Anyone?

by Scott, Angela

  “Like I said, the book was better. Books are always better.”

  He scooped Callie into his large hands and brought her over to me. “Here you go.” He placed her on my lap and tucked the blanket around the both of us. “Hold on to her.”

  My fingers were too numb to really feel her. Pinprick sensations ran from the tips of my fingers toward my palms, but I placed my hands on top of her warm little body anyway.

  “What else do you like reading? Romance? Sci-fi? Mystery?” Cole knelt in front of the rock fireplace and stacked old newspapers, kindling, and a few logs inside. The cabin’s owners had a nice pile of wood next to the door. Good people.

  “Pretty much anything, as long as it’s good. How about you?”

  He shook his head. “I don’t like reading.”

  “Then you’re doing it wrong.”

  “You’re probably right.” He stood and searched a few shelves, pushing nick-knacks and other random items aside before he dug into his backpack and removed a lighter. “I’ll have a fire going before you know it.”

  “I can’t wait.” I couldn’t remember what feeling warm was like anymore.

  “Let’s just hope I don’t accidently burn this place down.” He clicked the lighter and a small flame came to life. It didn’t take much for the newspaper to catch fire, or for the flames to engulf the kindling and wood. “Let me get it going a little better, and then I’ll move you closer.”

  “Okay.”

  He placed a couple more logs in the fireplace. “That should do it.” He crossed the room, slipped his arms under my legs, and lifted me from the couch. “I’ll go see what blankets I can round up.” Callie enjoyed the ride, purring while he carried us. He placed the two of us on the woven rug in front of the fire. “I’ll be right back.”

  The dancing yellow and orange flames intrigued me, almost hypnotizing, emitting a gradual warmth—kissing at my face then at my hands as I held them out in front of me. The pinpricks worsened, and I snatched my hands back and hid them in the blankets.

  “Here we go. Look at this.” Cole stepped out of a side room with a large pile of blankets and comforters in his arms. “We’re going to be nice and cozy.”

  I didn’t answer. My eyelids had already started to close.

  He gave my shoulders a gentle shake. “Not yet, Tess.”

  “I’m still freezing.” I knew the warmth of the fire wouldn’t heat me instantly, but I couldn’t help wishing it would hurry and do its job.

  He took Callie, removed her from the sock, and sat her to the side. She took a few timid steps, but overall stayed close to the fireplace, which was good since I didn’t think I had it in me to chase her down. If she wanted to take off, I’d probably let her. Be free, little kitty!

  Cole slipped the quilt from my shoulders, and as I tried to grab it back, he pushed my hands away. “We’ve got to get you out of those wet clothes. They’re probably stuck to your body.” He removed my gloves and cursed at my hands.

  “What?” I tried to look, but he maneuvered himself so I couldn’t.

  He picked up one foot at a time, and gently removed each of my battered boots and threadbare socks. He didn’t swear this time, but the look on his face said it all.

  “It’s that bad, huh?”

  He reached forward to unzip my pants.

  “Am I going to lose my fingers and toes?”

  He shook his head as he maneuvered my stiff jeans from my frozen legs. “Not if I can help it.” Tiny pieces of my flesh peeled away with the material, as he said it might. The small sores bled, but stopped after a few seconds. Even so, they appeared raised and angry looking. Not pretty at all.

  “Sorry,” he said. “They had to come off.” He removed my jacket, unbuttoned my shirt, and cast them aside.

  The cold kept me from caring I sat there in only my bra and panties. Being ogled was the last thing on my mind. “Hurry. Please.” Goosebumps rippled my skin and my shivering increased tenfold, even though I couldn’t have imagined either of those things being worse than they already were. “I’m going to die here.”

  He removed an old woman’s flannel housedress from the pile of blankets—a dark blue and pink flowered print my grandmother might have worn—and slipped it over my head, lastly helping to work my arms through the holes. He eased me into a resting position and placed a pillow under my head.

  “I can sleep now?”

  “Almost.” He covered me in one after another of the various blankets he had gathered earlier. “How does that feel?”

  I continued to shake without reprieve, but could feel a slight difference. “It’s great.” I would say almost anything so he’d leave me alone and let me sleep.

  He slipped a knitted cap over the top of my head and tucked the blankets tightly around me. I closed my eyes, but heard him moving around the cabin—placing more logs on the fire, boiling water, and feeding Callie. He opened and closed closets and drawers, but I wasn’t curious enough to open my eyes to see why.

  The fire crackled and a hint of smoke hung in the air. It warmed my nose—the first time I could breathe without my nostrils sticking together or my lungs filling with icy air. Yeah, I could totally go to sleep.

  “Here you go.” Cole lifted the edge of the blankets and slid the most amazing bag of heat next to my body. A hot water bottle. My new best friend. “How are you doing?”

  I smiled with my eyes still closed. “Better. How about you?”

  “Don’t worry about me, okay? Concentrate on getting yourself warm.” He reached under the blankets and touched my hands, then each of my feet. “Damn.”

  “I’m getting warmer.” I tried to stop his worrying. I did feel warmer.

  “You’re still shaking.”

  “I am?”

  “Yeah,” he said. “You are.”

  “I’ll be fine.”

  He sighed, long and hard. “I’m going to make sure you are.”

  He was quiet, and I couldn’t hear him moving or doing anything, but could sense his presence kneeling next to me. Is he praying?

  I cracked open an eye, then the other eye quickly followed suit. He wasn’t praying at all. I tried to sit up. “What are you doing?”

  He had removed his shoes, pants, and shirt. He knelt next to me in wearing only his boxer shorts. “Move over.”

  “What?”

  “Just do it.”

  I shifted a little, and he lifted the blankets and quickly slid inside next to me. “Jeez, it’s cold.”

  He didn’t shiver. No goose bumps attacked his skin. In fact, as he curled his body against mine—his stomach pressed against my back—heat radiated from him. He wrapped his arms around me, and he laid his head next to mine. “You can go to sleep now, Tess. I’ve got you.”

  “You’re not a real person are you?” How else could he be this warm?

  “Shush,” he whispered against my ear. “Close your eyes. We’ll talk more tomorrow.”

  Warm breath escaped Cole’s partially closed lips and swept over my eyes, my cheeks, and my mouth. Our faces had turned toward one another sometime during the night. And now, as he continued to sleep, I watched him by the light of the fire with only one question on my mind: What are you?

  I kept still, breathing in rhythm with Cole’s. His chest rose and fell against mine. His eyes, deep in sleep, danced behind his lids. His nearly naked body exuded warmth I’d never experienced before, but wholly appreciated even though I questioned its probability.

  Alien. Imaginary. False. Unnatural.

  All the facts I played over in my mind pointed to him being one, if not all of those things. Dylan not seeing him; his overall heath; his bizarre warmth and lack of shivering in below-freezing temperatures—but his unshaven face, no matter how much I stared, revealed nothing. If anything, the mole below his ear, the small scar above his left eyebrow, and the scattering of faded freckles on his bare shoulders—signs of realness—caused me to question myself again.

  His eyes opened and he caught me staring. �
�Hey, there.”

  “Hey.”

  “How long have you been awake?”

  “Only a few minutes,” I lied.

  “You should’ve woken me.”

  “I didn’t want to. You looked peaceful.”

  He grinned. “I was going for handsome and rugged, but I guess peaceful will have to do. Are you feeling any warmer?”

  “Yeah. I am.”

  “That’s great.” He sat up, slid the blankets to the side, and took one of my hands in his. He turned it over, examined my palm and then each of my fingers before doing the same thing to my other hand. He moved to my feet, studied them, and then looked at me and smiled. “Everything’s looking good. No stumps or pirate hooks for you.”

  I lifted each of my hands and glanced at them, then wiggled my toes, surprised to find I could. The whiteness and waxy look were gone. No more redness on my hands. No more pinpricks stabbed my fingertips and toes. He was right, everything did look and feel good; they appeared almost normal.

  “How’s that possible?” I asked him. I had witnessed the horrified look on his face the day before and didn’t need to be told how bad my hands and feet had been; I had known by his grimace how dangerously close I’d been to losing them. “How did you fix this? What did you do to me?”

  His forehead wrinkled. “Do?”

  “Yeah, how did you make me better?” I grabbed the blankets and tucked them around me again. A chill still hung in the air, though nothing like the day before, and I needed the blankets.

  Cole sat in his underwear, seemingly unbothered by the cold. “I started a fire. I put blankets on you, wrapped my body around yours, and hoped for the best. But you already know all that.”

  “No, what did you do, really?”

  He cocked his head to the side. “Umm...I’m not sure what you’re asking.”

  I matched his posture by sitting up, and placed my hands on top of the blankets for effect. “My hands and feet were in bad shape yesterday, now they’re not. I crawled into a train car with a severe sunburn on my arm, but when I woke up, you were there and the sunburn was gone. What have you been doing to fix me?”

  He eyed me as if I’d sprouted another head. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Come on, Cole. You can’t tell me all of this was a coincidence. Tell me what you did. I’m open-minded, and I can handle it.” He could shoot white light from his eyes and spit fire at that very moment, and I was fairly certain I’d be okay with it.

  “Wait a minute.” He smiled. “You don’t think I’m a miracle healer like Jesus, do you? Because as flattering as it is for me, I’m fairly certain the Son of God would take offense to the comparison.”

  I leaned forward. “I’m being totally serious.”

  “Okay, I see that now.” He put his hands up, palms facing me. “Just to be clear, I’m not Jesus. The guy fed like ten thousand people with a loaf of bread and a couple of fish. I can barely keep us alive with a can of soup. While we’re at it, you are not open-minded and you can’t handle much of anything.”

  I ignored his humorous crap and insults. “Are you an alien or something?”

  He smirked. “Now, you’re being cruel. First, I was like Jesus, and now you’re comparing me to one of those bald-headed, big-eyed creatures from space? Please, stop talking before I really get my feelings hurt.”

  “How did you know where this cabin was?”

  “I didn’t. We got lucky.”

  “When the tornado was chasing us, you drove the car straight into a carwash that ended up being the only building in the area not destroyed. Are you saying we got lucky then too?”

  “I would have to say yeah, we got damn lucky.”

  “What about these?” I reached forward and ran my fingers over the angel wing tattoos on his back. “There’s something more to these isn’t there? Are you like my guardian angel or something?”

  He turned his head sideways and squinted at me. “Ahhh... I was demoted from Jesus to an alien and now I’m promoted to guardian angel. Nice. You’re buttering me up again. I like it. But honestly, Tess, does every good thing I do have to have a deeper meaning behind it? Because that’s a lot of pressure for a guy like me. I don’t think I can keep up these so-called ‘miracles’ you believe I’m capable of performing.”

  I scooted closer to him. “Please, if there is something unearthly going on, or if I’m going crazy, tell me. I need to know, because I’m not sure of anything anymore... and I hate feeling like I’m going out of my mind.”

  Cole released his breath and moved toward me, our knees touching. “You want to know the truth, huh?”

  I nodded. “Yes, I do.”

  He took both of my hands. “Then here it is.” He looked away briefly, cleared his throat, and brought his eyes back to mine. “I want to tell you I’m just a boy, standing in front of a girl, asking her to love me.”

  What the—? I ripped my hands from his. “Did you quote Notting Hill at me?”

  “Well, yes and no. Technically, Julia Roberts quoted this to Hugh Grant’s character, so it was a girl standing in front of a boy thing. Literally, they were standing in a bookstore where as we’re sitting on the ground, but that is beside the point. The message is still the same. I’m an ordinary guy, who happens to have had some pretty amazing luck lately. That’s all. Please, can’t that be enough for you? Why do you have to make this more complicated?”

  “You’re not going to tell me anything, are you?”

  Cole reached for his pants and slipped each leg inside before standing and hiking his jeans over his hips. “There’s nothing to tell.”

  “Fine. Whatever.” I sank back against the pillows and jerked the blankets around me. I’d let him get the fire roaring before getting up and attempting to get dressed in something that didn’t come from my grandmother’s generation.

  “Besides,” he said as he grabbed his shirt and pulled it over his head, “if I was an angel, do you really think I’d admit it? There are rules about that kind of thing, you know? The whole mortal versus immortal aspect needs to be in balance. Rules that angels, vampires, and elves alike must abide by.”

  Of course there are.

  “Now, witches and warlocks are different. Also fairies. Those nasty little bastards love to brag about their pixie dust. You can’t shut them up.”

  “You’re annoying.”

  “But adorable, right?”

  I shook my head. “Well, if you’re an angel, then God must have been pretty desperate.”

  Cole smiled as he knelt next to the fire and placed more kindling and timber on top. “If I was an angel, then God probably was.”

  “Tess, come here! You’ve got to see this.” Cole poked his head over the edge of the cabin loft. “Seriously, it’s amazing.”

  “What is it?” I wasn’t in the mood to climb a rickety ladder to only be shown a dead mouse or something equally non-amazing. With Cole, I could never be sure. Our definitions rarely lined up.

  “I can’t explain it. You’ve got to come up here and see it for yourself.” His head disappeared. He cursed out of awe, and said, “Incredible.”

  Fine. He had me intrigued. I climbed the ladder, taking my time, so I didn’t lose my grip or footing and end up falling backward. My hands and feet were doing great, but still felt a little awkward from being frozen stiff for so long. “What is it?”

  He lay belly down on a huge king-sized mattress with Callie curled at his side, grooming herself. He had to have carried her up with him, and I found it a little sweet.

  With the pitch of the roof, the mattress had to be placed straight on the floor without a box spring beneath. Heat rose and warmed the small area, so even with the window wide open, I didn’t feel cold.

  He patted the mattress next to him. “You’re going to like this.”

  I crawled across the floor and climbed on beside him. “So what am I supposed to be looking...” I couldn’t finish my sentence. He didn’t need to explain anything. Wow.


  Splashes of color—deep greens, reds, and purples—rolled across the early morning sky and formed waves shifting and blended above us for as far as I could see. The snow reflected the colors, making the experience twice as fantastic. The lights went on and on, dancing and swaying, encompassing the entire sky for miles. I’d never seen anything like it. Magical and mesmerizing all at once.

  “What is it?” I whispered, too amazed to be frightened by something so beautiful and unnatural.

  “I believe we’re witnessing the great Aurora Borealis.”

  “What? You mean the northern lights?” I glanced at him and then stared outside again, unsure. Impossible. The northern lights were seen in places like Norway, Sweden, and Alaska. Not Utah. Cole had to be wrong. “That can’t be right.”

  “Well, I’m pretty sure that’s what it is, but if you want to believe it’s my mother ship signaling me to come home, you’re welcome to that theory too.”

  The lights hypnotized me, and I watched them until the sun rose completely and they faded away. It saddened me to see them go, even though they shouldn’t have been there in the first place.

  “That was the best thing I’ve seen since leaving my TV back at the hanger.” Cole wiggled off the mattress, picked up Callie, and started down the ladder. “I’m going to see what goodies they have in the cupboards and whip us up some breakfast. You should start searching the closets for a decent pair of boots, and hope they’ve got something that will fit you.”

  Yep, the Doc Martens had to go, but I worried that this cabin, as great as it was, wouldn’t have anything worthwhile. If there were boots, they would most assuredly be hideous.

  I waited until Cole reached the bottom before starting my decent. Part way down, an itch behind my ear aggravated me to the point that I stopped midway to scratch the heck out of it. A mosquito bite this time of year? Bed bugs, maybe? Scratching only made it worse. I struggled to stop and find some sense of self-control. Seriously?

  “You need some help getting down?” Cole called from the kitchen.