Before Theo could think too hard—or second-guess himself—he’d grabbed the extra barge pole from the deck and sloshed down the first step to reach out with it. With the branch extended, he was close. Now that his eyes had adjusted to the dark, he put his phone in his pocket and grabbed hold of the wooden rail, took another frigid step into the water.
“God, Spencer, this is freezing,” he muttered. “How did you do this for hours?”
He heard the rustle of foil but couldn’t risk looking up from what he was doing.
“And don’t move—it was finally getting dry down there.”
“Woodchuck, it was no drier under there than it is out here,” Spencer muttered, his voice unmuffled. “Now I need you to rethink what you’re doing here, because there’s more space between that cat and that stick than I think you kn—fuck!”
“Fuck!” Theo didn’t even hear the splash he made, or feel the barge pole slip out of his hand. “Fuck! It’s freezing! Oh my God! Jesus! Fucking shitballs! Fuck!”
“Theo!” Spencer called. “Man, what are you—”
But Theo had spotted the wheelbarrow and poor Stupid, hearing human voices, had perched on the side curiously. A sodden mess, his thick fur saturated by rain, the cat looked bedraggled and pissed off and more grateful to see Theo splashing toward him than Theo reckoned a cat had a right to look. Theo could barely breathe for the cold, but he’d grown up swimming in mountain runoff. His body knew this shock; he knew he’d recover. Just a few more strokes and—
“Augh!”
“Well, hell,” Spencer muttered, voice carrying over the water. “I guess that cat knows you!”
Stupid had taken a leap of faith from the wheelbarrow to Theo’s back, claws digging into his head, and Theo turned and began a torturous, slow, sodden stroke back to the raft. He was shaking, his limbs getting leaden, dragged down by water and jeans, as the cold got worse—probably because his body temperature had been so low to begin with.
Oh God. He wasn’t going to make it. His hand came in contact with a step, and he struggled to find purchase.
“Hang on there,” Spencer barked, voice raw. “Hang on. I gotcha, big guy.” And miracle of miracles, the other barge pole appeared in the darkness, nearly bashing his nose in.
Theo grabbed it, and Spencer used what little was probably left of his strength to haul Theo up the stairs, one at a time, until he was tugged limply up to the porch.
Where Spencer grabbed the cat by the scruff of the neck and tucked it under one arm before dropping the barge pole and shaking Theo until his teeth rattled.
“What in the fuck do you think you were doing!” he shouted.
“Stupid!” Theo protested.
“I know it was stupid,” Spencer yelled hoarsely. “How could it not be stupid! The whole purpose of us here on this fucking raft was to save your life, asshole! Why would you want to put that at risk—how stupid can you get?”
“The cat’s name is Stupid,” Theo yelled back. “And how’s it fuckin’ feel, Spencer! How’s it feel to worry over someone, be helpless over someone, because they put themselves on the line to do something for someone else and didn’t give a shit about themselves!”
“It feels like shit,” Spencer snapped. “You’re making a relationship sound terrifying about now, do you know that? I am legitimately frozen to my fucking balls—was that your intention? Because it worked! If I could, I would jump off this raft and swim the fuck away because you scared me, you fucking moron. How could you do that to me?”
Spencer ended his cry with a cough that shook him, hard and to the bone, and some of Theo’s adrenaline wore off and most of his mad.
He wrapped his arms around Spencer’s waist and buried his face against Spencer’s shoulder and clung.
“I scared me too,” he admitted. “I… I lost everything else, Spence. I…. Everything. My town, my home, my family. I thought… Jesus, if I could only save the fucking cat.”
“Aw, kid,” Spencer mumbled, shuddering in Theo’s arms. The cat was wedged between them, exhausted and probably warm for the first time all day. For a moment, the world stopped, and they were the only two people in it.
And then the world dipped suddenly beneath their feet and slid violently downward, sending Spencer, Theo, and the cat sprawling to the deck of the raft.
“Oh shit,” Theo muttered. “The barge pole!”
“Motherfucker!” Spencer snarled, struggling to sit up, Theo in his lap. “Shit! I’m sorry. I had to pull it out of the knot to get you and… shit!”
Theo stayed sitting and scooted to where Spencer was, and together, Theo’s arm around his waist, they looked in awe and terror at what was to come.
The rain hadn’t stopped, but that didn’t mean there wasn’t moonlight, strong-arming itself through the clouds, filling the entire valley with a sort of ambient gray, a filter of twilight with which to view the violent lake of cold-boiling water that took the place of Theo’s pleasant little valley.
The water levels must have risen since Theo had tied the boat off, because the giant dip they’d felt that had sent them sprawling had been the raft getting sucked into the path of the water as it thundered its way out of the valley. The road had created its own ferocious current, like a riptide in the ocean, and they were currently riding that road of water toward the bottleneck of the valley, where they would be spit out and launched across the canyon below.
“Oh God,” Theo whispered.
“I’m sorry,” Spencer rasped. “Oh fuck, Theo. I’m so sorry. This is all my fault—”
Theo grabbed the hand without the cat. “This isn’t your fault, Spence.”
“I grabbed the fucking barge pole—”
“You saved my life,” Theo told him truthfully. “I wasn’t going to make it. I… I….”
“Hush!”
“What?” Theo stared at him, irritated because they were probably about to die and Spencer had shut him down midconfession.
“Do you hear that?” Spencer demanded. “Do you?”
“Oh my God!”
“That’s the Black Hawk!” Spencer gasped. “Oh holy fuck! Theo, do we still have a foil blanket or two?”
Theo grabbed them and they spread them out on the flat of the deck before Theo pulled out his phone again and shined the light on the foil, reflecting it back into the night sky.
Together, they searched the skies in tense silence, checking their roaring progress through the valley with panic in their eyes.
“I see it!” Spencer cried. “Do you see it? Coming over those trees? It’s heading right for us!”
Theo looked over his shoulder at the rapids again, and up at the Black Hawk, its searchlight on full.
“Yeah,” Theo said, swallowing. “Spence, it’s gonna be close.”
“We should get closer to the railing,” Spencer agreed. “They might want to drop a cable down to hold us still.”
Theo scooted back and waited expectantly for Spencer to do the same but he sat, shoulders slumped, chest heaving in and out.
“Spencer?”
“On my way,” he rasped, but he didn’t sound convincing. Oh hell.