Page 109 of Snowed In
“You said I could come to the cabin.”
“That was before—”
“Before nothing.”
“You can’t just keep ignoring what happened between you two,” he tries again. “What he did.”
Watch me.
“Can we please just go to the cabin?” I ask, my voice significantly calmer than before. He doesn’t move for a long moment, and I think he’s going to stay or argue with me some more or both. But he doesn’t. He just takes a breath and puts the car in gear, his expression wiping clean as he drives us off into the snow.
TWENTY-THREE
CHRISTIAN
Megan simmers the entire drive up. I know she does because she doesn’t talk to or even look at me other than to glare when I get annoyed at some idiot driver. She just sits there, angry-knitting. I don’t know if angry-knitting is a thing, but I’m coining the phrase now because I’ve never seen her work those needles so fast. And I’m fine with it. Silence is good. Silence also lets me simmer. Also lets me stay mad. Or at least it does for the first thirty minutes, and then I’m just confused as to how she makes me so mad in the first place.
I’ve had fights with girlfriends before. Real girlfriends, anyway. Snapping ones, yelling ones, slamming bedroom door ones. You work stressful jobs in stressful cities, and you’re bound to take it out on those closest to you. But it was always on their end. I never yelled. I never slammed. Never. It wasn’t in my nature.
Or maybe I just didn’t care enough.
But right now? I care. Maybe it’s the headache or the run-in with my dad. Maybe it’s the fact that something so simple as being in the same place as Megan usually cheers me up except for now.
But I guess I shouldn’t be surprised. Ever since I bumped into her, she’s had a habit of making me feel things I didn’t normally. The only thing that irks me more is that I don’t seem to have the same effect on her.
So we drive in silence. There’s barely any traffic, and none at all when we start traveling up the mountains. The snow on the roads gets progressively worse as we do, the higher ground and fewer people making them more difficult to get through, but if this is as bad as it gets then we can manage. I’m only planning to stay a few minutes tops anyway. I think the best thing to do is to put the stuff away and get going, maybe find a pub somewhere on the way back where we can have some privacy and hash this out between us, but that little plan goes flying out the window when we get stuck halfway up an incline, the car refusing to budge another inch.
I curse as the engine makes a noise I don’t like, and Megan’s fingers pause briefly before she continues knitting again. After a few seconds of trying and failing to restart it, I get out and round the hood to find the snow too deep to get any farther.
We’re jammed in.
I straighten, glancing through the windshield, but Megan’s so focused on her work that I have to knock on the passenger window before she realizes something’s up.
“Car’s stuck,” I tell her when she rolls it down. “I’ll be able to get us out for the way down, but we’re going to have to walk the rest of the way.”
“Walk?”
“It’s just around the bend.”
Still, she looks troubled. “I’m not in the right shoes.”
“So wait here. I won’t be long.”
“But—”
“We don’t have to stay, okay? I just need to put the food in the fridge.”
“The world is a fridge,” she mutters, and while I agree with her, I don’t like the thought of it sitting out on the porch.
“I’ll be ten minutes tops,” I promise and take off up the slope, but I’m barely a few feet away before I hear a thump and a muffled curse. Turning, I find Megan sprawled face down in the snow, one of her shoes stuck in a lump of it.
“Don’t say anything,” she warns, pushing herself into a sitting position.
“You mean like how I told you to—”
“I know,” she grumbles, as I help her to her feet. She tugs her boot free and shoves it back on. “But I need to use the bathroom,” she says, dusting off her clothes. “So if we can just— Christian!”
She shrieks as I lean down, sweeping her into my arms.
