My fight is ruined. My tears water the shores of Lake Sad.
I’m out of tissues, because I used the last one on the windshield and the ninety-nine before that on school runs with Eleanor. The only thing that can muffle my sobs is my hat, eventhough I’m freezing. My battery indicator flashes a single grim, red digit.
A pickup truck rolls to a stop beside me, its profile blurred through my frosty window. I don’t bother to scrape the ice; I know the voice of that grumbly old junker as well as I know its driver.
“Why are you wearing mittens?” Tobin asks, jerking me back into reality.
I take my face out of my hat. “How did you find me?”
“You come here whenever something’s on your mind. You hike to the old shack and poke around. There’s always dust smudged on your face when you come back.”
He knows me better than I like to think.
The mountain bike reserve used to be private property. There’s a one-room shack a ways down the trail, with a sign on the door in shaky, old-timey handwriting:
Please do not
damage this cabin.
There is nothing
of any value
inside.
We love this place.
Someone’s broken the padlock and left it dangling from the door. Inside, a rusted-out woodstove hunches in the corner; a dish rack sits in the cupboard underneath the sink, still full of plates. In the corner near the door, a huge axe leans, the head loose.
Not one teen has tagged the place. No one’s smashed a single glass. It’s uninhabitable and about to fall down, yet everyone has decided, for some reason, to defend it.
It gives me hope, that place. It’s nothing like the rest of the houses around here, not pretty or new or even possessed ofindoor plumbing. Not easy to love. Yet someone loved it once; cherished it for what it was, not what they wished it could be. And that love cast a spell of protection over it and made everyone else love it, too.
I brought Tobin there years ago, half afraid he wouldn’t understand what I liked about this dim, crumbling cabin. Maybe he’d think it was creepy and I was weird; it was the kind of thing I had to be careful introducing to my partners. But he ran his fingers over the candle drippings on the dark tabletop and said, “They liked it cozy, didn’t they?” It was dusty and musty and probably full of pack rats, their nests glinting with shiny stolen buttons. For health and safety reasons, we should have gone back outside. Instead, I stayed in the circle of his arms a long time, until I could be sure I wouldn’t cry with relief.
“It looks cold over there,” Tobin observes. “Battery low?”
I jam my hat back on. “I layered. I’ll be okay.”
“It’s nice and warm over here. I could drive you back to Amber’s. You can call for a tow tomorrow.”
Curse him for knowing why I pulled over. My dignity has a quick scuffle with my desire not to run out of juice on a dark, frozen highway.
I use the last of the battery to lock my doors.
God, it’s warm in his truck. It’s pathologically clean and smells like cinnamon donuts and Tobin.
I press my bare fingers against the vents. It’s impossible to meet his eyes. I feel naked, like he can see through layers upon layers of gear right down to my broken-open soul.
He picks up my hand, cradling it between his big hot palms. They’re rough from his work, but the feeling coming from them is so… soft. So loaded with years of tenderness.
There must be something that can make me forget we’ve kissed in this truck, young and laughing and swatting giant northern mosquitoes so that when the clothes came off, we’d be the only ones feasting on each other’s bodies.
“Hey! We agreed, none of that!” I pull my hand against my chest like he’s burned it.
“It’s just hand warming,” he argues.
“No, it’s not.”
