Chill Factor

He caught her watching him curiously. “I’m not going to sleep on the sofa,” he stated definitively. “I don’t fit on it. I’m battered and beat up, and I need what creature comfort I can get. You can have an extra blanket to tuck around you so there’ll be no chance of us touching, even accidentally.”

“All right.”

She got up and went to the bathroom. He didn’t have to caution her to hurry; it was frigid in those rooms.

When she returned, he was piling fresh logs onto the fire. “You lie here, nearer the hearth.” She moved to where he indicated, but she didn’t lie down until he had disappeared into the bedroom. At his suggestion, she tucked a blanket around herself.

He was back in a few minutes. She saw him hesitate and glance down at the wet legs of his jeans. She said, “Do you want to take them off?”

“Yes, but I won’t.” He lay down on top of the blanket with which she’d covered herself and pulled the others over them both. He groaned as he settled himself onto the mattress.

“Are you hurting?”

“Only when I breathe. You? Are you comfortable?”

“Fine.”

“You haven’t coughed in over an hour.”

“I’m much better.”

“Sounds like it. You’re barely wheezing.”

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“Sometimes it’s worse at night. I hope it doesn’t keep you awake.”

“Same goes for my snoring. If the fire burns down, just nudge me awake. I’ll get up and add more wood.”

“Okay.”

On their backs, nowhere close to touching, they stared at the ceiling. The firelight cast dancing shadows across the exposed beams. Ordinarily the interplay of light and darkness would have been hypnotic and sleep inducing. But she lay rigid and tense, light-years away from sleepy.

“Do you think they’ll come tomorrow?” She wasn’t sure who she was referring to by “they.” Dutch and a local rescue team, or the FBI. Both perhaps.

“I figure someone will set out to try,” he replied. “That is, if the forecast holds and the snowfall stops.”

“And if Dutch got my first voice mail message. He may think I’ve been safely back in Atlanta all this time.”

“Maybe.”

“If he didn’t get that voice mail, he doesn’t even know you’re here with me.”

“No.”

But intuitively Lilly felt that Dutch did know, and the strain in Tierney’s voice indicated he thought so too. “If the weather clears,” she said, “we’ll have cell phone service again.”

“When we do, who will you call, Lilly? The FBI or Dutch?”

“I haven’t thought about it.”

“You’ll call Dutch.”

They were quiet for a moment, listening to the pop of the burning logs, then, turning onto her side to face the fireplace and stacking her hands beneath her cheek, she said, “Good night, Tierney.”

“Good night.”

There would be no nudging him awake because he didn’t fall asleep. She knew this because she didn’t fall asleep either. There were several reasons for her insomnia. The long nap that afternoon. The firelight flickering on her closed eyelids. The uncomfortable bulkiness of her clothes and the weight of the blankets. The recollections of her terror during those last minutes of the asthma attack.