“Um, I think I will be okay,” she claimed. Claimed, because there wasn’t much confidence in her words.
“You gonna eat that or just push it around?” I asked, watching as she poked at the entree, but only seemed to eat the salad.
“Do you want it?” she asked, already reaching to hold her plate up for me.
And, well, I wasn’t going to let it go to waste now, was I?
An hour later, she was tucked in bed, though the bed creaked, and I could hear her tossing and turning while I washed up after dinner and made up the couch.
It wasn’t until she seemed to finally pass out that I heard my phone buzz from where I left it on the counter.
Ranger: Get ready for your plans to change.
– Could you be more cryptic? There’s no fucking TV here. What’s going on?
Ranger: Nor’easter. You’re about to get dumped on. 12+
– Shit.
Ranger: Plus side, you’d see someone coming from miles off.
– Not helping.
Ranger: Not known for it.
Shit.
Twelve inches in Navesink Bank would blow, but wouldn’t make life that much harder. Within a day, all the main roads would be plowed. Within two, all the side ones. Life would go on as usual.
Out here in the sticks?
They might not even bother to plow.
Even if they did, I had half a mile of a private driveway that they wouldn’t touch. And I might be in good shape, but I’m pretty sure even I would drop dead of a heart attack trying to shovel that shit by hand.
It would take several days.
After the snow stopped.
Whenever that would be.
I didn’t have to wait long for it to start either. A half an hour after I went to the small shed nestled almost in the woods to grab a shovel and a tarp for the firewood, it started.
With a fury.
Fat flakes fell hard and fast, the wind whipping so wild that it was zero visibility even just trying to look out the window.
And it was about an hour after it started that the house went suddenly dark, something in the house announcing the power out with a loud beep.
“Shit,” I growled.
A power out alone sucked.
A power out in the woods with a woman you barely knew – and didn’t know how you’d tolerate in such a situation?
Yeah, this was going to get interesting.
“Gunner?” her voice called tentatively from off in the bedroom.
And here we go.
FIVE
Sloane
Something woke me up.
You know, when you wake up with a start, heart pounding, knowing it hadn’t been a nightmare, but completely at a loss for what in your surroundings could startle you up like that.
My first thought was my stomach. Pain often woke me up. If I went to bed after two glasses of wine without making sure I flushed my system with some water, a blinding headache woke me up sometime in the middle of the night. But I hadn’t had any wine. And my head and my stomach – and everything else for that matter – felt fine.
Things came to me in pieces as I lay there.
It was dark.
Pitch.
The kind of dark that hardly ever existed in the city with all the street lights, headlights, store signs.
The bed felt weird.
Hard, where I slept on something that could probably be mistaken for a mattress stuffed with feathers.
The sheets were off too.
A little scratchy and foreign.
Then I remembered.
The threats. The fear. The knife in my stomach.
Packing.
Running.
Asking for help yet again.
Being dragged off to the woods.
With Gunner.
“Gunner?” my voice called, mostly without even thinking. I should have kept quiet. What if the power wasn’t just out, it was cut?
What if he found me again?
What if I just let him know where I was?
I mean, not that it would take him long in this shoebox of a cabin to locate me.
Even as I was trying to scramble out of the sheets to, I wasn’t sure, hide under the bed maybe, a light appeared in the doorway.
A flashlight turned upward to illuminate Gunner’s suddenly very welcome face.
“We’re getting slammed with snow,” he explained, getting right to the point as I stopped fighting the confines of the bedsheets. “The wind has been whipping. Must have taken down a tree on the lines somewhere. It’s fucking March. Who thinks to check the forecast for a storm like this in March?” he added, shaking his head. “It’s about to get a helluva lot more rustic from this point on.”
“Do you think we’ll be out long?”
“In this? Out here? I wouldn’t hope for power for three days at least.”
Three days.
“That is only a day longer than we planned to stay,” I reasoned, trying not to think of all the ways having no power for an extended period of time could affect us.
No heat.
No water since I was sure this cabin had a well because there seemed to be no public anything nearby.