her body curled so perfectly inside of his bigger spoon, but because he was a highly skilled professional, and being thoroughly prepared was way up high in his job description.
Still, he was generally an optimist, and he hadn’t expected to need anything more than Plan A’s wait-for-morning-and-get-their-asses-rescued.
But now, despite listening as hard as he could, the silence was still unbroken by even the distant pulse of rotor blades. In fact, now that he thought about it, he couldn’t remember the last time he’d heard any air traffic at all. No small planes or jets, not even a high-altitude jetliner doing its flyover thing.
That was strange. And it made him uneasy.
He shifted slightly, leaning in to whisper, “Hey, it’s time to wake up,” into Tasha’s ear.
“I’ve been awake for a while,” she surprised him by immediately whispering back.
How long had she been...? Damnit, he thought he’d been letting her sleep. “Why didn’t you...”
“Say something? Because I felt safe and warm and I wanted it to last a little longer.”
Her quiet honesty threw him. How was he supposed to respond to that? His truth was more along the lines of Wow, that was a terrible night, and I hated every endless minute of it and why couldn’t you stay a little girl forever, because I knew how to protect you back then.
But then she added, “Although your ass must feel like the dark side of the moon right about now,” and he had to laugh, because he absolutely could agree with that. His exposed backside was decidedly chillier than his body-heat-mingling front.
She started to move away from him, to sit up, but he stopped her by tightening his grip. “Wait,” he ordered. “Last thing we need right now is a stick in the eye. Close ’em and cover your face.” When he felt her shift, he started pushing the brush off of them both.
“Is there ever a time in which a stick in the eye is needed?” she wondered, her voice muffled by her hands.
His muscles screamed from being static for so long in the cold. He pushed himself away from her and sat up, continuing to sweep her clean. “Depends on whose eye and who’s holding the stick.”
“True, but I was thinking my stick, my eye.” She sat up, too, brushing the dirt and debris from her face and hair, blowing air of out her mouth and even making little spitting sounds. “Yuck.”
“Sorry,” he said. She had a clump of something on her shoulder, and he wiped it off.
“No,” she countered. “I appreciated being even a half a degree warmer. I just... Please, can you make sure there aren’t any spiders on my face or in my hair?”
Thomas looked at her. Her hair was a hopeless riot of curls.
She correctly read his dismay, and added, “Forget my hair. Check my face. My hair’s a lost cause. When we get to civilization, I’m going to have to shave my head.”
“That seems extreme.” He checked and... “Your face is spider-free.”
She pulled back her lips in a wide grimace. “How about my teeth? Any spiders in my teeth?”
Okay. That made him laugh—and brought back memories of the teeth-check he’d always had Tash give him whenever they’d had pizza at the mall, back when he was crushing on Smart Nina from his English lit class. “You’re good.”
It occurred to him that in all of his thirty-five years, he’d never had a girlfriend who’d checked his teeth. He always dated girls and women that he’d checked his teeth for.
And now he was sitting in a hide on the side of a silent, overcast mountain in the literal middle of nowhere, wondering what that meant both about him and the women he’d dated, and why it made him feel like he’d maybe missed out on something special—when he should’ve been leaping into Plan B, step two.
“We should get moving,” he told Tash as he led the way out of the hide, wincing as he tried to work the kinks out of his aching back and legs.
“Not before I pee,” she announced.
“Yeah, see, that’s the unspoken part of We should get moving,” Thomas pointed out. “There’s an assumption that we’ll both find a tree.” He did quick check of the clump of heavy brush he’d assigned to her yesterday.
“This morning I was hoping for a special tree,” Tasha said. “With a door and a flush toilet and a sink in which to wash my hands...?”