Snowed In

A half hour went by. An hour. I walked to the opening and cleared the snow, only to find the same raging storm as always. The only thing that had changed were the accumulations. The snow was so deep now, it was getting scary.

“MAYDAY! MAYDA—”

There was a crash as Morgan’s fist hit the table. She dropped the microphone and plunged her face into her hands.

“Hey, hey,” I said. “Easy…”

Gently I slid my hands over her shoulder and began rubbing her neck. She didn’t protest. Her muscles were stretched tight as guitar strings.

“What’s wrong?”

Her hair hung over her face, like the ghost in one of those Japanese horror movies. Only instead of being dark and corpse-like, her hair was this beautiful, strawberry blonde.

“I have something to tell you.”

“You’re pregnant,” I joked.

Silence, followed by even more silence. Apparently I wasn’t being funny.

“Morgan come on,” I said, kneeling down beside her. “What is it? You know you can tell me.”

She shook her head. Her hair shifted back and forth.

“It can’t be that bad. We’ve only been here—”

“I sabotaged the radio.”

The sentence seemed so strange, so foreign, it took a minute to register. Even when it did, I wasn’t sure I’d heard her right.

“No you didn’t.”

“Yes!” she cried, finally looking up. Tears were streaming down the side of her face. “I did it, Boone! I pocketed one of the transistors! And I’ve been trying to tell myself I didn’t know it. That I did it by accident, or I did it subconsciously, and that it wasn’t really my fault. Only it is! Because it is my fault, and I know I did it! I did it to Kim Balas and now I did it to us and now—”

“HEY!”

My voice was loud and firm enough to stop her mid-sentence. She looked up at me, her chin trembling.

“I don’t care.” I said.

She blinked, and a fresh set of tears made their way downward. “Y—You what?”

“I don’t care, Morgan. It doesn’t matter.”

She swallowed hard, and I brushed her tears away with the back of my hand. “B—But…”

“You fixed it,” I said. “That’s all that matters.”

“But I kept us here!” she insisted. “I could’ve fixed it days ago! A—And… And maybe we missed our window! Maybe they were looking for us back then, only now they’ve stopped, and now no one’s in range and—”

“Why do you think

you sabotaged it?”

She took a deep shuddering breath. She couldn’t even look at me.

“I—I think it was because I wanted to stay,” she said quietly. “Because I was enjoying you, and Shane, and Jeremy. I’ve never gotten this much attention before, Boone. From any guy. Much less three guys! Much less—”

“So you were having fun?” I chuckled. “Is that it?”