I walked over to the bathroom, got my slippers, and then padded over to the window in the living room while I waited on the coffee to brew. Overnight we had gotten a lot of snow.
Correction, in scientific terms, we had gotten a fuckton of snow. It was still coming down too. It was piled so high that I couldn’t see much past the porch. so all the work I had done to clear paths had been for nothing.
I went back to the kitchen to start up breakfast, thankful for the stock of bacon I had picked up, both packages in the grocer and fresh at the butcher shop. Starting with the fresh stuff, I laid out a bunch of strips over the gas stove and broke out the eggs to go with it. As I made breakfast, I heard shuffling in the bedroom and realized the woman was awake.
We hadn’t spoken much last night, not even to give one another our names. She kept to herself mostly, and I didn’t bother her. We ate lunch together when she arrived, but then after she warmed up, she slept most of the day. I understood that, since the adrenaline drop after being lost in the woods in a blizzard had to be pretty hard-core. By the time she was up and roaming again, I had made dinner. We ate in separate rooms. We spoke occasionally, but we didn’t really keep the conversation going, so she went back to the bedroom while I kept to the living room.
“Morning,” I said as she made her way into the kitchen.
“Morning. Is there anything I can do to help?”
“Sure. If you can make pancake mix with the eggs and stuff over there, I’ll have those ready for us in a few minutes. Griddle’s already set up.”
“On it,” she said, going over to the mixing bowl and putting together the batter. When she was done, she brought it to me, and I made a stack of pancakes, splitting them evenly with bacon and eggs and bringing them to her at the dining room table. “Thank you for breakfast. I realized that I was so exhausted and overwhelmed yesterday that I never even told you my name or asked for yours. I’m Desiree. But you can call me Des.”
“No problem,” I said as I sat down to eat with her. “I’m sure yesterday was a shock on your system. I’m Aiden.” I was a little miffed that after all the work that I put into preparing myself to survive the winter, I was now sharing my hard earned resources with someone else. But still, she was in need, and I couldn’t just turn her down. Besides the fact she wanted my help, she was smoking hot, and I couldn’t deny that I enjoyed looking at her. That had to be part of it.
“So, when do you think I can get back to my car?” she asked. “I need to get home. I have a job interview tomorrow.”
I watched her face for a moment, trying to decide if she was joking or not. When I realized she wasn’t, I shook my head.
“Couple of days, probably.”
“A couple of days?” she said, incredulous. “No. No, I can’t do that.”
“Well, I can’t get you off the mountain any earlier than that,” I said. “I’m sorry, but where you parked your car is miles from here, and it is impassable at the moment. You should have checked the weather before hiking the day before a blizzard if you didn’t want to get stuck. But you are more than welcome to try to find your way back to your vehicle by yourself if you want. I have to warn you, though, it’s going to be covered in snow. Good luck getting it off the mountain. What kind of car is it?”
“A sedan,” she said. I could tell by her voice she knew I was going to laugh. I didn’t disappoint her.
“You know that even if you could get to your car, you probably wouldn’t be able to get it uncovered from the snow, much less get it driving? The snow would be higher than the front end.” I took another sip of my coffee. “Might as well try to walk back to town.”
I expected her to have a rebuttal to that. She seemed rather sassy, and even though I had done her a massive favor, her expectation was she was going home today, and me telling her it wasn’t happening seemed to make her angry at me. But instead of arguing, she got quiet, focusing on stabbing her food with a fork and chewing. She brushed away her long, wavy dark hair from her chocolate-brown eyes, and I noticed they were puffy. Like she had been crying.
Suddenly, I felt bad for making fun of her car. She was clearly having a tough time, and I probably wasn’t being as empathetic to the fact that finding my cabin quite literally saved her life yesterday. Most people weren’t used to multiple run-ins with a great chance of death. I was. It had been a long time since I had barely cheated death and felt anything other than mild relief about it. Or guilt.