Somehow, she’s against the wood-paneled wall. Somehow, my hand slid up her torso and it’s on her side, ribcage rising and falling beneath my palm. There’s a thin layer of fabric between us, drenched in warmth, and I twist it in my fingers while I kiss her again. Her hands are in my hair, around the back of my neck, grabbing at my shoulders, her back against the wall. There’s a tug at my chest and I break the kiss, look down to realize she’s unzipping the fleece I’ve still got on.
“Is this,” she says, lips dark pink and cheeks light pink, strawberry blond sweat curls against her neck. There’s a red spot on her neck that looks like it might bruise, barely, and my train of thought crashes into it.
She stops unzipping.
“Yes,” I say, in a voice I barely recognize, and then I’m pulling it off and dropping it behind myself as Andi runs her hands down my arms, still covered by the thin blue base layer I wore today. Her blush deepens and her lips are parted and I’ll never wear anything else if this is how she’s going to look at me.
I get my mouth back on hers and my hands under the sweater, higher, dragging the thin fabric below with me. Our bodies are pressed together and there’s flashes of cold skin against my belly where she’s toying with the hem of my shirt, and my brain feels like it’s losing signal and becoming static.
In my pocket, my phone starts vibrating. I ignore it in favor of running one thumb along an elastic line on Andi’s ribcage—bra? she’s got a lot of layers on, I’ve lost track—and Andi makes a noise and tilts her hips and grabs my wrist and pushes my hand higher.
It’s—fabric, mostly, stretched tight against the swell underneath it, but the layer under my hand slides against the layer below and Andi gasps into my mouth so I do it again. My phone’s still buzzing. It can buzz for all fucking eternity if it wants, because this time I go slow enough to feel the slight peak of one nipple under the heavy fabric, so I scrape a thumbnail across it. The noise Andi makes is perfect.
My phone stops vibrating. Ten seconds later, it starts again.
“Someone’s calling you,” Andi says into my mouth. I make a noise in response and do nothing about my phone. After a bit, it stops ringing.
It starts again.
“Answer it,” Andi says, breathless.
“I’m busy,” I say, and mouth at her neck again, running my tongue over the red spot I left earlier.
“What if it’s important?” she asks. I lick the spot again.
“It’s not,” I tell her, and she sighs.
“For fuck’s—” she starts, and then she’s squirming her hand into my pocket, but before I can contemplate that, she’s pulled my phone out and is frowning at it.
“Forest Service Dispatch,” she says, holding it up. “Do they usually call you just to chat?”
I grunt, take the phone, and I’m still pressing her against the wall when I answer simply because I don’t want to stop.
“Bell,” I answer, my forehead against the wall over Andi’s shoulder. I’ve still got my hand splayed over her ribcage, rising and falling beneath my palm, and I move it until the bump of her nipple is under my fingertips. I can’t move away. I can’t stop touching her, because if I stop this might end and we might start talking about burritos again, and I can’t risk it.
“There you are. I was starting to worry,” Dale says, friendly and folksy as ever, voice crackling down the line. Through the air. Whatever. “Listen, I wanted to update you on the situation.”
It takes me several seconds to process that, because Andi’s hand just sneaked under my shirt, cool fingers on skin, and her nipple hardened under my fingers. Fuck. What?
“What situation?” I ask.
“Well, it’s not looking like anyone’s going to be fixing the road up to y’all in the next couple days,” Dale says. “Truth be told I’m not sure I can put a timeline on that fix at all.”
I draw a circle around Andi’s nipple with one fingertip and wait for Dale’s words to filter through.
“Okay,” I finally manage.
“You’ve got food, water, firewood?”
Andi makes a small noise in her throat, head tilted back against the wall, eyes closed. I pull the phone away from my mouth and turn to face her, lips almost against her ear.
“Shh,” I whisper, and she swallows without opening her eyes. God, did she like that? “Plenty of everything,” I tell Dale.
“All right, then, you’ve got some options,” he goes on. “You folks know about the weather we’ve got coming?”
“What weather’s that?”
“The cold snap,” Dale says, as if he’s surprised I don’t know. Which is fair. I should know. “Supposed to get down into the single-digits tonight and then dump another six inches of snow starting late tomorrow.”
“More snow?” I ask, because that actually got my attention.
Dale sighs on the other end.
“Meaning,” he says, resigned, “that your best bet for hiking back to civilization before the weekend is to start early tomorrow. I can send someone to pick you up at Hogswallow Picnic Area by the trailhead, the Parkway’s clear enough for that.”
I pull back enough to make eye contact with Andi, and I don’t move my hand, but I still it. We’re both breathing a little harder than we should be, her lips deep pink and her cheeks flushed, eyes watching my face.
“Give me a sec to talk to—Andrea,” I tell Dale, stumbling over her full name because I don’t know if Andi is too familiar and I’d be giving something away; I don’t know what exactly I’d be giving away or whether she’d mind and it seems best to leave that all be for right now.
“You heard?” I ask her, muting the phone.
“Yeah,” she says.
There’s a small, short silence that feels like a slingshot being pulled back.
“Is your ankle—”
“It would be dangerous—”
We both stop again, our faces still a few inches apart, Dale waiting patiently on the other end. I nod at Andi.
“Your ankle might be not be up to it yet,” she says, voice low and quiet. “It’s a lot of tricky downhill, right?”
“Yeah,” I agree, my heart beating so hard I can feel it in my neck, in my fingertips where they’re gripping the phone a little too hard. “We’d have to make really good time or risk getting caught in the snow.”
“And it’ll be in the single digits, he said,” Andi goes on. “There’s a risk of. Uh. Frostbite, probably.”
“And the weather could do anything.”
“It could.”
“Probably best to stay here a little longer,” Andi says, tipping her head back against the wall, looking at me through her eyelashes. “For safety.”
“Safest thing to do,” I agree, thinking about the way her throat flexes when she breathes. I bring the phone back up to my ear.
“I think we’ll wait it out here,” I say. No response. I sigh, unmute the phone, and repeat myself.
“Sounds like it’s for the best,” Dale agrees. “And anything could happen. You know what they say about the weather here.”