Snowbound with a Stranger

by Rebecca Rogers Maher

  “We’ll make our own clothes.”

  “Clothes?” Dannie shimmied closer and pressed her body against Lee’s. “Who needs clothes?”

  She kissed him, and a sweet hot liquid seemed to pour down his belly and into his legs. He pulled her close and held her tightly against himself, and kissed her back.

  It was a fantasy. He knew that. They were playing house here, like two children, pretending they had something it took normal people years to build. It was painfully unlikely their connection could survive the outside world.

  But he kissed her back anyway. He took off her clothes and joined his body to hers. He wiped her tears away and kissed her, and entered her, and gave her everything he could give.

  Chapter Nine

  Dannie’s eyes opened the next morning to a thought so obvious she couldn’t believe it hadn’t yet occurred to her. Gently, she disentangled herself from Lee’s heavy limbs and ventured out to the kitchen.

  Lee’s backpack lay propped against the doorjamb. Dannie was still too scared to go near the door—she wasn’t ashamed to admit it—but she found enough courage to creep up to the pack and drag it across the floor to the center of the room.

  Mama bear had not come back in the night, thank God. Lee said they were more active after dark, that it had been strange to see her so early in the day. Dannie had been afraid to go to sleep and find herself awakened by the scratch of bear claws against the hardwood floor, but by the time night fell, she was so exhausted an injection of speed couldn’t have kept her awake.

  If there was a corner of this cabin that hadn’t seen some action in the last forty-eight hours, Dannie didn’t know where it was. They’d made love like the world was ending and sometimes, wrapped in the heat of Lee’s body, she’d felt as though it were. The world she had known anyway.

  She was sore all over, and smelled like Lee, and she’d never felt better in her whole damn life.

  The backpack was covered in bulging zippers and pouches and weighed at least a hundred pounds. It was the sort of pack a soldier or survivalist would carry: broken-in, worn-down and full of just about anything a person would need in an emergency. She couldn’t have said why, but it was pretty much the sexiest physical object she’d ever seen.

  Dannie began rummaging through it, trying to ignore any personal items she found there. Mostly it was gear—matches, ponchos, bungee cord, water bottle—except for a faded photo of a smiling family and a beaten-up journal with a waterproof pen attached. She would have liked nothing better than to sit by the window and examine that photo, to read every word of Lee’s private thoughts. But she restrained herself. One day, perhaps, he would share them with her, and if not, the information contained there wasn’t hers to know.

  She found what she was looking for stashed in a side pocket. Although it was what she was after, the grimy orange rubber made her heart sink. A part of her had hoped that it was lost.

  The walkie-talkie.

  With the batteries taken out.

  * * *

  Lee lay asleep on the bed, an arm stretched over his face to block out the morning sunlight. She set two coffees on the table beside him and pressed her hand to his hip.

  “Lee.”

  He groaned.

  She gave his hip a little shake. “Lee.”

  His hand snaked around her wrist, and before she could react, dragged her down beside him. He threw a leg over her thigh and pulled her against his chest. “Mmph.”

  “Dude. Wake up.” She tried to infuse her voice with authority, but it was difficult to do so with her mouth full of chest hair. One of them needed to be practical, though. One of them had to broach the subject of leaving.

  If it wasn’t her, eventually it would be Lee.

  “No. You come back to sleep.”

  Dannie sat up. “Lee. I found the walkie-talkie.”

  His eyes opened. “Yeah?”

  “Yeah.”

  He rubbed a hand over his face and squinted up at her. “I took the batteries out.”

  “I noticed.”

  “There’s a radio in the pack too. Did you find that?”

  “A what?” Dannie climbed off the bed and stared at him, her hands on her hips. “Are you kidding me?”

  He hoisted himself up and blearily reached for a cup of coffee. “’Fraid not.”

  “Lee.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Were you going to tell me?”

  A grunt of approval emerged from the side of his cup. “Good coffee.”

  “Um. Thanks?” Dannie’s foot tapped against the wood planks of the floor. “Were you?”

  “Eventually.” Lee rubbed his eyes. “I’m almost sure of it.”

  He sipped the coffee she’d made for him—strong, as she knew he liked it, as she liked it—and despite his scratchy beard and bare shoulders and his almost unbearably sexy chest, she made a valiant effort to be angry. She really did. Honest to God.

  It was just that, despite his cowboy looks and his sleepy attempt at playful banter, he looked vulnerable to her this morning. Like something was troubling him that he was determined to push aside.

  She sat down beside him. “You okay?”

  “Sure.” He stared into his cup. “Why wouldn’t I be?”

  “I don’t know. You tell me.”

  Lee was silent. Something crossed his face that Dannie couldn’t quite name.

  “You should have told me about the walkie-talkie.”

  “You never asked.” He swallowed the last of his coffee and with a clatter, set the mug on the table beside the bed.

  “They’ve probably cleared the roads by now.”

  “Probably.” She didn’t know why Lee refused to look at her, but she barreled on.

  “Dr. Stevens might even be on his way already.”

  “He might.”

  “We could listen to the radio, check the state of the highway, head on down to our cars. It would take a while in the snow, but—”

  “How about we just stay?” He leaned back against the pillows and gave her a pained look that totally confused her.

  “Lee. What’s going on?”

  His smile slipped. “Nothing. Nothing’s going on.”

  “We can’t stay.” She faltered. “This has to…to…end sometime. We can’t—”

  Lee laid his hand over hers. “We’ll radio Stevens and tell him we’re spending a few more days. It’ll be…it’ll be great.”

  “I have to work, Lee.”

  “You must have some vacation days coming.”

  “Yeah, but—”

  The gravity in his gaze should have been a warning to her, but her head was swimming with the details of their departure. Details were distracting. They required thinking instead of feeling and therefore, at this moment, they were where she wanted to be.

  They had been there two full days. The snow had stopped.

  It had to come to an end. All she wanted was to be prepared. To not be caught off guard. To not look up from bed the next morning and find Lee standing there in his parka, pointing to the door.

  At least, if it had to happen, she could be the one making it happen. It didn’t have to be another thing that happened to her.

  “We have to head back. I’m sure the roads are fine by now. We have to—”

  “Dannie.”

  Outside a lone bird called across the echoing snow, its dark shape casting a moving shadow over the window.

  Lee’s gaze followed the bird’s path. His mouth opened as if to speak.

  Dannie waited, her mind still scrolling through the mechanics of leaving. If she could focus on that—on the process, on the lists, on the radio—she could make it through their parting like a rational person and move on with her life. As Lee would surely do. As he surely would want her to do.

  She looked up into his face just as he spoke.

  “I was married once too.”

  For a moment, it refused to register. “What?”

  Lee was very still. “Married. Like you.”r />
  Dannie stared into his eyes. They were green and clear and unblinking. “Married.”

  “Yes.”

  “When?”

  “I was young. Her name was Caroline.”

  A long silence stretched between them. Sunlight played gently across Lee’s face.

  Was.

  The echo of that one word struck Dannie like a freight train. Lee’s hand slipped into hers.

  “She died. Of cancer.”

  Dannie struggled to absorb what Lee had said. To make the shift with him, from leaving to…this. This thing that explained the look on his face when she’d awakened him. While she had been scheming and planning and fighting against feeling anything, he had been here, alone in the bed, with this.

  More than anyone should, Dannie understood exactly what cancer meant. Not the commercialized, cancer-hero media story, but the real, prolonged, exhausting battle. The hope and the terror. The long road from diagnosis to whichever outcome fate handed you: recovery or death.

  “Oh, God.” His wife. She gripped his hand.

  Dannie knew what it meant to be left behind by cancer. It meant the sort of pain that never went away, that lodged in a person’s gut and put down roots there, that shaped and affected every future action or decision. It was the sort of pain that became part of you.

  She wanted to get up and run. To open the door to the cabin and run as far the hell away as she could get before she froze to death. But she held Lee’s gaze and did not look away. “Cancer,” she said.

  “It was nine years ago.”

  Dannie nodded.

  “I wasn’t always a social worker. I was a cop before.”

  Something flickered across his eyes, like the reflection of a movie screen.

  Dannie couldn’t see what he saw, but she could feel it. “A cop.” She grimaced. A cop. In New York City.

  “It was a few months after September 11th. All those people trying to get out of downtown, Dannie, and failing. And all the guys I knew from the neighborhood who went after them, and never came back.” He paused. “And then she got sick.”

  Dannie moved closer to him on the bed.

  “And it was so fucking quick. In her brain. She was gone so fast I had no time to prepare. We kept thinking she’d fight it.”

  It had taken only a few moments for the room they were in to tilt off balance. From her experience at the hospital, Dannie knew that it worked this way: grief struck out at you out of nowhere. It blindsided you. You could never prepare.

  Typically she would have shifted already into her professional persona: Florence Nightingale, ever-ready with compassionate care, feeling nothing for herself but faking it so well no one could possibly tell.

  But this was Lee beside her. It was Lee whose sorrow was so palpable it was a presence in the room. He slumped against the pillows, pale morning sun lighting his green eyes, his face. The force of her feeling for him caught Dannie completely off guard. She wanted to take it away, the pain that radiated off him. She wanted to bring Caroline back. And at the same time, the thought of Lee’s love for his wife devastated her.

  “She was just so tough.” Lee gripped Dannie’s hand in his. “It never occurred to me that she could die. But she did. She died in my arms in a godforsaken hospital bed. And there was no one. No one who could touch what I felt.”

  Dannie had seen men cry before. Many times in the course of her work. Her brothers sometimes wept in anger or frustration, right after they punched a hole in something.

  But this.

  This was a grief she had never seen or felt. Because it was Lee feeling it.

  That he had gone through this alone made her want to set fire to the whole world. She had no idea what to do with her own chaos of feelings.

  She stayed where she was.

  “Your family? They weren’t there to help you?”

  Lee sighed raggedly. “They tried. I wouldn’t let them.”

  “That was stupid.” Dannie rolled her eyes.

  He snorted and gave her a hint of a smile. “Yeah.”

  “You took care of her on your own, then.”

  “If you can call it that.” He shoved a tear out of the way with the heel of his hand. “I didn’t know what I was doing then. Typical macho cop. I stumbled over everything. I wouldn’t let her acknowledge the possibility of dying. As if by blowing sunshine up her ass I’d make it all go away. Even when she knew it was coming, I was the one who couldn’t handle it. I made her go through all of that fear alone.”

  “Lee.” She pressed her palm against his bare chest. “No one knows how to deal with a thing like that.”

  He covered her hand with his. “I would now. Now I would know what to do.”

  “That’s why you stopped being a cop? That’s why you became a social worker? To make up for what you think you did wrong?”

  Lee’s eyes could have broken the heart of a stone. “At least I can help other people figure it out. Before it’s too late.”

  “Honey. For God’s sake. Didn’t Caroline love you?”

  Lee’s breath hitched. “I think so.”

  “Well hell. I know so. There’s no way she couldn’t have.” For a moment, Dannie looked away. She swallowed hard and made herself meet his eyes again. “And if she loved you, she must have known who you were, and what you were feeling. And she must have understood.”

  Lee closed his eyes. “I don’t know.”

  Dannie had counseled people through moments like this more often than she could count. Each time, she separated herself from the situation and offered what she knew to be the right words of comfort and advice. She knew it from years of practice and study, and although in recent memory the feeling behind it was missing, she knew how to do her job and do it well. She listened and gave solace and helped people.

  But this.

  This was Lee. The compassion she felt was different. It was personal. Intimate. It snaked into her heart and twisted, and rooted her here, to this cabin, this room, this bed. To this man.

  In their worst fights, her ex-husband had called her irreparably cold. And half of her had believed him. That she was permanently, fundamentally broken.

  Well, so was he. So, maybe, was everybody. Stunned into paralysis by their losses. Death, divorce, their own particular suffering: whatever it was that kept them stuck in place, that kept them teetering on the brink of their own lives, too afraid to jump in.

  She had stood on the edge of a diving board all her life. Not willing to leap. Not knowing if she would swim or sink or crash against the concrete bottom of an empty pool and self-destruct. She had stood there, like an idiot, frozen.

  Lee thought he had failed his wife? Fuck that. She wasn’t going to sit here and hand him platitudes and let him drown in that ridiculous guilt.

  She got into bed with him and took him in her arms.

  “Dannie.”

  “You listen to me, Lee. This shit ends today.” Lee turned his face in to her shoulder, and she started to cry but kept on. “Caroline was lucky to have you.”

  His whole face began to collapse. Dannie absorbed it all—all the force and power of both of their guilt, their grief, their fear—she absorbed it and gathered him tightly against her.

  “No more of this. Enough.”

  Chapter Ten

  Dannie couldn’t remember the last time she had gone back to bed in the morning. She chose the early shift when she could get it and, even on her days off, rose early for the gym or a walk or chores around the neighborhood.

  But after telling her about Caroline—about their life together, about the dreams they’d shared that never came to pass, about her death—Lee had fallen asleep. In her arms he seemed to relax like a man who hadn’t slept in months, perhaps years. Dannie held him against her until his quiet breathing lulled her, too, into sleep.

  She dreamed of the bear.

  It led her out across the snow, through a thick stand of trees and deeper into the woods. In her unconscious state, Dannie was not afraid. She fo
llowed, curious where the animal would take her. As they entered a clearing, ice and snow began melting in hyperspeed around them, fast enough to make a moving stream that lifted her off her feet and carried her across the expanding plain.

  Shocked by the sudden shift, Dannie flailed in the water. Her head bobbed below the surface and she spluttered, frantic, desperate to find her footing on the ground. It moved relentlessly beneath her and the bear lumbered on ahead.

  There were no branches to grab, no rocks to slow her momentum. Water streamed beneath her, carrying her forward, helpless. Clouds raced overhead. She glanced up at them for the barest instant and that slight tilting backward of her head caused her body to stretch back and finally, to float.

  She struggled to catch her breath as the water moved under her. From her prone angle, the bear was no longer visible but Dannie sensed her there, up ahead, leading the way.

  She didn’t know where she was going or why.

  The bear was pregnant. Perhaps they were heading toward the den, toward a safe place to shelter the babies when they were born. Maybe Dannie was needed in some way, to help her.

  One thing was clear. If she fought the water, they would never get there.

  She lay back and let her body relax in the quick-flowing stream. She watched the sky moving overhead and waited to see where the bear led.

  * * *

  When she woke, Lee was lying in front of her, watching her.

  His eyes were red. They contained a fire Dannie hadn’t seen before—a smoldering fusion of pain, regret and something else she couldn’t name.

  Fear, maybe. Desire.

  She leaned forward, closing the six-inch distance between them, and brushed her lips over his. Her hand lit against his jawline.

  For a moment he lay very still. He breathed against her mouth, his pulse rippling beneath her fingertips. His gaze seemed to pour into her.

  And then he took her face into his hands and kissed her in return.

  All the feeling that had passed between them before now, all that Dannie thought she knew: all of it was swept hard into the cyclone of energy that now spiraled out of him and into her.