When he pulls me toward him with the smallest pressure in the tips of his fingers and kisses me.
It is so slow that it fucking hurts.
I think that maybe I’ve never kissed anyone in my life.
We touch each other, under the black sky and a million stars that shine a million miles away, stars that make up the backdrop of this crucial twenty-four hours, this life-altering turn of a night, and that do not give a single shit about us.
We are not imprinted in the memory of the stars.
Anyway, it’s the vastness of the black that’s imprinted in mine.
We shift back into the cave, inch by inch, toward the warmth of the crackling fire.
Eventually, we pull apart.
Jonah adds a few sticks to the fire and I shift back against him.
He starts to run his fingers over my hair.
I breathe out a sigh, the smallest, most inexplicable smile touching my mouth.
His hand carelessly brushes across strands of my hair, and we’re both breathing in smoke and I think, absently, that I bet I’ll go out smelling like a campfire, and then the thought drifts off on the wind.
It doesn’t matter.
Tomorrow doesn’t matter; all my ideas and plans for after and speculations and . . . they don’t matter.
This matters.
Feeling every single bit, every single pinprick of sensation in my brain and blood and skin right here right now is the only thing that matters.
Ever.
I feel.
Every single bit.
Every single pinprick.
When he sucks in the shallowest breath.
Then he releases it and his arm curls over my torso and he brushes his fingers back and forth over the softness of my stomach.
I should not feel safe.
But I do.
He says into my ear, “Jesus. I’m snuggling you and I’m totally into it. And not even in a horny way.”
My own laughter is the thing that lulls me into sleep.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
THE SECOND THING I notice when I wake up is the storm gathering outside the cave. The sky is growling, and rain is pouring down.
The first is Jonah shaking me and yelling, “Hallie. HALLIE,” in my ear until I nearly haul off and punch him in his beautiful, perfect face.
“Oh my god,” I groan. It’s still dark outside, for Christ’s sake. And my limbs kind of hurt. One in particular; I must have injured it yesterday—surprise, surprise.
I’m cold.
I’m hot.
I’m annoyed.
He says, “Hallie, someone’s here.”
That wakes me up.
I jump out of the blanket, then realize I’m naked and it’s freezing and quickly burrow under it again, yelling at Jonah to grab my clothes.
Even under the circumstances, he smirks.
I blush.
Then I start yelling again.
He tosses me everything I discarded last night in a fit of hypothermic passion, and I say, “What makes you think there’s someone here? Not something, right? Not like another killer moose or wandering bear or—”
“No,” he says, holding out his hand and staring outside. “It’s someone. I swear, I heard—I think I—it sounded like . . .”
I hug my coat around my shoulders and grab his hand, then tighten my fingers. “Sounded like who, Jonah?”
“Like—like your cousin. Like Tzipporah.”
“What?” I say.
Hope chokes me. I shove it down and grit my teeth. It can’t be her; it can’t be them. That’s just—it’s too much to want. It’s not possible.
He’s hallucinating, maybe.
Maybe he’s just that far gone, and this is it for us.
I shut my eyes tight and brace for the possibility.
I feel Jonah’s fingers crushing over mine and he tugs me closer.
“Hallie?” he says.
I open them.
“Do you trust me?”
I blow out a breath. It slides out onto the ice air in a white cloud. “Y-yes,” I say.
We leave the cave together.
It’s a full minute of walking, and then I see it: a bobbing flashlight.
“Oh my god,” I breathe. “Oh my god.”
My exhausted legs do not leave me the choice of running—I can’t do anything more than walk, but I’m crying. This is it; this is it.
It’s someone.
We get closer to the light, and I hear what Jonah heard: “HALLIE.”
I sob. Immediately.
“We’re here!” I scream back, but my voice is swallowed by thunder.
The crash is so massive I can feel it in the ground. Lightning makes the whole sky electric white. I jump.
I would shrink back against Jonah in service of some kind of evolutionary BIG GUY IS PROTECT kind of instinct, but he jumps harder than I do, so I just keep walking, shouting out that we’re here, we’re here, WE’RE HERE.
The snowmelt seeps into my jeans, leaks into my fire-dried boots, but it doesn’t matter anymore, does it? We’re found. We’re saved.
We’re okay.
I shout again, ignoring the persistent crashes of thunder, the ever-brightening sky, the sharp, freezing rain now pouring from the sky.
I don’t hear Tzipporah’s voice first; I hear Jolie’s.
I can’t run to her, but she’s running to me.
The thunder and lightning are nearly on top of one another now—one massive cascade of sound and light— and I ignore it, it barely even registers, until Jonah screams, “FUCK,” and a tree just yards ahead of us cracks and bursts into flame.
He shoves an arm out on instinct and I run right into it, screaming, because the tree groans, sparking and smoking and blazing, and every one of us hears the s-p-l-i-t.
The sky, and the fire before it’s drenched by the rain, are kind enough to illuminate the entire scene as it plays out: the dramatic Homeward Bound limping toward each other breath before the reunion—and the branch of the old, dry, dying tree cracking off and slamming into my favorite cousin.
Suddenly, I am more than capable of running.
I sprint off toward her, gritting my teeth past the pain in my leg from whatever irrelevant thing I did to it yesterday, and make it to her just as three of my other cousins catch up.
I do not have time to ask where the others are.
To ask why only the older ones are here.
To contemplate all the horrible reasons it might be that the only ones I see are Tzipporah, Sam, Jaxon, and Jolie.
I only have time to fix things.
I snap out, “Where? Where did it hit her?” and Tzipporah swings the flashlight to face Jolie, who’s gasping for breath.
The massive branch has her thigh pinned to the snow.
“Jolie?” I say, “are you bleeding?”
“I don’t—I don’t know, I don’t know, I just—”
I say, “We have to get her inside,” and stare at Jonah, who immediately rushes to her side and starts looking for a handhold. “Christ, Hal,” he says, eyeing me over the branch. “It’s heavy. I can’t—”
“Lucky I’ve got these massive guns,” I say, and I pull, but he’s right. I can’t possibly lift it.
“I don’t know how we’re supposed to do this,” I say.
“You don’t, dumbasses. There’s five of us.” The other three situate themselves around Jolie. She coughs out a sob.