Warm Heart

by Amy Lane

  The dancing helped. He was packing down the snow, stomping a path for Mal to get to eventually, and even though it was icy, it was better than falling through.

  Finally, finally, Mal was close enough for Tevyn to offer his hand and pull him up, one step at a time, toward the shelter.

  “I didn’t get firewood!” Mal yelled when it became clear they were following the two ropes back.

  “I don’t care!” Tevyn shouted in return. “We’ve got enough!” Hopefully. They might have to burn the bark he’d peeled off, but the stuff from the day before might be drier. Hell, they had scraps of soiled T-shirt to burn, old gauze, Tevyn’s pitiful attempts to make snowshoes from the day before.

  Mallory’s had been better. They’d been going to try out his little shoes today, but Damien hadn’t woken up, and they didn’t have time.

  They’d even burn those if they had to. Burn the go bag, burn Mallory’s wrecked Italian loafers. Burn the socks Tev wasn’t using. Anything so Mal didn’t have to come back here, to be devoured by a maw in the snow.

  Just as he was thinking that, a crack sounded from overhead, and a limb came crashing down, almost on top of them. Tevyn was torn between dancing out of its way and seeing if Mal could get clear, when Mal gave a roar and launched himself on top of Tevyn, pushing him out of the way.

  For a moment, Tevyn lay deep in the snow, breathless, Mallory on top of him, almost limp.

  Tevyn shoved at his shoulder. “No sleeping yet!” he yelled. “C’mon, man, not this way!”

  “Sorry,” Mallory mumbled, struggling up. It took some doing, but finally they were upright, and Tevyn got a good look at the limb that had almost crushed them.

  It was big, too big to break up with the bowie knife.

  But if they fed it from under the fire blanket, through their fire pit, shoving more inside and peeling it as the other end burned down, it would last them at least two days.

  “C’mon, Mal,” Tevyn called, checking at the slack of rope they each had. “God, it can’t be that far, I swear!”

  Thirty feet, maybe. That’s all it could have been. It felt like miles. Tevyn had come down mountain faces that hadn’t been that long.

  They pushed their find up against the rock face and slid down the rabbit hole back inside. The fire hadn’t burned much more, but the snow was melted and boiling, and Tevyn could have cried. What had it been—ten minutes?

  His entire life had passed before his eyes in ten goddamned minutes.

  “Strip,” he ordered Mallory sharply as he took off his parka and spread it back down on the mat of pine needles they’d slept on the night before. “Strip and sit down next to the fire. I’ve got a bottle of broth for you.”

  Mal grunted, and his suit jacket and pants hit the ground by the entrance. He bent over slowly to get them, but Tevyn beat him to it. “Just go sit down!” he cried, his voice wobbling. “Jesus, you scared the hell out of me. You were going to lie there and fall asleep, you bastard! Lie there and never get up!”

  “I was too going to get up,” Mal muttered, sounding drunk. “I was coming back to you. But I needed a nap first.”

  “What were you thinking, going out that last time! You were already tired. Mallory, you can’t do that to me!”

  “How’s Damien?” Mal asked, surprisingly lucid.

  Tevyn took a deep breath and tried to calm down. “His wound pussed—I think that’s good. Means we’re getting the infection out.”

  They both looked at Damie, sleeping now, breathing a little easier, the swelling in his leg having gone down even in the time they had been gone.

  “It’s less black,” Mal said critically. “That’s good. He’s not as pale.”

  “Yeah. God. Stupid backwoods medicine. I had an ingrown toenail once, you know? Whole toe turned black with blood. Missy put my foot in a bucket of damned near boiling water. I screamed bloody murder, but….” He shrugged. His foot had been scalded and tender for the whole next day, but the infection had burst into the bucket.

  “That’s how you knew what to do,” Mal said, admiration in his words. He shivered hard, and Tevyn grabbed the bottle of broth and came to sit down next to him.

  “Here. I had mine. You missed lunch.”

  Mallory laughed weakly and drank. “Thanks,” he said.

  “Course.”

  “For saving my life out there.”

  “Purely selfish.” Tevyn leaned his head against Mal’s shoulder and swallowed against the aching in his throat. “Don’t know your middle name yet. Would have driven me nuts.”

  Mal wrapped his arm around Tevyn’s shoulders and turned, pulling Tevyn on top of him as he leaned backward against the branch behind them. “It’s not Ambrose,” he said as Tevyn shook against his chest. Part cold, part adrenaline—and part fear.

  “Dammit,” Tevyn mumbled, still shaking. “Arthur.”

  “Nope.”

  “Alexander.”

  “Nope.”

  Tevyn’s brain stalled out. He was warm and alive, and Mal’s chest was broad enough to rest on. “Don’t let go for a few, okay?”

  “I promise.”

  “I can’t lose you.”

  “Yeah. I get that now.”

  “Good.”

  THERE was no more talk of going out after that. Mallory fell asleep, leaning back with Tevyn on his chest, and Tevyn squeezed his eyes shut and tried to find his center.

  For the first time, he could see why Mallory and Damien had been against going out into the elements and trying to get down the mountain. Tevyn had grown up in the snow. He respected it, but he loved it a lot too, and it had loved him back for most of his life.

  Mallory had grown up in the Bay Area—no snow there. Cold fog, yes, but wandering around the block in your bare feet wasn’t often dangerous unless human predators were involved.

  Damien was helpless. It looked like his fever had broken, and the infection had been pushed out, but he was exhausted, weak and shaky. Moving him like this would be a risk—but waiting for help to come before the infection set in again was a fool’s gamble.

  Nobody knew where they were.

  Nobody knew where they were.

  If they had gone hiking in the snow, they would have passed sign-in stations—small cabins or even wayposts, often fortified with supplies, with a ledger.

  Those people Mallory had talked about, the ones who had burned everything and waited for rescue—they’d been hikers. They’d had a destination and let people know where they were going. They’d signed into wayposts on established paths.

  Tevyn didn’t doubt Damien had followed a flight plan, but he’d been in the process of deviating from it. A deviation like that, in the air, that was the difference between people knowing where you were and people finding your polished bones in a year.

  In Tevyn’s experience, nobody came back for you. Even if they were trying to, like Mal had been, the world opened up and swallowed you whole.

  If you wanted to be found, you made yourself noticed—you flew down the hill faster, you did the best trick. You tied a rope to somebody and pulled yourself to them through the driving snow.

  I was coming back to you. But I needed a nap first.

  Tevyn’s eyes burned behind his lids. Even covered in snow, a nap away from death, Mal had been thinking about him.

  Intentions counted. So did degree of difficulty. Judges would give you better marks for trying a harder program and falling on your face than they would for trying a weak program any rookie could master.

  Mal had been trying an advanced program in someone else’s boots and in cashmere gloves, and he’d been doing it to save Damien’s life.

  Mallory had been planning to come back.

  But Tevyn couldn’t judge the rest of the world by the trust he put in Mallory Armstrong.

  They were going to have to go find rescue themselves.

  MALLORY slept that afternoon, and Tevyn tended to Damien some more. After a nap of his own, when the fire burned perilously low, he stoked the
fire and went outside, making sure to tie their bedraggled T-shirt rope to the sapling—just in case.

  All he was doing was dragging the limb around the shelter, to the other side where the fire sat, and digging a hole in the snow to feed the limb through. He’d gotten to the point where he’d lifted the fire blanket and shoved the cracked end of the wood through the hole left, when the wood suddenly took on a life of its own and jerked out of his hands.

  “I’ve got it! Now get your ass in here and start stripping the bark!”

  Tevyn almost jumped out of his skin. For some reason the blanket of snow, the fire blanket—it had all seemed so inviolate. It was hard to remember that their shelter consisted of a few layers of polymer and cold water.

  “On my way!” he shouted back.

  By the time he slid inside, he was shaking from exhaustion.

  But Mal had started the water boiling again, and was stripping the old bandages from Damien’s wound and putting a new set of hot ones on again. Damien was awake enough to bitch.

  “Are you going to eat me when I’m done poaching? Just want a little warning.”

  “Are you kidding? We’d have to pound you and salt you and soak you in brine for you to be soft enough to eat. It’s bad enough you look like you do, but you have to go for the washboard abs too? Bastard.”

  Damie’s soft snort was reassuring. “You talk big, but I hit on you shamelessly, and you turned me down. Can’t be that hot if you’d rather pine for Snow bunny here.”

  “He hit on you?” Tevyn asked, stripping off his parka. “Damien, you bastard. I will eat you!”

  “Cool your jets,” Damien breathed, apparently exhausted by simple conversation. “He’s been in love with you since I’ve known him.”

  Mallory wrapped another hot bandage over the area, and Tevyn noted that it was looking very pink and decidedly scorched.

  “We should let it breathe for a while and then pack it in ice again,” Tevyn told him. He grimaced at Damien. “I’m guessing. You know that this whole thing is a guess on my part, about hot and cold and what it does to muscles and about trying to keep infection at bay.”

  “I’m breathing,” Damien said, coughing softly. “I mean, that’s gotta be worth something.”

  “Yeah, it means don’t hit on Mal when we get back or I’ll break your leg again.”

  Damien smiled, but he was apparently past talking. Mal was the one who broke the silence.

  “He wasn’t serious about it.”

  “Hitting on you?” Tevyn had thought that was all talk.

  “He asked me out a couple of times.”

  “After Keith?”

  “Yeah. I think I just looked sort of pathetic. Anyway”—Mallory patted Damien’s arm—“his heart wasn’t in it.”

  “And you were in love with me,” Tevyn said. He met Mallory’s eyes over the fire.

  “And I was in love with you.”

  They stayed like that, eyes locked, until Damien cleared his throat. “Tevyn?” he said weakly.

  “Yeah—you need that snowpack now?”

  “No. I need you to listen to me really carefully.”

  “What?” Tevyn smiled at him, then was surprised when Damien didn’t smile back.

  “This guy here trying to poach me like an egg? He’s a good guy. He gave my friend’s business startup money when it was only a dream. He treats Preston like a real person, when most people sort of write him off because he barely speaks to humans. I will literally fly him to an island populated by naked cabana boys and leave him there until he’s so sexed out he can’t remember your name, if you break his heart. Do you understand me?”

  “Damie, that’s enough,” Mal said quietly.

  “No.” Damien shook his head and touched Mallory’s hand as he started to remove the bandages. “He needs to know. I wasn’t half-hearted. I was serious. Your heart was already engaged. If he hurts you, I’m not the only one who’ll line up to make it better.” Damien sank back against his makeshift pillow. “I don’t think I’ll have to,” he said. “But he needs to know.”

  “I know.” Tevyn met Mallory’s eyes and nodded so Mal would understand. “I know.”

  “Are we all uncomfortable now?” Mallory asked lightly. “Or should I give Damien a Vicodin so he’s too stoned to have this conversation anymore?”

  “I’ll take the Vicodin,” Damien said, sounding exhausted. “Just don’t eat me.”

  “Not until we figure out Mallory’s middle name,” Tevyn told him. “Jory.”

  “Caspar,” Damien countered.

  “Samuel.”

  “Ezekiel.”

  “Are we doing biblical names?” Mallory asked. “Because I always wanted to be Nehemiah.”

  “Is it Nehemiah?” Tevyn asked sweetly.

  “No.”

  “Then no. Abraham.”

  And so on.

  By the time Mallory fell asleep, they’d packed Damien’s leg with snow again and inflated the pressure bandage. Damien was stoned and asleep and exhausted—but his fever was down to unterrifying levels, and he was no longer sweaty and pale.

  Tevyn had managed to pull the log through and skin at least half of it, and they’d started burning it as it sat in the fire. It was thick enough, and big enough, that their main worry was a spark flying up and catching in the low-hanging branches of the pine trees they were gathered under, but given the storm was still raging outside—and was still wet snow with big sleety flakes and not dry powder—that seemed unlikely.

  Mallory had sat quietly during their guessing game and woven two more snowshoes, each one looking sturdier than the last. Tevyn had set them on the incoming log—close enough to the fire to cure, far enough away not to catch.

  “I’ll make some more tomorrow,” he yawned, slouching down in his accustomed place now, next to Tevyn.

  “Damien’s not walking,” Tevyn laughed.

  “We need extra.” Mallory regarded him soberly. “Unless we’re really lucky, we’re not going to find another shelter like this one. We need to have as much as we can carry to get us through.”

  Tevyn nodded. “If we get caught out around sunset, we can dig a hole in the snow. If we carry some fire starter and fuel with us, we can have a fire and keep melting ice for water.”

  So far they’d only used a few of the hand warmers when Mal had gone outside for firewood. Tevyn had plans for the rest.

  “I’m thinking my trench coat for a travois,” Mal murmured, surprising him. “We can do that quick sewing thing you did around some branches—it’ll make it easier to haul Damien through the snow.”

  “Good idea.” Tevyn’s hands were full of sap from working on the log, but all of them were dirty and sweaty and covered in pitch. He stroked his fingers through Mallory’s hair anyway because he needed to touch him and because it would comfort them both. “Let’s talk about something else.” The idea—his idea—of going out and finding rescue was terrifying to him right now. He’d won. Mallory had almost died today because he’d braved the elements, and he was still planning to do what Tevyn asked.

  Tevyn needed a dream for when they survived, or he’d never get over the fear of leading them all to their deaths.

  “What do you want to talk about?” Mal asked softly.

  “I want a dog.”

  Mallory hmmed. “Big? Small? Midsized?”

  “Something that’ll play in the snow. Something we can take to Missy’s cabin in the summer.”

  “My mom’s old dog was too small for that. Have you seen English Labradors? They’re huge. Ginormous heads. Have that sort of patient, long-suffering look that makes you think they’ll put up with your bullshit forever.”

  “Sounds perfect. He’d have to stay at your house. You’d have him when I traveled.”

  “But then I couldn’t see you win.” Mallory’s voice took on a plaintive note, and Tevyn’s hand stilled in his hair.

  “Then you’d take him with you when you came to my events.”

  “He’d miss you when you
went without us,” Mal slurred. “But Charlie would dogsit. She misses dogs.”

  “And in the summers, you could work from the cabin,” Tevyn told him, not caring if it was fair.

  “I’ll have better Wi-Fi cables installed this winter,” Mal murmured. “Hire someone to fix it up.”

  He’d offered to do that before—and Tevyn had been all for it—but Missy had balked, not liking that someone she didn’t know would be doing the work. But Missy wouldn’t be there, and as much as Tevyn didn’t like the idea of her being gone, maybe Mal thought this was a way to help him go on.

  “They could replace the roof and the subflooring,” Tevyn agreed. “Fix up the porch, fix the plumbing—”

  “Seal the windows, update the electricity, add a big shower, a mudroom, some insulation in the roof and walls—”

  Tevyn laughed. “You’ve got a whole list.”

  “I’ve wanted to fix that cabin since I first saw it,” Mallory admitted. “I wanted it comfortable, for Missy. For you. My house used to be my mom’s. I’d go home when she was alive, and she’d have a list of stuff for me to do. And I could do it because I had the weekend and a shitty love life. I couldn’t do it for Missy. But I can do it for you.”

  “Your mom must have been so proud of you,” Tevyn said, a lump in his throat. He thought of Mallory all alone, not much older than Tevyn was now. He’d survived. He’d been lonely but okay.

  Tevyn would have Mallory in his life. He’d be okay. He had to remember that.

  “Can I take you to the theater?” Mal asked, wandering from the topic. “We could dress up. You look good in a tux. Not all the time. Just once in a while. I could be a handsome prince, and you could be a handsome prince, and we could be Mr. and Mr. Handsome Prince before you go out to do battle on the slopes.”

  “I’d be proud to go to the theater with you,” Tevyn whispered. “And we have to go dancing too. You’re such a surprise as a dancer.”

  “Mm. Only with you.”

  Tevyn rubbed his back, between his shoulder blades. “Go to sleep, Mallory. Dream of dancing and theater—”

  “And a little cabin in Colorado with new hardwood floors. And a giant dog who misses you.”