The point is, this time, I see it.
He shakes his head and stands, shaking his hands out.
“Get up,” he says.
“Excuse me?”
“Get up.”
I scoff at being told what to do but ultimately stand like he says to.
He’s moving from foot to foot, and I don’t know how he has the energy but I guess he does. Probably the burst from that whole ninety calories coursing through him.
“It’ll warm you up, man—move.”
“I’m tired,” I say.
He rolls his eyes and says, “Christ, you whiner.”
I rub my hands together and hop in place to get my blood moving. “You’re an asshole.”
He smiles, baring his teeth.
“Now listen,” he says. “I told you I was gonna teach you some mountain lion protection techniques.”
“Ah right, yes. Lest a wild animal attack us.” I say that like it’s not a real possibility, like this whole thing is fake and I’m watching it on a screen.
“Yeeeessss,” he says. “There’s animals here; it’s the woods.”
I narrow my eyes. “Thanks, did the Boy Scouts teach you that?”
He flips his middle finger at me and says, “Listen, smartass.”
“Mmhmm.”
“A mountain lion comes at you, you’re gonna want to run. Don’t do that.”
“O-okay.”
“You want to start by looking tough. Which . . . good luck.”
I groan and close the distance between us to shove him. He stumbles back on his heels and laughs. “Make yourself big and back up.”
“I thought you said earlier that I should stand my ground?”
“Yeah, but you stand still, you get eaten. You run, you get eaten.”
“Not leaving me with a whole lot of options here, slick.”
“Be big. Back slowly away.”
I blow out a breath. “Bigger than a mountain lion?”
“Yeah,” he says. “You’re probably bigger than a lion, dude.”
“What?”
“I was on a hunt a couple years back and the guy bagged a really big cat. Just short of the books. You know how big he was? Like a buck fifty.”
Oh. Well. Alright then.
I entallen myself. I hold my arms so that it really looks like I have biceps. I do have biceps, as a matter of fact; you want to be a firefighter, you lift heavy. But I exaggerate the stance. I puff out my chest.
Jonah smiles. “Nice. So you back off. Slow. And you yell. Huge, loud noises. Make yourself totally terrifying. Hopefully he doesn’t touch you.”
I nod. It’s still a game when we’re playing it this way, still not real. It’s dress rehearsal, not the show.
“What happens if he attacks anyway?”
Jonah chews on the inside of his cheek.
“I’m dead?” I take that to mean.
“Not necessarily. You hear about that dude who got attacked by a lion while he was out running in Colorado? Choked the thing out?”
“Holy shit,” I say.
“Yeah. Someone’s never hurting for a blow job again.”
I snort.
“Priority,” he says, “is to protect yourself.”
“Duh.”
He takes a step closer to me, and a cold breeze whispers its way into my coat, a couple errant snowflakes riding on it. It’s not even really snowing; it’s just like the world is existing in the middle of a floating drift. Lazy flakes deciding to form here and there and melt any place your skin had started to acclimate.
“So,” he says, “a lion attacks you, he’s going to go for your neck. Protect it. No matter what.”
My own hand instinctively slips up toward my throat, and he says, “No. Like this,” and grabs my wrist, then yanks it away from my jugular. He takes my left wrist in his other hand, and god, his hands are so big that he can loop his index finger all the way around my bones until it overlaps his whole thumb. I swallow hard as he presses into my pulse and shoves my hands so they’re around the back of my neck, elbows coming together in front of my throat.
“Like this,” he says.
His chest is pressed against mine, and I can feel him shift, even under the coat. I can see the pulse pounding in the veins of his throat, make out every little hair on his face that he hasn’t shaved in days.
My pulse is jumping all over the place; I can’t breathe.
“You got it?” he says, staring down at me.
I’m so cold, and I’m so tired, and I’m so . . . I can’t stop looking at his mouth.
He is breathing my air.
I watch his breath cloud out into the cold and disappear when I inhale.
“I—yeah,” I say.
He drops my hands and I only have a heartbeat to recover before he’s backing up and crouching, circling like he’s going to attack me.
My eyebrows shoot up to my hairline and he lunges.
I forget everything.
I forget what to protect, I forget my hand placement, I forget.
Until he’s chest to chest with me again, huge hand digging into the back of my neck like jaws.
“Game over,” he whispers.
I fucking shudder.
He doesn’t let go.
I can’t stop looking at him, can’t stop breathing in the cool scent of the mountain snow combined with sweat, can’t tell the difference between the adrenaline running because of potential mountain lion attack versus the intolerable closeness of Jonah freaking Ramirez. I am overwhelmed.
The points of his fingertips are digging into the muscles of my neck.
They’re going to bruise.
He says, voice low, “Protect yourself.”
I shake him off and back up.
If just . . . to be able to breathe, Jesus.
He cocks his head. “You ready?”
I open my mouth to say yes and he comes at me, and this time, I bring my arms up around my neck, elbows at my throat.
He grabs for my arm and I shove him off.
He comes at my back, and I whirl around in time for him to grab at my neck again. But my arms are in the way.
He clamps down on my forearm and spins me so my back is pressed to his chest.
“Not bad,” he says into my ear.
I feel myself lean, relaxing back into him.
I feel him breathe.
I feel him smile against my ear.
And I elbow him in the stomach.
“Fuck, goddamn, shit—”
He coughs and I prance forward. “Protect yourself.”
I face him, hand on my hip, and he’s doubled over, breathing.
After a minute, in which I am only slightly concerned that I took it too far, he pushes up with his hands on his knees.
Then he manages to stand.
He coughs out a laugh.
“Well,” he says, “lesson learned.”
“You think I can survive a cougar?”
He shrugs. “Beats me, but I’m sure as hell not going through another drill.”
I laugh and he breathes jaggedly for another minute before glancing up at the sky that’s going gray.
“Come on,” he says. “We should keeping moving.”
Yeah.
Yeah, I guess we should.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
THE PRIORITY, WE HAVE decided, has to be finding water, and not just water but drinking water. It wasn’t something either of us thought of earlier even though it should have been; it should have been the very first thing. Because when you’re surrounded by water, even if it’s in the wrong form, it’s so easy to forget that you might die.