “Listen. I’m sorry I went down that slope when you’d told me not to….”

  He utters something that almost sounds like a snort.

  “I could have known, I guess,” he says. “I shouldn’t have pushed you like I did all day. It wasn’t smart to do that, with you being, well.”

  “Being what?”

  “Being set on winning at stuff at all costs?”

  It makes me sound like a five-year-old.

  “Sorry,” I mutter.

  “Hey, do me a favor, Bennet. Stop apologizing all the time,” he says. He’s still having trouble forming words.

  “Sorry I made you do this in the first place,” I say miserably. He has just told me to stop wallowing in my wretchedness, but I simply can’t. “I know your father made you go with me,” I go on. “I had no business putting you in that position. I had no right to put you at risk. With the storm coming in and everything.”

  “My father didn’t make me do this,” he says. I look at him, not following.

  He seems to be attempting a shrug.

  “We discussed it this morning when we were checking the forecast. He was a bit concerned, actually, but since I was the guide, he accepted it was up to me whether I’d go through with this trip.” Something like an apologetic smirk ghosts across his pallid face. “There didn’t seem to be a risk at the time, so I decided to do it.”

  I’m confused. He chose to go on this trip with me, then?

  I don’t have time to think about it.

  Fuck, he’s still trembling with cold, even though he’s inside the bag.

  “You aren’t getting warmer, are you? Is there anything else I can do?” I ask. He looks up at me, and in spite of everything, I’m struck yet again by the beauty of his surreal eyes.

  He can freeze someone with that husky gaze, but he can also make them forget they’ve ever felt cold in their life.

  There’s a small, laden pause I cannot read. Then he says, “Could you maybe make me a hot tea?”

  But you already are a hottie.

  It’s Jay’s fault I’m thinking such nonsense.

  Andi is asking me to make him tea.

  This is my chance to prepare a drink for him, same as he did for me so often all through the last week.

  “Sure, I can make you a tea,” I say brightly, then realize I have no clue how to do it. There’s no electric kettle in sight, no immersion heater. There’s just the iron oven in the corner. It looks plain forbidding, and it’s not attached to anything like a power outlet.

  Andi’s gaze has followed mine.

  “I’ll tell you how to do it, okay?”

  Feeling like a complete idiot, I nod.

  And once again I find myself following his instructions.

  Open the chute of the oven. Rip up newspaper, crunch it up, put it in the oven. Get an armful of logs from the basket of firewood. Get a handful of kindling. Make a little stack over the paper balls in the oven, like for a bonfire. Find the little green cubes in the bag saying Anzündwürfel in the cupboard. Put two of those in the middle of the kindling in the oven. Find the matchbox. Light a match.

  Turns out I can’t light a match. They all break between my ice-cold fingers. In the end there are only three matches left in the box.

  Why am I such a frigging loser? Why can’t I even light a match to make tea? I have to turn away from Andi so he won’t see my face.

  “Try again. Quick, with feeling,” he says behind me.

  And it works. Aiming a quick grin at him over my shoulder, I reach into the oven with the burning match and light the Anzündwürfel.

  THE FIRE is burning. I got that prehistoric monster of an oven to work. Now to the actual tea. Get a pot from the cupboard. Take it outside and fill it with snow to make water.

  Simple enough.

  Outside, the hail has changed to thick sheets of snow. I bend down to scoop up a few handfuls of the stuff, hating it with a fervor that should melt it without the need of a fire.

  When I’m back inside the cabin and have shaken the snow from my hair and clothes, Andi says, “Now put the pot on the oven. Wait till the water boils, then get a tea bag from the box on the shelf and put it in the water.”

  I would have known how to do that last bit without his help. When I finally offer him the mug of tea that took me so long to prepare, I feel more like a fool than ever.

  “Thanks,” he says.

  He empties the mug in no time. While I give him a refill, I surreptitiously check his complexion, trying to gauge whether his circulation is improving. He’s still pale, but his lips seem to look a little less blue.

  “Thanks,” he says again. “You did a good job with the oven. That thing is a bitch.”

  It’s the first nice thing he has said to me all day. Or basically ever, apart from those moments of madness when he told me I was hot. He said I did a good job because I got the bitchy oven to boil water. It’s not much by way of a compliment, but I still have to bite down a grin, it makes me so happy. Hell, I did help him get better with making that tea. His speech sounds almost back to normal.

  “You did pretty great with finding the hut too,” he says, then breaks off, blushing. He’s probably thinking of how I carried him.

  Making it through that storm with him unconscious was one of the toughest things I’ve ever had to do. But I feel as if I’d like to go through everything all over again, just for the chance to listen to him praise me some more. I feel like I just grew an inch or two. His gaze has slipped past me again. His eyes have crinkled up at the corners.

  “And thanks for the splinting. My foot hardly hurts anymore.”

  I want to tell him how wonderful that is, but I sneeze instead.

  By now it has gone completely dark outside, and with night falling, it seems the temperature has dropped another ten or twenty degrees. The oven seems to be pretty much useless as a heater.

  Furrowing his brow, Andi holds the mug out to me.

  “Here, have some tea too,” he says. I take a sip. It tastes like cat piss. Or like I imagine cat piss would taste.

  If only we had something to eat too. I think of the Saturday Night Gala Dinner that was announced in the Fankhauser News this morning and that’s being served in the restaurant probably just now. Schweinsbraten, Bratkartoffeln, Knödel…. Carl read it all out to Jay and me over breakfast. I had scrambled eggs with Speck. I’m so hungry, the memory makes my eyes water. If only we still had our sandwiches! They are safely in our backpacks, mine sitting on the ledge in the crevasse, Andi’s where we left it behind, probably buried five feet deep in snow by now.

  I pour some more tea into the mug and return it to Andi. When I sit down at the table to think of food some more, I feel something hard dig into my buttcheek.

  Carl’s Landjägers. I dig the sausages from my back pocket and peel the tinfoil off them. There are six of them. They are soggy and rather flat because I sat on them. It’s still like finding a handful of gold nuggets in an unexpected place. Better.

  We share the sausages between us. They aren’t much, but they do calm my grumbling stomach. I only wish the things weren’t half-frozen. I’m covered in goose bumps, and eating iced Landjägers isn’t
helping with that. The tea hasn’t done much to warm me up either.

  I once read about that special technique against being cold. It seems you’re supposed to be able to up your body temperature by creating mental images of things related to fire. The Fitscher Saturday Night Fireworks. I’m going to think of the Fitscher Saturday Night Fireworks. I’ve read about those in the Fankhauser News this morning too. It said they light up the snowy mountains in an explosion of colors, showcasing each of the five summits in its own shade of Bengal light. It sounded like something exactly up my alley. Trying to conjure the image of burning-hot Bengal lights, I console myself with the thought that, with the snowstorm raging, the fireworks surely got cancelled, so everyone is missing out.

  Fuck, the cold is seriously creeping up on me. My teeth have even started to chatter. I never knew they could do that.

  Andi is watching me from under the hood of the sleeping bag, his eyes like two snippets of sky in the dark. For some reason, he has started chewing on his lip again.

  I start walking about in the tiny space between the beds and the table, rubbing at my arms.

  “Okay, you’ve got to get in here with me, Bennet,” Andi suddenly says, his voice shockingly clear, startling me. My brain seems to have slowed down somehow. It takes a few seconds for the meaning of his words to sink in. But then—

  “No! No, no.” I vigorously shake my head. “No. No, definitely not, I won’t—”

  “You don’t want to be dead by morning, do you?” he interrupts in that same clear voice. “Justin.”

  It’s the most disconcerting thing to hear him call me by my given name.

  Briefly, I think of how I heard him scream for me after I had fallen into the crevasse. Something shifted between us in that moment, I only realize that now. I don’t know what it is, but it scares me.

  “I’m fine,” I say. “I won’t—”

  “I won’t have a paying customer die on a trip.”

  He’s cracking a joke. Or maybe it isn’t even a joke.

  I utter a laugh that has an edge of hysteria to it and ends in another sneeze.

  “Seriously, man. The thing is, I’m not really getting warm in here on my own.”

  “Oh,” I say. Fuck, of course. I’m so dumb. Everyone has heard of how people suffering from hypothermia can be warmed up by another person’s body heat. He must think me such a dimwit, refusing to help like I did just now. This is about his health, obviously, nothing else.

  “Didn’t think of that. Sorry. Sorry.”

  Blanking out the awkwardness, I shimmy out of my hoodie without further ado, then yank off my snowboard pants. My phone slips out of the back pocket. I forgot to close the zipper after I made the call to Carl. The phone clatters to the floor. The screen lights up, and there’s Andi at his keyboard.

  My wallpaper.

  It looks like a painting now, totally different from the original photo. It’s mostly shapes of blue and gold. I didn’t go for likeness; I wanted to bring out what I saw in him. The cool and the warmth.

  But his exquisite profile is unmistakable.

  Quickly, without looking at him, I fumble for the phone and put it on the nightstand next to the bed, facedown.

  Then, my back toward the bunk bed, I strip down completely.

  Andi has turned onto his side, facing away from me to give me space, I guess, and to make room for me. Setting my jaw, I start crawling into the bag behind him.

  He feels like an icicle. Shit, he was right. He needed me in here much sooner. I shiver just from the feel of the cold skin of his back against my legs as I ease them down the bag behind him.

  With a jolt of fear, I realize I haven’t yet saved his life. I’ve got to warm him up as fast as possible. Quickly I wriggle myself deeper into the bag until I’m fully inside, my front pressed flush against his back.

  This is spooning. I would lie on my back so he’d just have to deal with the side of my body, but I have to focus on making sure he survives.

  Trying to quash my worries about how much this must stress him out, I press up against him, focusing on willing what body heat I have left in my system to seep into his.

  If only I knew where to put my hands. Eventually I cautiously rest one on his shoulder and the other on his clammy thigh, hoping my palms will work as heating pads.

  Andi seems to have stopped breathing.

  I try to do the same. Lying there, feeling every inch of the body of the man I’ve lusted after for a whole week, all I want is to not freak him out.

  I keep as still as if he were a bomb that might blow up at the slightest jolt. The whole situation is so stressful that my groin is, like, switched off. The temperature is helping with that too. Instead of me warming him up, the polar cold he seems to have stored in his body is invading mine.

  Minutes tick by. Suddenly the flashlight on the table starts flickering. A few seconds later, it gives out, leaving us in complete darkness.

  Now that I can’t see anything at all, I can hear Andi’s breathing.

  It seems to me his body is a little bit warmer. From a medical point of view, it would probably be a good idea to rub his arms and legs or something. But I don’t dare move as much as a finger.

  The back of Andi’s head is right in front of my face. As my eyes adjust to the darkness, I can make out a few strands of black hair curling above his ear.

  It’s just a tiny detail of him, and it makes me ache with helpless tenderness.

  And with shame.

  I’ve got a lot of time to think about the last week. A lot of time to feel bad about myself. I tried to get a guy to have a one-night stand with me when he had told me it wasn’t for him. Just to gratify my crazy craving for him.

  At least this whole bag-sharing thing seems to be working. He’s definitely warmer now.

  His scent is coming back, crawling into my nose. It’s sharper than usual with all the dampness and sweat, and it travels straight to my cock.

  Fuck no. Focusing what mental powers I’ve got left, I concentrate on making the stirring go away, trying to breathe through my mouth.

  It doesn’t work.

  Cursing in my head, I mumble an apology. Predictably, I get no answer.

  Shit.

  No way can I go on prodding my throbbing dick into his buttcheeks like I am. This has to stop, for his sake as much as my own. If we stay like this for even another minute, I’m going to implode and die from the strain of trying to keep my body in check. Or worse, come all over his backside.

  With another muddled apology, I start to shift and wriggle inside the bag until I’ve kicked him in all the possible places and said sorry like a million times. Shit, this is definitely the trickiest 180 I’ve ever performed. But at long last, I’ve done it. I’ve turned fully around, facing safely away from him.

  It’s much less warm and cozy like this, and that’s a good thing too. This is the only way to do this. Hugging myself to stop the fresh breakout of goose bumps on my chest and stomach, I try to focus my mind on Bengal lights again. With less success than ever.

  His asscheeks feel way too good, muscled and silky and pressed flush against mine as they are. But the material point is, my dick is out of harm’s way. It’s still painfully hard, twitching against the lining of the bag like it’s searching for the ass it got to poke earlier and liked so much.

  Andi’s body is giving off such heat now that I start worrying. Do people get a fever from a sprained ankle? Or from a broken bone? Or is this already something like pneumonia setting in?

  If only I weren’t this total dumbass. If only I knew some shit!

  He’s breathing too hard. That can’t be normal. His whole body is heaving with it.

  I turn my head.

  “You okay? Your foot hurting again?” I ask in a low voice, anxious not to startle him. His ear is just an inch from my mouth.

  He doesn’t answer.

  I start to get seriously worried now.

  “Andi?”

  It’s a shock like nothing
I’ve experienced in my life when suddenly he rears and turns around inside the bag in one violent motion, nearly pushing the both of us off the bed.

  Then his hands are all over me, on my stomach, my chest, my thighs, and he presses his body down on me as if he meant to crush my every bone.

  Digging his fingers into my skin, he pushes me facedown onto the mattress and is gasping into my hair. The next moment he pulls back, grabs me by a hip and a shoulder, and forces me to turn over. At two hundred pounds, I’m not exactly easy to haul about, especially when I’m stuck inside a super tight sleeping bag. But he’s strong, and I’m too confused and overwhelmed to resist him.

  Finally we are face-to-face. I get a glimpse of his eyes glinting in the darkness.

  I haven’t even begun to wrap my brain around what’s happening when his lips come crashing down on mine, full of wild, greedy intent.

  The kiss lasts for a second or ten. I can’t tell.

  However long, it has solved my problem with the cold conclusively, with no mental effort required at all. My blood is thrumming through my veins, hot like mulled wine.

  Eventually he pulls away from me to draw breath, keeping me pressed against him with his hands on my ass, fingers clawing into my flesh, bruising me. Our erect dicks are squashed together between our stomachs.

  My head might have trouble catching up with what’s going on, but not my dick. Oh no, on the contrary.

  Andi is reaching a hand down between us, and at the first moment of feeling his fingers on me, I come, right into his palm.

  I want to stop myself, because if there’s one thing I still know, it’s that I’m supposed to show more control than this.

  I don’t stand a chance. I’m moaning like a bad actor in a porn movie, much too loudly, but I only hear Andi’s excited, breathless gasping. There’s a chuckle mixed into it.

  It seems he likes my overpowering reaction to his touch, to the point of being amused by it. It’s humiliating and weirdly exhilarating, and I want to go on shooting into his fist, held captive in his arms and exposed to the core, forever.