Quadruple Duty: All or Nothing

I swallowed hard, but I couldn’t get past the lump in my throat.

“They’re not even looking,” he said. “Not now. Not yet. It’s too dangerous for them. Our best bet is to hunker down in here. Ride it out until morning.”

For the first time I got a good look at him. My hero was handsome, with reddish-blonde hair almost like mine. He had a short-cropped beard, all covered in snow. He had ice crystals on his eyebrows too.

“Thank you,” I said. Taking my gloves off, I reached out to brush the melting snow from his eyelashes. “You dug me out. You saved my life!”

The touch was somehow intimate, despite our predicament. Or rather, maybe because of it.

“You saved yourself,” he said simply. “I saw your pole, wriggling up through the snow. That was smart, you know.”

I blushed in the semi-darkness. We were huddled together in the tiny space. Practically lying against one another, in the low-slung little snow-cave.

“Besides,” he went on, “we’re both UMASS. We undergrads gotta stick together.” He hesitated, then grinned. “And if I’m being honest, you were too cute not to save.”

“Oh yeah?” I was beyond blushing now. “You could tell I was cute under three feet of snow?”

He shrugged. “I could tell you were cute a week ago, when we started this whole trip.” I could see he regretted the words immediately. Like he’d said too much. “Of course, you were standing across from me on the gondola.”

Now it was my turn to be embarrassed. “I was?”

“Yup. All the way up.”

“Shit, sorry. I’m oblivious.”

He laughed, and the conversation paused, awkwardly. Our eyes met, and in the dim glow of my phone’s screen I could see just how incredibly handsome he really was. Handsome and masculine and… shivering.

“Oh my God! You’re cold!”

I began wriggling out of my jacket. Or rather, his jacket. The one he’d given me.

“No no,” he said, stopping me. “You keep it. You lost half your clothes on the mountain!”

It was true. The avalanche had stripped me of my own jacket. My scarf too. My ski pants were shredded nearly to tatters, and my feet — still in my ski boots — were soaked and freezing.

“I’m fine,” he said. “It’s just—”

I grabbed his hands. It was like holding two ice packs.

“OH MY GOD!”

I pulled his hands to me, pressing them under the jacket and against my body. I did it without even thinking. He slid them to my sides, settling them somewhere near my hips. A warning bell sounded someplace in my brain — the flash of an intimacy alarm or something — but considering the circumstances, I completely ignored it.

“If you won’t let me give you the jacket,” I said, “at least let me cover you with it.”

His teeth were chattering. His hands were icicles. I felt horrible.

“It’s too small for us both,” he shivered.

I pushed him back, stretching his lithe body across the length of our little ice cave. Before he could say anything else, I lay down on top of him.

“Then I’m covering you with myself.”

I left the jacket open, so our bodies touched. Immediately I could feel my heat being transferred to his cold, hard torso. It sucked, but only for a minute or two. With the jacket over us, we began actually generating some heat of our own.

“Better?” I asked.

He smiled. “Much.”