by Roxie Noir
“But you’re still going out with her,” I ask, the words tumbling from my mouth because I have to check.
“Technically,” he says, turning toward me, arm draped over the steering wheel.
Even through his jacket, I can see the bulge of his bicep. It’s nice. A nice bicep.
“But I don’t really like her,” he says, his voice lowering, eyes boring into mine.
I swallow.
“She’s all right,” he goes on, gaze flicking out the windshield. “Melissa’s pretty and she’s popular and she looks good in a cheerleading uniform, I guess. But she’s who I’m supposed to be seen with, you know?”
I nod, even though I don’t really know.
“Once a week I promise myself I’m going to break up with her,” he goes on, his eyes sparking. “And then, every single time, she bakes me cupcakes or some shit, and then I feel bad about dumping her, so I put it off.”
He doesn’t really like her, I tell myself. It’s like they’re not even really dating at all.
“She knows, though,” he says. “She’s gotta know. Maybe that’s why I keep getting the cupcakes.”
“Maybe,” I agree, my voice quiet.
“I don’t know what to do, Imogen,” he goes on, his voice deep and low. “Here I am, dating some girl I don’t even like, but I’m alone with the girl I can’t get enough of…”
I blush bright red, glance through the windshield. There’s a tiny voice in my head whispering you’re getting played, but Wilder Flint just said he can’t get enough of me and there’s a symphony singing in my body, nerves alive and jangling.
“If I kissed you again, you’d forgive me, right?” he asks, a half-grin on his face as his eyes move to my lips.
He doesn’t wait for an answer, but he takes my backpack from my hands and tosses it into the back seat.
“You shouldn’t,” I whisper.
His grin widens, and he reaches out, takes my cheek in his hand.
This is happening. THIS IS HAPPENING.
“I do plenty of things that I shouldn’t,” he says, and then he kisses me again.
It’s hard and warm and soft and delicious and before I know it I’m straining against my seatbelt, trying to get closer to him, the same pit of longing opened up inside me as before but deeper, hungrier.
This is all I’ve thought about for four days. I’ve been standing in the shower as my dad pounds on the door, shouting about water conservation, while thinking about this. I’ve laid awake at night in bed, staring up at the ceiling, thinking about this.
He turns his head, grabs my hair, pushes his tongue into my mouth. A tiny noise, a squeak, makes its way out of me and Wilder pulls back, laughing.
“I like that,” he murmurs.
“Me too,” I whisper.
It’s wrong. I know it’s wrong.
But we don’t stop.
Chapter Twenty-One
Wilder
Present Day
I wake up before Imogen again. The fire’s just coals, and in her sleep she’s gotten so close that I’m almost afraid she’ll catch on fire, nearly curled around it.
I let her sleep. We need to leave, need to get the rest of the way down this mountain and to the valley below because if we’re going to find people or civilization, that’s where it’s going to be, but I let her sleep.
Just ten more minutes.
I go through my pack, do a quick inventory. We’ve got enough food for two more days, three if we stretch it though we’re already stretching.
Supposedly it takes three weeks to die of hunger, but it takes way less time than that before you’re too weak to fight the cold any longer, too weak to walk through the snow, too weak to do anything but sit under a tree and wish you were dead instead of cold, tired, and hungry.
At least we found water, and down below in the valley there’s a small river, the wide blue spot of a lake not too far away. But beyond that? I’ve got no idea.
Before I wake her up I head out from between the two boulders and climb up one of them, trying to get a better view of what we’re dealing with. It’s beautiful out here, the mountains all snow-covered sharp angles dotted with deep green trees and the forbidding gray of granite, wild and savage and terrible and glorious.
I take a deep breath of pine air, let it out. A breeze rustles through everything, and though it finds the tiny cracks in the zipper on my parka, the space between my hat and my hood, it’s not so bad because at least today, the sun is shining.
It could be worse, I remind myself. Remember how it rained the whole time you did wilderness training?
Something flashes in the corner of my eye. Just once and it’s gone, but I’m sitting bolt upright now, afraid to even breathe in case I see it again.
It was just water, I tell myself. Ice or a waterfall or something, it caught the light the right way.
I look for it, breathless, stone-still except my eyes.
“Come on,” I whisper, scanning the valley below.
It seems like an eternity that I sit there, increasingly certain that I’ve made it up. Certain that I’m finally going snow-blind or just crazy, that I’m hypothermic and hallucinating. There are a million reasons I could have thought I saw something and only one of them is that I really did.
Finally, I give up, stand, turn so I can scramble back down the boulder and then there it is again, slower this time, like the sun’s licking a flat, shining surface and wants to make sure I see it.
I do. I see it. I stare, holding perfectly still, at the spot where the flash happened. It’s far away, miles away, but there’s something there. Water or ice doesn’t shine like this did.
This shines like glass.
There’s a rustle below, and Imogen comes out of the makeshift cave, hair wild, looking like hell, but beautiful hell.
“I gotta pee,” she says, glancing up at me. “Don’t watch.”
“Give me your glasses,” I say.
She looks at me like I’ve grown a second head.
“Ew, no.”
“Not so I can watch you pee. There’s something over there.”
“You don’t even need glasses,” she says.
“I know. I want to see better.”
She blinks, holding up one hand against the light.
“That’s not how glasses work,” she says, sounding tired and annoyed.
I jump down from the boulder, brush my hands off, walk up to her. She takes a step backward but I’m faster, lifting the glasses from her face and holding them out of her reach.
“Don’t!” she says, a note of panic in her voice.
“I’ll be careful.”
“You already fucked them up — dammit Wilder —”
“There’s something down there,” I tell her, and it sucks the fight right out of her.
“Where?” she asks, breathless.
I boost her up the boulder then climb up myself, point at the spot where I saw the flash. I look, then look through her glasses, then she looks through them.
“I can’t tell,” she says. “It might be something. It might be an empty vodka bottle left there by campers.”
“That’s something.”
“It’s not much.”
“Something doesn’t have to be much.”
She sits there, perfectly still, cross-legged with her hands dangling on her knees, head bare, wisps of hair dancing in the breeze where they’ve come loose from her bun. For the millionth time in my life I wish I knew what she was thinking, whether it’s about me or getting out of here or musk oxen or God only knows what.
“I don’t know,” she says, squinting and leaning forward as if an extra six inches will help. “It’s the wrong direction, we’d have to either go across that part of the lake or around it, and I don’t really like either option.”
“What options do you like, Imogen?” I ask, staring at the spot. The glimmer’s gone, but I’m fixated on where it was, an inlet from the lake, my eyes playing tricks on me because at this distance I
can’t tell trees from houses from cars from rocks and it could be anything.
But it could be something.
“Maybe we should just walk out the way we’ve been planning,” she says. “Stay on this side of the lake, we don’t have to go around or over anything, and we’ll reach the mouth of the valley sooner and that’s more likely to have people. Why would there be something there to begin with?”
We’ve come down from the mountains on one side the valley, near the spot where the valley dead-ends into a craggy wall. Down below is a frosted-over lake that turns into a river as the mountains narrow the valley toward a mouth that we can’t see past.
The thing is across the lake from us, closer to the dead end than the valley’s mouth. We’d be backtracking, but not much, and what if it’s a house, or a cabin, or even just a broken down truck? Almost anything would help us.
“And if we’re wrong and it’s nothing?” she asks. “We don’t have forever to keep going, Wilder.”
She rubs her bad ankle with one hand, massaging it, though I don’t think she realizes she’s doing it.
“And if it’s a house?” I say softly. “Even someone’s summer cabin is gonna have food, a fireplace, somewhere we can hide out for a couple of days and recuperate before we get out of here for good.”
Imogen looks down at it. There’s purple spots under her eyes, and I know she’s every bit as hungry and tired as I am, but in even more pain from two straight days of hiking on a sprained ankle. She never complains, not to me, but I have to wait for her to catch up a lot. Sometimes I look back at her and she’s just standing there, face pale, like she’s trying to summon the will to go on.
“Let’s just go down,” I say. “We can decide later.”
I re-wrap her ankle before we leave, and she doesn’t argue with me at all this time, just lets me do it.
Ten Years Earlier
Friday night, downtown Solaris. It’s only about seven blocks long, seven blocks of tourist ski shops and cute little bookstores, coffee places and bars and restaurants that cater to the kind of people who can afford some of the best skiing in North America.
It’s also the only place to hang out, and it’s where everyone goes for date night. Whatever the single movie theater is playing we all go, then head to the diner nearby for burgers and milkshakes, like some dream left over from 1955, only it’s real.
I take Melissa to see some rom-com about a girl who bets her friends that she can make a guy dump her and a guy who bets his friends that he can date a girl for longer than two days, or something. It’s kind of dumb but Melissa loves it, holding my hand the whole time, eating about three kernels of the popcorn I bought her.
On my other side, Trevor is sucking face with Allie, his newest girlfriend. I swear to God it sounds like someone trying to unclog a drain, it’s so loud, but everyone ignores them and pretends to be watching this terrible movie as we really all watch each other.
I drape one arm around Melissa and she leans her head against my shoulder. I’ve never kissed her like I’m trying to unclog a drain. I’ve never even wanted to. I’ve never even touched a breast, though I tried once and she told me she wasn’t that kind of girl.
It’s been two months since the conference room, two months since I told Imogen that I wanted her and not Melissa. Two months of getting my cake and eating it too, of showing up places with a cheerleader on my arm for show and hooking up with the weird nerd girl behind her back.
Saturday, I tell my mom I’m going over to Jake’s house to play video games. I think she hears me, but she’s on the phone and her computer at the same time, sharp voice going on about branding or something as she waves me out the door.
I don’t go to Jake’s house. I go to the library, where Imogen’s standing outside, and then we go to heavy equipment storage where Wayne waves me on.
“What’s the surprise?” Imogen asks.
She’s deeply wrapped up in a million layers, the hood of her coat lined with fake fur even though I’ve got the heat blasting in my car.
“If I told you, it wouldn’t be a surprise, would it?”
She rolls her eyes as I pull up to the snowmobile aisle of the equipment shed and just leave my Jeep parked there. No one else will know. Our feet crunch across the frozen grass, and I head to the middle of the aisle, pull out the one that I’ve prepped, push it to the edge of the shed.
“Ready?” I ask, sitting on it and patting the seat behind me.
Imogen looks skeptical.
“Do you have helmets?” she asks.
I roll my eyes, but I toss her one. She makes me put on the other one, and then we’re off.
It’s so much better than the movies, than having Melissa’s limp hand in mine. Imogen holds onto me tight, warm even through all my layers, her arms and legs tightening whenever we go around a steep curve, speed up, go downhill.
I swear to God I can feel her hips moving against mine from behind me, grinding, rolling, and I’m hard as hell just thinking about it. She does things to me that I don’t understand, makes me want things I didn’t know I’d ever want.
Up above, a single light flashes across the sky. It’s the wrong shape and color for a light, curving and sinewy, winding through the sky like a snake and then it’s gone.
Imogen squeezes me harder, and I know she saw it.
Good. I give the engine a little more gas.
By the time we get to the spot, a bare outcropping of rock surrounded by almost nothing but sky, the northern lights are in full force. Imogen leaps off the snowmobile, tears off her helmet, and stands there looking up, spellbound.
“This is incredible,” she says, her voice hushed. “They’re almost never visible this far south, the atmospheric conditions are almost never right and they’re so hard to predict…”
She keeps staring. I grab the stuff I prepared, start spreading it on the ground.
“Did you know?” she asks.
Imogen sounds like she’s looking at something holy, and maybe she is. A prickle of annoyance worms through my brain at the suggestion that I didn’t know, that maybe I just took her here tonight of all nights by accident.
“Of course I knew,” I say, walking up to her, my hand on her waist. “Why do you think I brought you here?”
She puts her hand over mine, both of us wearing thick gloves because it’s January in northern Idaho and ten degrees below zero. It’s not so bad as long as you dress for it, I swear.
“How’d you find out?” she breathes. “I was reading some weather blogs this week, and they said that it might be happening soon but none of them were sure. There’s been a lot of debate because of the temperature inversions that’ve been happening, you know.”
“Mhm,” I say, pulling her closer, layers and layers and fleece and down still separating us. “I just asked Charlie. He says he’s got a trick knee that hurts when it’s gonna rain and an eye twitch that shows up just before the northern lights.”
She’s still looking up in awe, the writhing glow reflected in her glasses.
“There’s a theory that they’ve got something to do with the earth’s magnetic field,” she muses. “Maybe Charlie is particularly attuned to that and so he can tell when it’s going to happen.”
“I think it might be a joke,” I tease her, planting a kiss on the side of her head. “He was telling me he saw them a little last night, so I figured I had nothing to lose by bringing you here tonight. Worst case scenario, we’re still in the middle of nowhere alone together.”
I run my hand up her back until my thumb is on her neck, and I slide it over the knot of bone there as Imogen looks down at the spot I’ve laid out for us: two tarps, a couple of thick, old blankets, two sleeping bags zipped together, covered by another few blankets.
I did forget pillows.
“Oh,” she says, a little breathless.
“It’ll be a better view, Squeaks,” I say, right into her ear, both my arms wrapped around her now. I’m already hard and she can probably tell
despite the winter gear. “Wouldn’t want you straining your neck.”
“Is that why I should get into the sleeping bags with you?” she teases.
Even in the dark, I can tell she’s blushing.
“Solely out of concern,” I tell her. “If you don’t, your neck could get stuck that way, you know, and imagine the difficulty.”
She takes one of my hands in hers, pulls me over. Stands next to my setup, tilts her face up, and kisses me, rough and needy and fast, her hands already tugging at my coat. Every single time she kisses me like I’ve never been kissed before.
Every time feels new, wild, untamed, like I’m finding something I’ve never had before.
We take off coats, jackets, vests, get into the sleeping bags. By now we’re ignoring the light show above as we keep shoving aside layers until we’re making out skin to skin, our breath frosting into the air as our bodies are overheating.
“Did you get them?” Imogen murmurs.
I bite her neck, close my lips over it, suck so softly that I won’t leave a mark.
“I thought you’d never ask,” I growl, and reach for my pants.
Imogen’s eyes follow the condom I pull from my pocket, her legs wrapped around my hips, and she takes it from me.
She unwraps it carefully, examines it for holes, bites her lip, clinical and careful as always, but she wouldn’t be Imogen otherwise. I kiss her neck as she reaches down between us, rolls it on.
“Okay,” she whispers, one hand on my hip.
In the years after that night I fuck plenty of other women, but no matter who or how many, I still think about the night I spent with Imogen under the northern lights.
Chapter Twenty-Two
Imogen
Present Day
Reason #114 Wilder Flint is terrible: he’s stubborn and impossible to talk out of something once he’s got an idea in his head.
Reason #115: he walks too fast.
