Chikuk gasped for breath and began her crawl toward the igloo. At least she had the forethought to create some kind shelter. At least she had packed some provisions. She would be able to survive inside, for a while, at least.
As she reached the shelter of her temporary home, she spared one final glance at the world of white beyond. Somewhere, far away in the distance, the creatures cackled.
1
Tori Asplin
The stale aroma of their sex hung in the air. A heady concoction of his scent and hers, entangled in the fabric of the room as they lay side by side, content and sleepy under the glow of the crackling fire.
Tori Asplin’s curtains were skewed, her typically neat bedroom evidence of her desperate lovemaking with the hulking man who dozed beside her. A sliver of silver moonlight winked before fading to darkness as the undulating clouds took over the sky. Around the room hung posters, postcards, and letters, symbols and gestures mailed to her by fans across the world. They had sent her drawings, a strange array of homemade gifts, and these were neatly displayed along the wall and scattered across an old oak desk.
A coy smile lingered on her pink lips, the glow of satisfaction that came after a session of furious physical activity keeping her warmer than the roaring embers which burned in the fireplace at the end of the room.
Tori rolled over and curled her body up against Karl’s. His skin was still slick with perspiration, and her hands found the contours and grooves of his body easily enough as she affectionately squeezed his titanous frame and kissed his back. She had never been attracted to such masculine men before, never understood the lure of men who spent all day working outside under the thin haze of sun in the Alaskan tundra, never desired to be lifted and carried as easily as if she were nothing more than a paper bag, but something about Karl changed that within her. There was a chemistry there that she couldn’t fight. Even now, as Karl’s deep breaths showed the tell-tale signs that he was teetering towards sleep, she craved more. Wanted more. Needed more.
With a mischievous glint in her eye, she rolled to her edge of the bed and scooped up her phone. She chuckled as she opened her camera app and turned it to selfie mode. Angling the phone to get as much of the fleshy boulder behind her, she propped her head in the lower corner of the screen and gave a cheeky thumbs up.
The shutter sounded. Tori flinched, forgetting to turn her phone to mute. A litter of notifications decorated the top bar of her phone. Ordinarily she would spend the next fifteen minutes swiping and tapping through mentions, likes, comments, and shares of her countless social media profiles, but this time she didn’t get the chance as Karl shifted beneath the thick covers and rolled over to face her.
“What was that?” His voice was a low rumble. His eyes narrowed.
Tori placed the phone back on the sideboard and propped herself up on her elbows. Her eyes lingered on Karl’s chest, his dark skin matted with a thick layer of dark hair. Somewhere beneath that hair was a mountainous region of abdominal muscles that even now made her salivate. She could still taste the salt tang of his skin on her tongue, still knew the map of his body, right down to the three deep grooves which cut along from his right nipple towards his bellybutton where the forest of hair broke into sections, highlighting the puckered pink edges of a scar he had earned in years past.
“Nothing. Nothing for you to worry about, at least.”
Her tone was jovial, playful. Although she was approaching her mid-twenties, there was still plenty of child-like youth in her. Maybe that was why she found Karl so alluring. He was approaching his forties and was measurably more mature than the other men that she had encountered that were her age.
Not that she had many options to choose from in a place like Denridge Hills, where the population of the town barely exceeded 3,000 citizens across the thin stretch of frozen coastline that made the northern borders of Alaska.
Karl’s expression did not mirror Tori’s own. His dark, hazel eyes glinted as he leaned across Tori and snatched her phone. His fingers were baguettes against the delicate screen and, though he couldn’t unlock her phone, he stared at the infinite display of notifications popping up on her lock screen.
“You haven’t shared that, have you?”
Tori’s playful expression faltered under the intense heat of Karl’s gaze.
“No. Of course not. I was just… It was for me, more than anything else. I just wanted to capture this moment of peace. Before… well. You know.”
For a second it appeared as though Karl was going to crush the phone in his hands. It would be easy. Simply apply pressure to the meaty vice of his grip and the phone would shatter to a million pieces. Tori felt a flutter of excitement in her chest at the idea of it, that she could hold the attention of a man who could easily take on any man in a bar fight and come out triumphant.
She teased the phone from his fingers and returned it to its dock on her sideboard. Beside the dock was a notepad titled ‘To-do’ with a series of quick scribbles detailing her top priorities in order to manage her online beauty blog and update her social media pages. Her online presence was the very heart of her business, bringing her in a steady stream of royalties from advertising and promotional opportunities that flooded her inbox every day and, though the destruction of her mobile phone would definitely put a huge spanner in the works, there was a large part of her that knew that Karl didn’t have it in him.
Ever since their first sexual encounter, after finding each other alone and drunk in the thick heat of one of the town’s three public houses, ‘The Wolf’s Head,’ Karl had been the perfect gentleman to her. Under the blanket of darkness they walked along the glittering snow together. He held the door open for her, and though their lovemaking was desperate and passionate, only once had he physically brought her to the point of tears, letting his excitement get too much for her as he yanked at her ponytail and tore a small clump of hair from the back of her head.
Apologies flooded from between his lips and he held her as gently as a lover should until the pain subsided. His thick black beard tickled her forehead and brushed her lashes, and they remained that way for some time.
That moment was perfect. From chaos is born beauty.
If only Karl hadn’t had to return home to his wife.
Karl rolled onto his back and laced his fingers across his chest. He stared at the ceiling, chest rising and falling. “I’m sorry,” he said, lips barely moving. “I should probably head off soon.”
Tori’s phone screen flashed—another notification. She felt the instinctual need to answer her phone and view the latest nugget of micro-interaction yet decided against it, rolling onto her side and propping her head up with her hand. She reached over and trailed a finger across Karl’s stomach, twisting the thick coils of hair as she did so. “So soon? You know, I’m not going to wait around forever.”
Karl remained where he was, the only sign that he had heard was the minute movement of his nostrils flaring.
“I wanted to talk to you about something.” Her breath came in nervous hitches as she worked the courage to say the things that had been plaguing her mind for some time. Even just the mention of his home, with his wife, and his child, it was enough to make her chest burn. “We’ve been sneaking around for months now and… I can’t keep holding in my feelings for you. We need to do something about this… situation.”
“What do you suggest?”
Dismissive, unfeeling.
Tori shrugged. “I don’t know. Something. Anything. We can’t keep going on like this, can we? Sneaking around in the middle of the night, pretending it’s not happening, passing each other in the street and pretending we’re strangers? It’s impossible. All I want to do is run to you and tell you how much I love you. All I want to do is kiss these lips and never stop kissing you.” She leaned across and planted a kiss, driven solely by passion. When she finally came up for air, she smiled. “Can’t you imagine it?”
Karl closed his eyes. When he opened them again, they were mu
rky with confusion. His brow furrowed as he sank into thought. “You love me?”
Tori wasn’t expecting that. “Of course. You love me, don’t you?”
“I suppose.”
It was weak, but Tori took it. She sat up and crossed her legs beneath her. “We’re good together, me and you. Much better than you and her ever were. You complain about her all the time. You groan about how she treats you, about how the spark is gone, about how you wish you didn’t have to lie down like two corpses in the night, fall asleep, then wake up and do it all again the next day. I can see it in your eyes, that dying light that comes every time we kiss goodbye and you go out there into the cold, like embers on a fire where everyone has abandoned the camp.”
She moved closer, feeling her desperation grow. They had never fought before, but they had come close, on a few occasions. She felt her emotions surfacing and wasn’t sure whether they would erupt or not right now. She loved him, dammit. She loved him.
“Tell me you don’t want this.” She indicated her naked body. “Tell me you don’t want our late-night talks. Tell me you don’t want to stare into my eyes and get lost in them like I do in yours. Tell me you’d rather live the lie you’ve been keeping and go back to her. That you want to live in misery when you could live in bliss.”
Karl remained silent.
Tori gave him a nudge, more forceful than she had planned. Still, she barely moved him.
“Tell me.”
Karl chewed his lip, his dark eyes narrowing at the wooden beams on the ceiling.
Tori waited for an answer. When one didn’t come, she let out a frustrated growl, took her phone and opened up the picture she had taken of the pair of them. It was the only picture she had managed to get in five months, knowing how important it was to keep their affair a secret. She pointed to the corner of the image where a beaming Tori stared at the lens, her blonde hair tangled into a bird’s nest on her head. “That’s happiness. That’s what we could have all the time. Every second. Every minute. Every day. All you have to do is tell her. Tell her you want to be here and tell her that you’re mine. Who cares if it all turns out messy? We’ll figure that shit out together. I want you.”
To her dismay, Karl shook his head. “I can’t. I just…”
A sudden wave of anger swept through Tori. She pushed herself from the bed, standing as naked as the day she was born. “What, Karl? What is it? What possible reason do you have to delay us spending our lives together? You’re worried what the towns will think? Fuck them. You’re worried what your wife will think? Fuck her. You’re worried about what your daughter will think…”
It was Karl’s turn to anger. His head whipped toward Tori with such speed that it was a wonder he didn’t damage the tendons in his neck. He pummeled a fist into the bed and sat upright, the covers slipping down and revealing his upper torso in its entirety. “Don’t you dare finish that sentence.”
“Then what is it?” Tori’s eyes blurred as tears flooded them. She wasn’t sure where this sudden burst of emotion had come from, but after months of sneaking around and Karl promising that he would soon tell his wife, she was impatient for it to all begin. She crossed to the en-suite door and shrugged her arms into her night gown, fumbling to tie the belt around her waist with shaking hands. “We can’t keep sneaking around. Sooner or later they’re going to find out. This is a small town. I’m surprised that people aren’t already suspicious.” A tear trailed down her face, tickling her nose and finding its resting place on her upper lip. “Please. Just tell me when. Tell me when we can start our goddamn life together and make it official. I need to know.”
Karl clenched his teeth as he fought some internal battle, but he had never been the type to openly share until prodded and interrogated to the point of frustration. Tori held up her phone and faced the image towards Karl. She hovered a finger over the delete button. “It’s all in your hands. I want what’s in this picture, but you clearly don’t. Make a decision sooner rather than later, because I can’t keep falling further in love with you and watching my heart break every time you crawl back into bed with her.”
Her hands shook, her lips trembled. She could barely see him through the tears streaming down her face, but she didn’t want to give him the satisfaction of wiping them away. For the last five months they had lived a fairy-tale lifestyle, stealing moments of passion under the glow of the Aurora, hiding their dirty little secret as she fell further and further in love with the man sitting before her, staring at her with eyes laced with apathy.
An endless moment of time stretched before them as a thousand thoughts ran through Tori’s head. She suddenly regretted her decision, terrified that he would choose the Get Out of Jail Free card that she had offered, yet at the same time held a buzz of excitement that maybe this was what the giant lummox needed, a kick in the right direction. Tori wasn’t going to wait around forever, she had more self-respect than to simply be the other woman.
Karl growled and pushed himself off the bed. His footing was heavy as he slowly tramped his way around the room. Her eyes tracked his, her head craning upwards to look up at the mountainous figure towering over her. She was hyper aware that he could snap her in half with ease—Lord knows he had picked her up and held her against these walls enough times for her to know the true magnitude of his strength. You didn’t get to become one of Denridge Hill’s most revered hunters without having the muscle and the dexterity to back it up. Tales still whispered among Karl’s friends of the time a polar bear had caught him off guard while fishing along the coasts of the Arctic. Though the bear had taken a powerful swipe with his claws and caught Karl in the chest, he managed to swing himself onto the bear’s back and grip the bear around the throat with the crook of his elbow. Holding his arm steady with his spare hand, he had constricted the bear’s throat until his fellow hunters were able to respond with a volley of bullets which caught the bear in the vitals and stained the ice pink.
They stared at each other for a silent minute, Karl’s exhalations coming out in warm gusts from his nostrils. Tori held his gaze, unblinking, knowing that she had made her bed and now it was time to lie in it, hoping that this would be the moment that she fought for—and won—what was rightfully hers.
Deftly, Karl reached out and cupped Tori’s cheek. His skin was calloused and rough, the cup of his hand enough to swallow the majority of her face. The ghost of a smile returned as she leaned into his hand and let out a weak laugh.
Her smile died when Karl shook his head. He didn’t even have the decency to use his words. With his free hand he relieved Tori of the phone and pressed the button. The picture vanished into the digital ether, leaving behind the next picture in the gallery—an image of Tori’s bare legs spilling out from the bedsheets as she decorated the bed in boxes of ‘Ray Ray Self-tan.’ A bright orange streak of the tanning solution running from knee to ankle.
Tori opened her mouth, but the words stuck in her throat. She gave a small cough and glanced at her hands. When she finally managed to speak, the words were nothing more than a whisper. “Get out.”
Karl remained where he stood, heat radiating from his bare flesh, the scent of his body messing with her senses as her body yearned for him but her mind told her to put as much distance between them as possible.
Still he did not move.
“What do you want from me?!” Tori screamed the words at him,now, her anger coming out like poison as she spat each syllable in his direction. “Just fucking go! Go back to her! Go back to that bitch and live your happy little fucking lives! Just go!” She shoved him, but she may as well have been trying to move a stone obelisk. Still, it did not deter her. “What are you waiting for? Just go! Get the fuck out of here. You don’t want me, I don’t want you!” The tears were hot in her eyes as she beat her fists against the fleshy giant. “Go! Just go!”
She broke down in tears, her body slumping and going slack as she nearly collapsed into the vanity table behind her. It was only after watching this moment of d
efeat that Karl silently turned and started re-dressing himself, as though he had been waiting for her to rage, as though he was actually enjoying watching this side of her.
When at last he pulled on his final layer of thermal wear, he moved to the door and paused with his hand on the handle. He looked back at her, a pitying glimmer in his eye which only made her anger burn hotter. She thought that perhaps he might change his mind, that maybe in the final moments of making his decision he had had a change of heart. Perhaps this was it, she needed to show the true depths of her feelings in order to wake him up and realize what he was missing out on. She was an online celebrity, for God’s sake. Everyday thousands of men showered her in adorations and sent messages wishing, just wishing they could spend an hour of time with her. Didn’t he understand how lucky he was?
If any of that was on his mind, Karl didn’t show it. “You won’t tell anyone about this, will you?”
Tori’s face fell. Led by a blind, carnal hate, she reached out for the nearest object to her which happened to be a large glass bottle of perfume her mother had handed to her before she passed away. She hurled the bottle at him, missing his shielding arm by inches as it smashed against the door and sent an explosion of its sweet scent into the room.
Karl’s eyes flashed. He pulled at the door with such fervour that it almost ripped clean from its moorings. He marched out of the room and down the stairs towards the front door.
Tori chased after him, her gown flowing behind her as her bare feet padded on the wooden stairs. “I should have known all along that that’s all you cared about. Your goddamn reputation! You think I’m not going to tell your wife about this? You think I’m not going to tell the whole fucking world?” She held her phone in the air and waved it, not even sure of the words that were spilling from her mouth anymore. In that moment, she didn’t recognize herself and she didn’t care, all she cared about was reciprocating the hurt he had put on her in denying her ultimatum.
The First Fall Page 2
