Tierney said, “Music to my ears.”
Suddenly pushing the inhaler away, she coughed into her hands. “Here.” From the other sofa, he snatched up the towel he’d used the night before to support his head and thrust it at her.
She coughed into it. The coughs racked her whole body. Tierney, kneeling in front of her, murmured encouragingly.
Finally, the coughing ceased. She lowered the soiled towel from her mouth. He took it from her. She seemed transfixed by the sight of him, and only then did he realize how scary he must appear.
He brushed frost off his eyelashes and eyebrows, and worked the stiff, icy scarf down beneath his chin. “I’m not a ghost. It’s me.”
“You came back?” Her voice was barely audible. “Why?”
“That was the plan all along. You thought I was abandoning you to die so I could escape.”
She nodded.
“If I had promised you that I was coming back with your medication, would you have believed me?”
Slowly she shook her head no.
“Right. Trying to convince you would have wasted valuable time, so I had no choice except to leave with you thinking the worst of me. It wasn’t easy to go.”
Using the armrest of the sofa for leverage, he pushed himself off his knees and stood up, moving like a man decades older than himself. Inside his boots, his feet were numb. He couldn’t feel the floor beneath them as he shuffled to the fireplace and arranged several sticks of wood on the grate. In order to get the dying coals to ignite, he bent down and gently blew on them. They caught, and soon hungry flames were licking at the logs.
He eased off his backpack, set it on the floor, and nudged it beneath the end table with the toe of his boot. He unwound the scarf from his neck and removed the stadium blanket and watch cap from his head. Along with his coat, he draped them over one of the stools at the bar so they could dry out. Tentatively he patted the back of his head, then inspected his fingers for fresh blood. Either his wound hadn’t bled any more or the blood was frozen.
He sat down on the sofa opposite Lilly and unlaced his boots. He wavered on removing the one from his right foot, knowing that his ankle might swell so badly he wouldn’t be able to get the boot on again. But if he didn’t get more circulation to his foot, he could lose toes to frostbite.
Gritting his teeth against the pain, he worked his foot out of the wet boot and peeled off his sock. The ankle was slightly swollen, but not as bad as the pain had indicated it might be. He saw no signs of frostbite, but he roughly massaged his toes. It hurt like hell when blood started to flow into them again, but that meant the capillaries weren’t frozen beyond repair.
While he was doing all this, Lilly had continued to sit wide-eyed and wordless, staring at him as though he were an apparition. Moving slowly so as not to spook her, he got up and went to kneel in front of the sofa again. He tried to speak her name, but it came out a hoarse croak. “Are you all right now?”
She merely bobbed her head once.
“Jesus, I forgot your pill.” He found the small brown plastic prescription bottle beneath one of the armchairs. He got a glass of water from the kitchen and brought it to her. She used the second inhaler, then swallowed one of the pills. As she drank, he noticed that color was returning to her lips, reassuring him that she was getting adequate oxygen, although her respiration still sounded like an out-of-tune bagpipe.
“That inhaler is good stuff,” he said. “I didn’t know which one to use. I had a fifty-fifty shot. I guess I picked the right one.”
She gave a small nod.
His gaze roved over her face. She was moving and breathing, and her color was returning, but he feared he might be having another hallucination, like many he had experienced on his return trek from the car.
Lilly had been at the center of all of them. In some, he returned to find her blue from cold and lack of oxygen, motionless, dead. In others she was radiant and warm, glowing with life, sexually needy, passionately taking him deep into herself.
In reality, she was neither lifeless nor lustful but dazed. “You must have passed out just before I came in,” he explained. “I called your name several times, but you didn’t respond, didn’t even move. Your chest was perfectly still. Scared the shit out of me,” he said, his voice turning gruff. “I thought I’d gotten here too late.”
In less than a whisper, she said, “So did I.” Then her face crumpled with emotion. As though a dam that had been tenuously holding back her tears suddenly gave way, they filled her eyes.
He reacted spontaneously. In a heartbeat, he was beside her on the sofa, his arm across her shaking shoulders. “It’s okay now. I’m back, and you’re alive.”
She fell against his chest. He lifted her onto his lap, cradling her like a child, enfolding her in his arms and bending his head over hers. He felt her reflexively clutching handfuls of his sweater.
“Shh, shh.” He rubbed his lips against her hair. “Don’t cry, Lilly. You’re not supposed to cry, remember? You don’t want to bring on another attack by crying.”
He tipped her head up and smoothed back her tangled hair. Thank God her complexion no longer had the gray cast of death. Cupping her head between his hands, he ran his thumbs across her cheeks to wipe away the tears.
Looking directly into her eyes, he said, “Short of dying out there, nothing could have kept me from coming back.”
His gaze lowered to her mouth. Her lips were soft, full, pink now, slightly parted, tremulous, damp from drinking water, possibly tears. At the base of her throat, the smooth skin throbbed with each beat of her heart.