“I want what my parents have. What Davey and Rowan found.” He lifted his gaze to hers, his eyes startlingly blue in the dim light. “I’m tired of being alone.”
His gaze held hers, and her chest tightened. For a moment, her lungs locked, and she couldn’t draw in a breath.
“You—” Words abandoned her, and she scrambled to find something to say.
Sex with him was one thing. She was good at physical intimacy, loved every second of it—especially with him—but the kind of connection he was talking about now scared her more than anything she’d ever faced on one of her expeditions.
“You mean… like, relationship relationship?” She regretted the words immediately, but her mouth was already off-roading without her permission. “Like, dinners and holidays and ‘let’s buy a succulent together’—all that?”
“Not the succulents. I always over-water them. Maybe a cat. I’ve always liked cats.” A smile ghosted over his lips. “But, yeah. All that.”
She tried to picture it. Elliot in a kitchen, making dinner. Elliot sleep-rumpled and making coffee for them both after a night of sleeping side-by-side. Elliot talking about taxes and drycleaning and family dinners and all the little mundane things that made up a normal life. She bet he’d fold his boxers into obsessive little squares and would complain because she was chaotic and messy.
Could she tolerate that for more than a week before she started hallucinating from boredom?
Probably not.
She didn’t know how to be what he wanted. She knew how to lead expeditions and climb mountains and throw herself headfirst into adventures that would terrify most people. But sitting still? Building a life with someone? Stillness had always bothered her, and the kind of life he was describing sounded like mind-numbing stasis.
She thought about her parents, how happy they seemed, how content. But also how... contained. Her dad had been a SEAL, and once he retired from that, he led an elite hostage rescue team into the worst corners of the world. Her mom had been a free-spirited artist, living in a tiny cabin on the Pacific coast of Costa Rica, where she wandered barefoot in the sand, painted all day, and swam with dolphins in the evenings.
But when they got together, that all changed.
Dad still traveled, but now it was to carefully vetted conference rooms in climate-controlled hotels. Mom still painted, but her work had become safer, prettier—landscapes and still lifes that sold well in tourist galleries instead of the wild, abstract pieces that whispered of freedom and wild spirits.
Yes, her parents had found each other, but they also somehow lost themselves in the process.
“That sounds nice,” she said finally, the words coming out more stilted than she intended. “Really nice.”
Elliot’s expression shuttered, and she could see him drawing his shields back up to protect that tender heart of his. “Yeah, well. Pipe dreams, right?”
She wanted to reach for him, to tell him it wasn’t a pipe dream, that he deserved everything he’d just described, but it couldn’t be with her.
But the words stuck in her throat.
Dammit, he’d warned her. Back in the shower room, before he gave in to her seduction, before he let himself touch her, he’d told her what it meant to him and that he’d want more. But she’d been too deep in her grief, too desperate for the distraction, to understand it wasn’t just his version of sweet nothings. He meant it.
The station felt smaller suddenly, the walls closing in around her. Outside, the wind had picked up again, rattling the windows with a sound like skeletal fingers tapping against glass. She longed to be out there again, pitted against the elements instead of trapped in this tomb of a research station with ghosts and frozen corpses and a man who wanted things from her she wasn’t sure she could give.
“We should get some sleep,” she said abruptly and stood, ignoring the throb in her ankle. “Long day tomorrow.”
Elliot watched her with those too-perceptive blue eyes, and couldn’t quite hide his disappointment. She was always disappointing him, wasn’t she?
He probably kept a list of them all, she thought bitterly.
“Rue—”
“I’m fine,” she said, cutting him off. She limped toward the residential wing, intending to find a bunk to crash in far away from him, but she stopped short and stared down the dark hallway. Like at Thwaites, it split into a T at the end. To the left where the bathroom, showers, and bunkrooms. To the right, piled in that cold storage room like sardines in a can, were the people who had once lived in those bunkrooms.
Maren was in there.
She froze, unable to take another step. The thought of sleeping in one of those bunks, knowing her friend was dead just steps down the hallway, sent a wave of nausea through her.
“I can’t—” The words caught in her throat. She hated the weakness in her voice, but the idea of being alone with those memories, with the knowledge that Maren’s frozen corpse lay just beyond the wall?—
Elliot was beside her in an instant, his hand warm on her lower back. “Let’s stay here,” he said quietly. “I’ll keep watch.”
The surge of relief made her dizzy. She allowed him to guide her back to the couch, where he’d already arranged the blankets into a makeshift bed. She sank into it, leaden with exhaustion. He didn’t take the floor like she thought he would. He stretched out beside her, caging her between the back of the couch and his body. She should’ve felt trapped, but instead his arms felt like sanctuary.
