The Savage Wild

by Roxie Noir

  He just looks at me. I think he’s looking at me, but I have no idea if he’s hearing me at all.

  He has to get warm is what else.

  I don’t bother thinking about it, I just tear off my coat and my fleece and my down vest and my other fleece and my sweater, my fluffy snow pants and my boots. I shove everything underneath the sleeping bags and on top of Wilder, hoping my residual body heat will do something.

  Then I crawl in next to him, wearing leggings and a tank top, and wrap my arms around him.

  It’s like hugging an iceberg.

  “Come on,” I whisper, and he doesn’t say anything back.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Wilder

  I wake up in an empty room, pinned under something heavy and soft, and I’m freezing. My whole body is trembling like a leaf, the shaking so hard that I can’t do anything to stop it, my teeth chattering together. I’m shivering so badly it’s hard to breathe, and I’m curled into a ball underneath this soft, heavy thing.

  Wake up isn’t the right word. I’m pretty sure I’ve been awake for a while, I just can’t remember much because the past few hours have felt like I’ve been watching through a sheet of ice, dim shapes moving slowly on the other side.

  I turn to my other side, careful not to disturb the blankets. That’s what I’ve decided the soft, heavy things are, and I’m pretty sure I’m right.

  It’s a tiny room. Plywood walls, one window next to the door. Plastic crates stacked full of stuff against one wall, a single crate taken down, its contents strewn everywhere, my soaking wet outer gear still in a mound on the floor, surrounded by water.

  I shiver harder, just looking at it and thinking of the crack of the ice underneath me, that one second before everything gave way and I plunged down, the water so cold it punched the air from my lungs.

  Under the blankets I curl tighter, hug my knees to my chest, only my face sticking out of this pile. Vaguely, I wonder whether I’ll get to keep all my fingers and toes after this.

  The door slams open, but I don’t move from where I am, curled and within reach of warmth even if I’m not there just yet. Imogen clomps in, her arms full of firewood, kicks the door shut behind her as she tracks snow across the floor of the little room and dumps her armful next to a blazing wood stove.

  Her face is bright red and she’s limping. She’s limping bad, favoring her right side, and for a moment she stands in front of the stove, looking down into it, flexing and unflexing her ungloved hands like she’s trying to warm them up.

  Then she sighs, shoves her glasses up her face, turns around.

  Sees me looking at her.

  “Are you awake?” she asks.

  I swallow, wiggle my toes. It all works.

  “I think so,” I say.

  She reaches under the blankets, grabs my forearm, and even though I’m cold and nearly died today, I can’t help but half-grin at her.

  “You’re still freezing,” she says, frowning.

  “You know what would warm me up,” I say through chattering teeth, her hand still gripping my forearm, warm as anything to my cold skin.

  Imogen just laughs, squeezes my arm. She pushes her glasses up again with her other hand, then leans in.

  “Wilder, I have bad news,” she says, pure mischief in her eyes.

  If I weren’t still shaking from the cold, I’d suck in a breath right now at that look.

  “Your dick has gotten smaller in the past ten years,” she says, cheeks flushing slightly pink.

  I blink. I stare at her for a long moment, my brain still stupid and slow with the cold before I can think of anything to say back.

  “That’s not fair,” I finally say, managing a smile. “You just saw the poor guy at his worst.”

  She just referenced your dick, you know. At least she’s thinking about it.

  “I’m a scientist,” she says, taking her hand off me and standing. “I rely on empirical evidence, and the evidence in your case is…”

  She shrugs, her eyes still sparking.

  “The evidence in my case is tainted,” I say as she heads for the door. “You know you can’t always rely on that shit!”

  She leaves, the door closing behind her, and I scowl around the cabin because whatever happens now, at the moment I’ve got one mission and one mission only: resuscitate my dick.

  I take a deep, shuddering breath, fight my way out from under the blankets, get my feet on the wooden floor. It’s cold, and there’s nothing more I want than to get back onto the cot and pass out again, but this? This can’t stand.

  Even though deep down, I know she’s just taunting me, I can’t let this stand.

  I get up, grab one of the blankets. I realize it’s actually a sleeping bag, unzipped all the way, pull it around myself, and head for the wood stove.

  When Imogen comes back in, carrying another armful of wood, I’m standing in front of the stove, sleeping bag held out to either side like a pair of wings.

  Imogen stops mid-cabin.

  “Are you…” she begins, the sentence trailing off.

  “Warming up my dick,” I confirm.

  She limps over, drops the wood on the pile that she’s already got, and stares into the stove, pointedly not at me.

  “You nearly die of hypothermia and that’s the thing that you’re really worried about?” she asks.

  I move the sleeping bag in my hand so it’s shielding me from her view and grin back at her, giddy. The cold is like alcohol, something they teach you in elementary school when you grow up where I did: it impairs your judgement and makes you stupid.

  “Not ready yet,” I tease.

  “I wasn’t asking to look.”

  “You’re the one who brought it up to begin with,” I say. “I can’t help what you’ve got on your mind, Squeaks.”

  The nickname comes out without me even meaning to say it, but Imogen doesn’t freak out for once, just pushes her glasses against her face, a half-smile forming around her eyes.

  “You nearly died, and your dick is tiny,” she says. “You can have that one.”

  “We should have gone around the lake,” I admit. “At least I was right about the cabin.”

  “You got lucky,” she says.

  “I know my shapes from far away.”

  “Luck,” she insists.

  Imogen walks to the cot across the cabin, grabs the other sleeping bag that was on top of me, comes back and sits with it wrapped around herself.

  “If I was lucky it’s about damn time I was,” I say, and sit next to her.

  I’m finally shivering less, still cold, but slowly returning to normal. I know enough about hypothermia to know that shivering is a good sign, a sign that means your body is fighting back. It’s not shivering that’s a sign of real danger.

  I reach out, touch her knee. Imogen looks at me but doesn’t flinch away.

  “Let me see your ankle,” I say softly.

  She pushes at her glasses.

  “It’s fi—”

  “You’re limping like hell and I’m going to look at it one way or another,” I tell her. “Voluntarily would be best.”

  She sighs, turns toward me, extends her right leg. Gingerly, I push her leggings up to mid-calf, unlace her boot, pull it off along with her sock.

  Her ankle’s swollen way worse than before, black and blue, the skin shiny.

  “Shit, Squeaks,” I mutter.

  “I think I wrenched it or something,” she says. “It kinda hurts now.”

  I’m fucking sure it more than kinda hurts. Just having it in her boot must be agony, not to mention walking around on it, hauling in wood from outside.

  I have a vague memory of surfacing for air, her hand catching at me, Imogen stumbling and sliding and gasping in pain.

  “You could’ve let me drown,” I point out, running my thumb over the red welts on her foot where her boot cut into her flesh.

  She just laughs, startled.

  “What the hell?” she asks.

  �
�It wouldn’t have even been murder,” I point out.

  “Are you saying I should have just walked away?” she asks, half-teasing but half-serious.

  “I’m saying I’m not sure I’d have blamed you.”

  “You know, even I think that something that happened ten years ago when we were in high school is a bad reason to let someone die.”

  I start massaging her foot in my hands, a knot in my stomach, remembering.

  Me, next to Melissa, up on stage. The music cutting out, Imogen standing in the back, against the wall, there with one of her other nerd friends. All I wanted then was to hurt her. Make her suffer for how she’d made me feel.

  Even if maybe, maybe it was really my fault.

  Her face when she realized what was happening, and the vicious surge of righteousness I felt when she ran through those doors. I thought then that it served her right, that it was what she got for trying to fuck up my life. Me, Wilder Flint.

  And I remember looking down at Melissa, who faked a smile at me, her Prom Queen sash shining cheaply in the bright lights.

  She dumped me not long after, and I realized way too late that I picked the wrong girl.

  “So you’ve forgiven me?”

  Imogen watches my fingers carefully, leaning back on her hands, the sleeping bag gathered around her shoulders as I press into the arch of her foot with one thumb.

  “Not letting you drown and forgiving you are two different things, you know,” she says.

  “I really am sorry,” I tell her.

  She waits, not looking at me, her face closed off, but I can tell she’s been crying recently, with her shiny eyes and blotchy cheeks. It feels like the cabin itself is holding its breath while I run my fingers gently over her foot, digging into the muscle and bone, her ankle delicately held on my lap.

  “For prom,” I say simply. “For not breaking it off with Melissa. For giving a shit that you were a weird nerd and I wasn’t.”

  She swallows hard, and I think her eyes behind her glasses might be filling with tears.

  It’s the smoke or something, I tell myself.

  “For using you like that in the first place,” I say softly.

  Now she looks at me, pushes her glasses up with one hand, her eyebrows raised like she thinks something’s funny.

  “You weren’t using me,” she says, a note of laughter in her voice. “Don’t go apologizing because you think I didn’t have a good time.”

  I pinch her heel between my fingers and she winces slightly but doesn’t move her foot from my lap. I shift, the sleeping bag sliding off my other hip, coming close to revealing everything. My skin’s covered in goosebumps but I’m not shivering any more.

  “Then I’m only sorry for everything else,” I say.

  She worries at the inside of her lip for a moment, looks at her foot, slides her eyes up to mine but lets them linger on me a heartbeat too long, a look I’d nearly forgotten but that I recognize in an instant.

  It’s a look that always made my mouth go dry and my dick spring to life. I tug the sleeping bag back over myself and pretend that nothing happened but secretly, I’m thinking of the kiss yesterday on the landslide.

  The way that she kissed me as ferociously, as needily as she ever has, the way it told me she hadn’t forgotten a damn thing.

  “You weren’t wrong the other day,” she finally says, her eyes boring into mine.

  “I’m not wrong very often.”

  She rolls her eyes.

  “I was right about the cabin, wasn’t I?”

  “You were wrong about the ice.”

  “And I paid for it.”

  She wiggles her toes in my hand, and I pinch one between my fingers, massaging it back and forth.

  “I’m trying to tell you that you were right about Melissa,” she finally says. “I didn’t hate knowing that I was fucking her boyfriend and she wasn’t.”

  “Go on,” I say, trying not to grin.

  “She was such a bitch at first,” Imogen says, turning slightly pink and laughing. “Did you know Sophomore year she started a rumor that she saw me make out with my little brother—”

  “Ew.”

  “I know, right? So once I got over feeling bad, it was sort of… fun. Until I felt bad again.”

  I stroke my fingertips against her ankle and try not to look at her, because even though she’s dirty and disheveled and wearing some really ugly clothes, it’s also the easiest thing in the world to imagine pushing her down to the floor and pulling her legs around my hips as her hands claw at my back.

  I tug the sleeping bag over my dick just a little more securely. The good news is that it definitely still works, and the bad news is that it’s working great right now.

  “You never told me she started that rumor.”

  “I didn’t really like talking about her with you.”

  I grab her behind the knee, pull her closer, the sleeping bag underneath her scraping across the wood floor.

  “Hey!” she says as I pull her leg across my lap. Now she’s facing me, not quite straddling my lap but close, her leg thrown over mine.

  “Ankle problems often lead to knee problems,” I tell her, grinning, taking her knee in my hand. “I’m just being thorough.”

  “Is this what you learned since I saw you last?” she asks, pushing her glasses up her face again.

  “How to treat sprained ankles?”

  “How to perform the bare minimum of flirtation before just putting your mouth on whatever it is you want.”

  There’s a bite in her voice when she says that, but she doesn’t move away, doesn’t take her knee out of my hands and I see her eyes dart to the crease between my torso and leg, the spot where the sleeping bag’s come off again and it’s pretty fucking obvious what I think about this situation.

  “If I put my mouth on what I want, are you going to slap me again?” I ask, pulling her in closer. “You’re not wearing gloves this time, so it might actually sting a little.”

  God, she’s warm, and I swear I can feel her pulse beating in the back of her knee. Something else from today comes back to me in a flash: Imogen, sobbing, piling both the sleeping bags and her coats on top of me, crawling onto the cot behind me, holding me close.

  She reaches out, fiddles with the edge of the sleeping bag where it’s against my chest. I catch her wrist, my thumb against her palm.

  “Don’t go all demure on me, Squeaks,” I say, my voice bottoming out at its lowest register, the sleeping bag getting practically thrown off my dick already.

  “Don’t tell anyone,” she says suddenly, a hard note of urgency in her voice.

  “There’s nothing to tell yet,” I say, and pull her onto my lap.

  Now she’s straddling me, the sleeping bag completely off, and I can see her determination not to look at my dick as I grab the front of her shirt with one hand, leaning back on the other.

  “I mean about this, you idiot,” she says, and I pull Imogen’s face down to mine and put my mouth on hers.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Imogen

  Update: his dick didn’t actually get smaller.

  I haven’t gotten a good look at it in its non-hypothermic state but Wilder pulls me in, his lips on mine, and I slide down his lap until we’re crushed together, and it’s trapped between us, hard and thick against me.

  I shift my hips against him even though I try not to, because I can’t help myself. Wilder brings one hand up, to the small of my back, fingers pressing into my sacrum and then grabbing my ass, making me do it again as his groan matches the slight gasp that escapes my throat.

  He pulls back, my lip between his teeth, laughing.

  “There it is,” he murmurs, his voice so low I think animals hibernating underground could hear it.

  “Shut up,” I gasp.

  “Nah,” he says, and kisses me again.

  It’s rough and unpracticed, teeth and tongue, the angle awkward. I’m still wearing one hiking boot and trying not to use my busted ankle
to balance but at the same time I can’t stop pressing into Wilder, my body screaming for his.

  I hate this. I hate how bad I want this. I hate how my body’s reacting to his like this.

  I hate that I’m not going to stop.

  He slides his hand up under the layers I’m still wearing, hooks his fingers under the bottom band of my sports bra, pulls me in harder as I make another noise into his mouth, helpless against myself.

  “Is this what I’m not supposed to tell anyone about, Squeaks?” he teases, still tugging. “That all it took to get you back in bed with me was a crash landing and a bout of hypothermia?”

  “Shut up,” I whisper, my fingers tracing down his chest.

  “Yeah, you were a piece of cake,” he laughs, tugging on my bra again.

  This time he runs one thumb over my nipple, and even through the thick elastic it sends a jolt through my body that brings my hips forward, makes me squeeze his shoulder in my hand, make both nipples stiffen like diamonds.

  He chuckles and tugs on the bra again, bringing my nipple to his teeth, biting me through the shirt and bra I’m still wearing. His teeth slide over me, the sharpness dulled by fabric, and then he shoves my bra over my breasts and does it again, only the thin fabric of my shirt in the way as he looks up at me, eyes twin glacial pools.

  I gasp, and it comes out a squeak. Wilder grins, bites, lets his teeth slide off as I grind my hips against him one more time.

  “You gonna tell me you don’t like that?” he murmurs, then licks my shirt.

  The fabric sticks to his tongue and he slides it around. I find purchase on his thigh with one hand, eyes closed as I pant for breath, afraid that if I don’t hold myself up I’ll fall over.

  “It’s dirty,” I warn him, eyes still closed.

  “Not yet.”

  His hand moves down, tongue working the other nipple through my shirt, and his fingers find the crease of my hip and in seconds, his thumb’s brushing over my clit, nothing but the thin fabric of my leggings in the way.

  “I meant my shirt.”

  Wilder just laughs, and I put more of my weight on his thigh, leaning back, pushing myself against his thumb and behind that, his hard cock.