“You’ll hate dying worse.”
“That’s so fucking dramatic.”
He shrugs a shoulder and says, “Listen. Follow me. We’re heading into those trees. We’re finding some semblance of shelter, and we’re parking for the night. You need to rest, man. I’m not bullshitting you, okay?”
Goddammit.
I purse my lips.
I don’t say Okay. I don’t acknowledge the failure verbally at all.
I just follow him into the shadows and let myself be led.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
JONAH REFUSES TO LET me help gather kindling.
He insists that I lie on the pine-needled ground, focusing on getting my shit together, focusing on breathing and not dying, however the hell I’m supposed to do that.
So I’m . . . doing that, I guess.
I try to think myself into hydration, my pulse into submission. I try very pointedly not to be dizzy.
I stare up through the pine boughs at the sky, streaked with blood and citrus.
I’ve collected my extremities in this big coat, as much as I can, and I’ve been horizontal for twenty minutes.
I’m getting cold, lying still, but Jonah said not moving was the best thing for me right now, and I guess I believe him. I kind of have to.
He’s crouched over a pile of pine needles and dead aspen leaves—all this detritus he’s gathered—trying to get it to catch. Jonah came with that lighter, thankfully, so the real struggle here is not the initial flame; it’s just getting this not-optimally-dry tinder to light.
I can hear him blowing and crackling his way through the stuff, coaxing it into keeping us warm. My teeth are chattering, and I wonder if Jonah can hear them, if it’s spurring him further into action.
“EUREKA,” he says, and I see him jump up and pump a fist in the air. The flame is small at first, but as the smell of smoke fills the air, so does the light from the fire. I will myself up and push past the pins and needles in my arms and legs. Then I draw myself toward the warmth.
It all hurts a little, the heat interacting with my frigid skin that’s half asleep from the way I was lying, from the cold.
I shudder, and Jonah goes to my pack and pulls out a fluffy blanket.
“Look at you,” he says, “all prepared.”
I try to say, “That’s my middle name,” but it comes out garbled from my chattering teeth. I doubt he even knows what I was saying; I probably sound completely out of it. But I’m too exhausted and freezing to be embarrassed.
He drapes the blanket over my shoulders and I try, I try to focus on the warmth it provides. To will myself into existing like a human.
“Better?” he says.
“Sure,” I lie.
“Why don’t you have something to drink?”
I shake my head. “I’ve taken enough of our water.”
“No,” he says, “you haven’t. Not if you’re battling altitude sickness. You get dehydrated, you’re only going to make things worse.”
I roll my eyes. “I’m fine, Jonah.”
His voice shifts so fast it makes my head spin. “No, dumbass.” I blink at him. “If you get sicker because you’re trying to be noble, it’s going to slow us both down tomorrow. Then I cover less ground. Then you get us both killed.”
“O-oh,” I say.
“Drink the water.”
I swallow. My mouth is tacky, and forming the necessary saliva is an effort, so maybe he has a point.
I open one of the water bottles we brought and take slow sips.
“Happy now?” I say.
He shrugs and stares at the fire, then rips into a big hunk of beef jerky.
He’s staring so intently away from me, so deeply disaffected by it all, that it almost circles around to affected. That’s probably me wishfully thinking. Wishing I was stranded in the mountains with someone who gave a shit about me, not someone who’s going to bully me into drinking water when I’m sick instead of gently, like, caressing my check and whispering that I need to take care of myself.
“Shit,” he says when he bites off another chunk, “this tastes good.”
Yeah. It was just me.
“The water,” I admit, “does not suck.”
I glance up at the sky again, the utter artwork of the sunset. A Colorado sunset has always been hard to beat, and in the isolated silence, trees cutting into it like they were drawn this way, it’s pretty breathtaking.
Jonah draws closer to me and I tense.
He says, “Body heat.”
I say, “If you’re trying to get me naked right now . . .”
Jonah rolls his eyes. “Trust me, Jacob, if I wanted to get you naked, you’d know.”
My face goes bright red and, for the first time this trip, I’m thankful for the cold that disguises the reason.
We sit in quiet as the sun dips below the horizon and the sky darkens.
I can’t decide if the silence is unnerving or if it feels right.
It feels almost familiar after the full day of it.
But it feels . . . lonely, almost, too.
I get a pang, missing my cousins. Wishing I could use Jolie as a buffer, tease her about the girl she likes, get pelted in the face with a snowball by Jaxon and yell at him when there was a little too much ice razored through it.
“Do you think . . .” I start.
“Do I think what?”
“Do you think they’re alright?”
Jonah doesn’t answer right away. He measures his words when he’s worried about honesty, I think.
“Yeah, Hallie. I think they’re okay.”
I blink at the fire and shift closer. To the flame, to Jonah. My blanket brushes his coat. “Do you think we were stupid to do this?”
“It doesn’t matter,” he says.
My breath shakes when I draw it into my lungs.
“You want any of this?” he asks me, wagging some trail mix in my face.
I instinctively jerk back and open my mouth to turn it down, and he says, “Oh wait. You’re allergic to peanuts, right?”
I say, “Yup,” then pause. “How did you know that?”
He furrows his brow. “I don’t know if you know this, but we’ve kind of been doing these vacations for years.”
“Yeah,” I say. “But it’s not like we’ve ever hung out.”
“Not like we’ve ever been allowed to.” There’s a note of resentment in his voice that is so freaking pleasing.
“So how . . .”
“I pay attention,” he says.
I glance over at him, but he’s staring at the fire again. His arms are draped over his knees but his biceps are the littlest bit tense.
Tiny sparks flick off the flames, bright orange against white smoke.
It is a strange time, maybe, to think about anything but the cold. Anything but the dark.
But the fire itself is so . . . bizarrely comforting. Not just because it’s warm.
Because it’s fire. Because I’m a Jew.
I haven’t practiced Judaism much at home in a long time; my parents haven’t practiced in years and years, so it feels . . . awkward to, like, light candles on my own. But every trip we make to my cousins’, I look forward to Shabbos, to Havdalah, like they’re literal gifts. I feel the yearning in my blood, the desire for connection to a people, to my childhood, to . . . I couldn’t even really say what. I’m Jewish no matter what I do. Whether I keep kosher or light candles or believe in G-d or don’t.